Online Courses and the $100 Graduate Degree

First time accepted submitter GCA10 writes "Forbes reports on the latest project of Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun (the proponent of self-driving cars.) He's moved on to education now, believing that conventional university teaching is way too costly, inefficient and ineffective to survive for long. So he started Udacity, which aims to deliver an online version of a master's degree for $100 per student. From the article: 'Udacity’s earliest course offerings have been free, and although Thrun eventually plans to charge something, he wants his tuition schedule to be shockingly low. Getting a master’s degree might cost just $100. After teaching his own artificial intelligence class at Stanford last year—and attracting 160,000 online signups—Thrun believes online formats can be far more effective than traditional classroom lectures. “So many people can be helped right now,” Thrun declares. “I see this as a mission.”'"

Comments

You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, it's going to be a hard sell that it is legit.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for

And yet some of the best things in life are free. It would be nice to add a world class education to that list.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Thrun's name and reputation ought to change that soon enough.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Spiked_Three]

I did not particularly like his teaching style (in the AI class), however that comment applies to any class, free or not. I do 100% like the idea of offering education for a reasonable price.

Look at it this way; in the future an employer needs to select a new hire. 2 people apply, both with master's degress. One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?

Indeed, you get what you paid for, not.

Re:You get what you pay for

[noh8rz3]

I got paid $25,000 to get a masters degree - tuition waiver and stipend for two years. who's the smartest in the room?

Re:You get what you pay for

[paiute]

Look at it this way; in the future an employer needs to select a new hire. 2 people apply, both with master's degress. One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?

So one went to Harvard and the other watched some Youtube videos and maybe emailed in a couple of tests and a thesis of some sort to an advisor of such demand that they charged nothing for their services.

In the grand scheme of things, yeah, the second one might be "smarter", but as a real employer I will have to go with the first person.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Missing.Matter]

As part of that $40k you're also getting contacts and connections. You think Prof. Thrun is going to recommend you to a colleague who might be hiring, or provide a reference for you? Because I know my master's advisor certainly will.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were to stop at my masters, I would have made $58,000, minimum. I guess I'm forgoing wages of about $100,000 for that same term, but w/e.

Re:You get what you pay for

[LilGuy]

Which one is going to stick to the job because he sold his first born child to cover the debts?

Re:You get what you pay for

[mister_playboy]

An awful lot of Americans are paying a lot and getting very little out of college right now... especially at for-profit universities. Every taxpayer has an interest in this subject because of federal student loans.

Major reform is going to be necessary because the college debt bubble is going to pop sooner rather than later. I applaud this man's effort to bring some fiscal sanity to the world of higher education.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Spiked_Three]

for $40,000 I bet HE would.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Idarubicin]

One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?

That's a good question.

One hundred dollars buys two or three hours of time from a professional tutor or teaching assistant.

Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose that's true, until people who have completed the less expensive one prove more capable and useful, in significant numbers, over time.

Then you take the better one. Who actually cares what you paid for your degree? The point of having one (nowadays) is to determine how useful you'll be before you have a real work history.

Re:You get what you pay for

[NicknamesAreStupid]

As part of that $40k you're also getting contacts and connections.

You hit upon the true value of college, the social network. College offers everyone an opportunity to leave their socioeconomic environment behind and move into a new and, hopefully, better one. That is one reason fraternities and sororities continue to thrive as they process these people into their alumni systems. The college social system is far from perfect, but it is probably more efficient than its education system. Ask Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, or Mark Zuckerberg, three famous dropouts.

Re:You get what you pay for

[hairyfeet]

But you are missing the other part of that equation which is all the insider bullshit and the prestige the name dropping can bring you. I've known guys that have landed 6 figure salary jobs straight out of college with frankly mediocre grades, how? because the one in charge of hires was a guy that went to the same frat. My oldest is doing pre-med at the local college and just because he's done charity work with one of the local churches where the pastor is a big alumni he is gonna go through pre-med with practically no debt at all and has even got a local doctor sponsoring him for all of his text books and a $2500 a quarter stipend.

A LOT of what you get out of these colleges is about networking and name dropping more than it is simply the education itself. Go to an Ivy League college and join one of the frats and it'll be damned hard for you to fail anyway but up, all because of the connections you end up with. While i don't personally think that is worth the frankly insane prices that higher ed is charging it certainly isn't worthless either.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a reasonable way to look at it. Technology starts out more expensive, and becomes cheaper. Consider slow $3/hour internet versus the low monthly fees today for a constant connection dozens of times faster. Or better yet, consider a past where nobility was the educated class and commoners being unable to read, and the transition to almost everyone being literate.

The people who strive for expensive Ivy League educations will still have the connections and added charm of doing it that way, and the people who afforded themselves tutors that would ensure they understood the material will still have that edge.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice but the people who make the tests, grade work, produce classes, etc all expect to be paid. At the college level those people have decades of training and don't come cheap.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

But you only gave him $100 and he's never going to meet you.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not particularly like his teaching style (in the AI class)

I didn't like his teaching style either. I really wanted to like him, and I'm sure he's a nice guy, but his teaching mainly consisted of exams and quizes. Ironically, I wish he provided lectures longer than 3 to 5 minutes before giving a quiz. His AI course was quiz overload and I wish it was more like a traditional classroom lecture.

Re:You get what you pay for

[flyingfsck]

If that was true then immigrants will never find work, since they leave their fraternal network behind. I am now working in my third country.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

So, you say, it's a meritocracy where ass licking skills are what matters instead of academics. Yeah, I've been to a U.S. school too, and while the quality of education was way better than what I had in Europe, the social side of it was a disaster. I tried to stay on campus only for the classes and library time.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

It's very sad that those connections matter. School should be about what you know and what you can do, not about your ass licking skills :(

Re:You get what you pay for

[oursland]

You're right! And with an initial signup of 160,000 students (I'm certain that number will increase as popularity increases) at $100 a student, I think there may be a fair bit of money exchanging hands.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

who's the smartest in the room?

Probably the person who realizes they are worth more than $40,000 a year...
My net income, even after paying for my master's degree myself, is a good bit more than $25,000/yr.

Re:You get what you pay for

[daktari]

It will be interesting to see who self starters w/ their $100 degrees are likely to hire when they start becoming successful. Would they hire the folks with the same $100 degree or the folks who are part of the much more expensive "insider" system?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

yes here in Finlad University is free

Re:You get what you pay for

[jaxtherat]

Welcome to Feudalism 2.0, Millenium Edition.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Dan541]

Why pay?

Thunderwood is FREE: http://thunderwoodcollege.com/

Re:You get what you pay for

[Dan541]

$40,000 per year? WTF college is that?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

If some sucker gives me $40,000 I'll say nice things about them.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

You i guess, i only got paid 20000 euros, and also got basically free loan for another 20000. But then, i'm not living in US, and almost every masters degree student gets the same around here. We believe educating people is a good investment. Oh, you do have to be somewhat motivated and/or smart to get to the uni, can't just buy your way in.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

I want my money back for this comment.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't sanity, this is just going to make things worse. The problem is too many degrees being granted and increasing the flood isn't going to help that aspect.

Plus, at $200 a masters you can pretty much guarantee that most of those will be basic diploma mill fodder anyways. I used to proctor exams for $10 an hour and when you factor in the cost of properly giving the tests alone, you're already just at $100 a year, even without any other expenses.

The system needs to be fixed, but this isn't a fix any more than applying a tourniquet to the neck will stop blood spurting out of the forehead.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

He got at least 1 hired from the AI class, he mentioned that several CVs went out. Part of the business model is also the referral money.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

I got my M.A. for free. I just had to write in to say that I wanted it and turn up to the graduation. How much is that worth?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that you mention Zuckerberg, as he digitized the college social network. You can integrate Facebook with the time between courses in your online degree!

Re:You get what you pay for

[mwvdlee]

You assume a difference in quality.

More money != better quality.

I'm not intimately familiar with the US education system, but would I be wrong in thinking that degrees must meet certain nationally defined standards in order to qualify as a masters degree?

Re:You get what you pay for

[kyuubi]

The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000. There is a whole industry built on updating learning material every year. Sure, we learn more about how to effectively teach all the time, but neither our knowledge of the universe (at least the sub-set of that knowledge that we need to teach the average student) nor our knowledge of how to teach better grows so fast as to require a complete re-write of the curriculum each year. There is a lot of fat in the system that can be done away with. This is an attempt to do just that. Maybe we can't effectively teach without face-to-face contact. Maybe we can use that face-to-face contact better. The lines and limits are worth exploring, especially since the cost of keeping the status quo in place is to place effective education out of the reach of most of the worlds population.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet some of the best things in life are free.

Not quite.

At the risk of sounding incredibly troll-ish, the best things in life are illegal.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000.

But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

The opposite of "a social network makes finding a job easier" is not "no social network makes finding a job impossible".

Besides, immigrants tend to have very good social networks, composed of other immigrants from the same country of origin.

Re:You get what you pay for

[kyuubi]

Actually, his business model includes "placement fees" to industry. He would identify students with high scores and/or creative solutions, and offer to introduce his top students to industry for the standard placement fee a personnel would normally charge. In my mind, that is at least as good, if not better, than what your prof will do. This model is a bit better than the off chance your prof may know someone somewhere that may be hiring 1 student, possibly.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

US schools place a lot of emphasis on social interaction, networking and extracurricular activities. Did you join a sports or drama club? Did you participate in a public service society? Did you join a social club?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

some sort to an advisor of such demand that they charged nothing for their services

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun
Do some research before you start tossing insults around. I'd rather take a course from Thrun and the other highly-regarded professors who hold top positions at MIT and Stanford than listen to some no-name middle management chump who has his head crammed up his ass.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

The reason Americans get less out of university and get into greater debt isn't a problem with universities. Americans complete university at twice the rate (30%) of Germany or France (15%). You can't expect 30% of your population to go to college and do as well as when only the top 15% of your students go to college. The high demand for college education has caused prices to skyrocket, fueled by the fact that due to cheap student loans, students can actually pay. And a huge number of those degrees are in fields that are basically useless from the point of view of getting a job, including visual arts, psychology, and journalism.

Yes, major reform is needed, and it's fairly simple: get rid of student loans for anything other than STEM fields. As a tax payer, I see no reason why I should subsidize people getting a college degree that amounts to little more than a personal hobby.

In a roundabout way, online classes do fix this problem, because while the class may only cost $100, you still need to live. And online universities aren't going to waste a lot of money on football fields and other facilities that universities needs to get their non-academically inclined students to part with more money.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Chrisq]

The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000.

But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.

With checks and balances, marking the lower level students could be an assignment for the higher grade ones. Some exercises can be computer marked. Of course there are still going to have to be some professional markers, and providing exam conditions isn't free (for most certification exams its about £50 or $75 to the centre).

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

One paid $40,000 a year for it, one paid $100 a year. Which is the smarter one?

That's a good question.

One hundred dollars buys two or three hours of time from a professional tutor or teaching assistant.

Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?

Which is the better candidate- the one who learned the material from the lectures and course work, or the one who had to go out and spend 20 to 40 hours a week in study groups and face-to-face tutoring sessions? Hint- it's not the kid who needs his hand held through every lesson and exercise.

Re:You get what you pay for

[DrPhero]

An online course doesn't have to mean it's lousy education, and that you'd have to pay through the nose for it from an expensive university. Excellent quality learning can be found online or in video courses for nominal fees compared to the incredibly overpriced (for what you get) university offerings. Clearly these also don't have to replace those institutions (and in a lot of cases, simply cannot), but rather, I hope they spur traditional "higher learning" to increase quality and lower prices to *reasonable levels*. I've found absolutely fantastic training in a 7 DVD set that $40K/year at a top state school couldn't touch. You can't begin to tell me that the student loan debts many have are worth the degrees they got from those institutions. Obviously, certain fields and practical labs just have to be done on campus, but there's a timeliness to much of the online training which can't be beat; and good interactive training (although often a bitch to create) can truly enhance learning speeds. Besides, $100 is nothing. We're not talking about angry birds or buying shareware here, as long as the course pays for itself in income you will get as a result of it, then it's a great price whatever the investment. ~$200K for 4 years and not able to get a job in the market with not so practical skills doesn't sound so appealing after seeing what's out there online. Employers care about results and job experience. Other hires are from networking, and on today's socially connected web, that's not only at the frat house.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who do the teaching have to eat. As long as you can get a living wage out of the $100 fee per student, enough to pay for the kind of supervisors it takes to get a "real" master's degree, then it would be fine, hypothetically. But given how specialized such degrees are, and the amount of supervision it typically takes to (competently) get a graduate student through a project of any substance, I'd be very surprised if the math added up.

At least around here, you have a project that lasts for about 2 years, it often involves significant research funds in order to make it happen and to pay the student a living wage as they study, you put together a thesis (usually 50-100+ pages), the supervisor does a great deal of reading/editing to help you get that thesis in presentable form, you present and defend the thesis (usually with 4 or 5 examiners that have read the whole thing), etc. And none of that considers the usual assignment of teaching assistantships, which pay the student some of the money to live and gives them some experience doing teaching themselves (i.e. there is a training component in those duties too).

I think the product that comes out of the master's program this guy has in mind will be pretty inferior to the program I described above. Either that or the math doesn't add up. Or he's talking about an entirely course-based master's program, which isn't much different from a regular undergraduate degree. It certainly isn't much of a preparation for going on to a PhD, if that is the plan.

I have no problem with the idea of spreading education efforts as widely as possible to as many people as possible for as low a price per person as possible, but there's no substitute for the kind of one-on-one supervision that exists in many master's and PhD programs, and the kind of evaluation and personal feedback it takes to help the student figure out how they are doing and how to improve it. You can't mass produce that. You can only get so far with coursework alone and multiple-choice testing as the evaluation. If people are suggesting "that's good enough", I weep for the future of education in the sciences.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Kjella]

Assuming no laboratory or administrative costs, how valuable is an education that you got for the cost of two or three hours of one-on-one attention (including teaching and evaulation) per year?

Wouldn't that primarily depend on how much time I spent and how much I learned? At least in an ideal world it should be utterly irrelevant if I did it all alone or had a personal teacher 8 hours a day. As for testing, yes if you need the degree then that costs. If you just want to get better at your job and earn raises/promotions that way, maybe you don't need it. Maybe you can do some variation of no cure - no pay and show people that you know your stuff. Or pay for a proper testing and certification. Alone this is just the video version of the book, but I've learned a lot from books so... what exactly is the problem here?

Re:You get what you pay for

[vlm]

The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.

I'd strongly disagree with "most". 200 students and one hour of office hours and the guy doesn't speak english anyway is not an unusual situation.

There is nothing wrong with people who have learning problems going to special schools that cost $50K/yr and everyone else goes to the $50/yr school.

The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is. US universities know they can attracted oversea students and they can be charged a fortune. This has resulted in the unis rejecting locals from their own state in favor of those coming in from another country. That in turn pushes them elsewhere where they lose the financial benefit (and prepaid program their parents set up) of going to their local uni and end up with a massive debt via the likes of Sallie May.

Re:You get what you pay for

[crossmr]

The issue isn't necessarily developing content. The issue is creating a degree out of it. Anyone can sit down and pound out some content.
How do you turn that into a degree? Well in order for it to be accredited I believe you'd have to create some standards. Tests, assessments, things like that.
Someone is going to have to manage those, mark them, etc.
No on is really going to respect a multiple choice masters degree, and no one is going to mark papers for a penny each. There are also issues in dealing with the practical side of some kind of learning. While literature can be discussed online as well as it could in a classroom, it might be harder to run an online chemistry course where students never do any actual chemistry.

Re:You get what you pay for

[BetterSense]

The $100 one may be smarter, but the $40,000 one will still get hired, even if (maybe especially if) his degree is in a field of limited utility.

Only the clueless think that higher education is primarily about imparting knowledge and wisdom. It's primary purpose is to act as a filter to allow corporate culture to launder its classicsm.

The "higher education" status symbol has become heavily used as a filter because it's either illegal or unpopular to hire based on membership in other clubs like religion, race, ethnicity, or extended family. Higher education only serves its purpose as long as it's expensive in money and time. Requiring higher education is a seemingly blameless way to keep the riffraff out. A $100 degree does not serve that purpose.

An expensive education is a sociological analogue of the peafowl tail. It's an economic signal that you are the right kind of white/black/$aggrievedminority person that will fit the company's core value matrix. A $100 Master's degree subverts this utility--leave it to the Internet--which is why you can find so many confused and borderline desperate people trying to dismiss online education based on stupid arguments, as if traditional universities could possibly be worth the huge cost difference because you really learn so much more from bit of professor interaction (which, as someone who has a Masters degree, is a fiction anyway, because graduate professors in my experience do not have good student interaction).

Expensive education may go away, but it will pop up in a few decades in the form of something else. All you speculative fiction authors can get to work predicting what that will be. More likely, anyone will be able to become an expert on any subject for nearly free (we are practically there now), but companies will still hire people who wasted years of life and enough money to feed several immigrant families for a decade, because "higher education teaches you how to learn and broadens your perspectives".

Re:You get what you pay for

[lwriemen]

And yet some of the best things in life are free. It would be nice to add a world class education to that list.

A world class education is already on that list, but proving you have a world class education isn't. The degree is for getting paid for your knowledge. Having a major university name on the degree bumps up your perceived worth, even though the knowledge could have been obtained much cheaper.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't get a degree and make $90k/year as a tech lead.

The value of a degree is... questionable

Re:You get what you pay for

[TheRaven64]

$100 is probably not enough to pay the people who will mark the exams. Most universities allow external students: those who are not taught by the university but simply show up and take the exams, and you'd be hard pressed to find any that do so for $100. A masters course typically involves a dissertation that is at least 100 pages. Just reading it is going to take several hours. If you can do it in five hours (which is pretty good going for a thorough read of a masters dissertation) then you're talking $20/hour, and not leaving any more time for marking the other exams.

I would not trust a $100 masters degree (unless that's just $100 paid by the student, with the rest funded from elsewhere) for the simple reason that it is not feasible to do a proper assessment of the student for that little money. $1000 might be quite feasible though...

Re:You get what you pay for

[__aaeihw9960]

The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.

And yet, in my brick and mortar school, when we encourage individual learning, peer mentoring and peer leadership, we are accused by students/parents of not doing our jobs. People want to be handheld today. They've been taught that someone will be there to help them, and they've been taught it for the last 50 years. Oh, and in today's society, when you don't get your way, do you know what the first course of action is? Threaten a lawsuit - granted, I only have my own experience and it is anecdotal evidence at best.

Sometimes I envy the guy that doesn't speak English. At least he can tune out the Bullshit.

Re:You get what you pay for

[History's Coming To]

It's a matter of economics - once the course is designed, written and recorded it doesn't scale up the same way - delivering it to 100,000 people isn't 100 times as costly as delivering it to 100 people. The lecturers and professors can make the same amount either way, with courses costing $100 or $100,000 respectively.

Agreed though, online courses do lack the face-to-face and practical elements in many ways, although alternatives can be found.

Re:You get what you pay for

[__aaeihw9960]

I agree with you whole-heartedly. While I was working on my thesis, I hated my PhD for making me his indentured servant. BUT, the lessons I learned under that man were invaluable. If you want to see what a Master's with no supervision looks like, you only have to look at the degree mills that already exist - in my area the big one is William Woods. If you want the degree, you can get it. Their selling point is that it takes 18 months; not rigor, not value, just that it takes 18 months.

While I would love to see an online option for advanced degrees, it is a very fine line to walk between $100 for a good degree, with valuable experience, and thanks for your $100, now put paper in your printer to receive diploma.

Re:You get what you pay for

[WaywardGeek]

Is it possible to educate kids without immersing them in a university environment where they can find their peer group, and actually hang out with them?

I believe I have learned more than 90% of my engineering/computer knowledge on my own and from peers, even though I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and probably over 50% of my math/science. By the time I'd take an electronics or computer course, I'd already built most of the hardware and software taught in the course. That's because I had a great peer group who loved to build stuff, code hacks, and explore arcane mathematics. People like Geo Homsy, who's working on the Organograph, taught me far more than any teacher. He once, and not completely inaccurately, boasted, "I taught him everything he knows."

I feel that it's easier to learn science/math/engineering/compsci material through Google and Wikipedia than in class, but without that college campus experience, who would bother? I feel the major challenge for on-line education is connecting people. We already form on-line groups to debate virtually every interesting topic, but is bitching on a list like this any substitute for planning an audacious stunt over beer and pizza with some of your best friends? How important is learning group theory if you don't use any of it to solve every moving-piece puzzle you and your friends can get hold of? How important is writing that computing assignment to calculate x^n, where n is an integer, if you don't compete with your friends to come up with an optimal solution, thus discovering a fascinating and little known unsolved mathematics problem in comp sci? How is learning alpha-beta tree pruning going to feel in an online course (probably like a root canal), compared to competing with friends on Othello or Go algorithms, thus requiring everybody to grok it in their gut? How good would a geek like me be at Calculus if I didn't keep getting asked by hot chicks to help them with homework over at their place? How do you reproduce that on-line?

Re:You get what you pay for

[Half-pint HAL]

But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.

As budgetary squeezes affect the universities in Europe (where laws prevent the fee gouging that angry people on the internet tell me is killing the US), personal time is the first casualty. I took a career break last year to do a university language course, and my individual time was limited to the marking of two or three assignments for each module. There was some class groupwork, but nothing like what I consider equivalent to the tutorials I got in my first degree. As an outside course, I did an online module in anatomy and physiology. There were three formative assignments. The first was a short essay on the first two units of the course. My individual feedback was two sentences. The next two formative assessments were multiple choice quizzes, and the tutor just distributed an answer sheet for us to mark them ourselves. After that came the final assignment -- one single essay which determined the full mark for the module.

This module on its own (you take 8 modules per year at my uni) would have cost the standard fee of £161, and that is after the subsidy from the government. I have a strong suspicion that this module is a lot cheaper to run than their honours-level modules, and that the degree level courses are cross subsidised by first and second year modules.

I'm dubious about the full mass-market distance degree, but I don't see any reason why we can't automate first-year courses in this way. The purpose of first and second year in most disciplines is to teach the absolute fundaments of the field of study. In my first uni, everyone studying in the Faculty of Science and Engineering was squeezed into one of four or five maths courses(maths, maths for engineering, maths for computing, maths for physical sciences etc), and that was already many, many thousands of students being handled by 10 lectures and a bunch of postgraduates acting as paid tutors (not quite equivalent to US TAs). Find a suitable solution to deal with the problems of inputting mathematical notation on-screen and develop a robust algorithm to mark students' work including working (neither of these is a major issue now) and those 4 maths courses can be expanded from the thousands at that particular university to millions worldwide, at a tiny marginal cost.

Cheating may seem like a problem, but if the model goes the way I predict it, cheating will only mean that you get entry into the degree years, which you'll obviously fail, because you haven't learnt what you should have in the first place and you just aren't ready for degree-level study.

Re:You get what you pay for

[IcyHando'Death]

Reading about this on Slashdot provides us with a clear source of inspiration in looking for ways to do this (marking) economically. Why not make marking of assignments, exams and papers a requirement for receiving your "degree"? The same could be done with tutoring, with senior students helping junior ones. This all scales very well, and reflects much of current practice at universities. The key difference is that the work is no longer paid, but goes towards earning your degree.

Meta-marking could also be built in to make the school mostly self-running (like Slashdot, or even better, Stackoverflow).

Re:You get what you pay for

[SteveFoerster]

There are lab kits that student get for distance learning science courses, some of which are surprisingly sophisticated. There's no way they'd fit into a model where the whole program is $100, though.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Half-pint HAL]

The value of a degree to highly talented, highly motivated and also pretty damned lucky individuals is questionable, but if you average out the entire jobs market, the ordinarily talented, highly motivated and not especially lucky individual is better off with a degree than without.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

Fuck NO. I had work, friends and family, that filled up my extracurriculars allright.

Re:You get what you pay for

[SteveFoerster]

You keep saying "ass licking" as though that's the only kind of social interation. That says more about you than it does about society.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Missing.Matter]

So, you say, it's a meritocracy where ass licking skills are what matters instead of academics.

What you call "ass licking skills" the rest of us call "social skills." No, we live in a society, where social interaction and relationships rule over numbers on a paper. I didn't kiss my advisor's ass, but I worked with him daily and he knows my abilities and the kind of work I can produce. Thus, if one of his many many colleagues from around the world says to him "Joe, I'm looking for a guy that can do X, know anyone?" he's going to drop my name. If someone asks Professor Thrun the same question, he's going to drop the name of one of his real students who he's had personal interactions with, not on of his Udacity students.

Now, why you seem to put no value on social skills, I don't know. Maybe you're just bad at them, since you tried to stay in the library for four years. But slashdot is pretty much the only place in the world where you'll be modded +5 insightful for having no EQ.

Re:You get what you pay for

[crossmr]

The issue here is the $100. Now he says a masters, does he mean from nothing to a masters? So is that 2 years or 6 years of schooling? Even at 2 years of schooling assuming he only had to provide website access and instructors to grade the material.

50/year
10 courses
$5/course
Let's say 30 students per course, $150/course/semester. Semester is 4 months, which means the instructor could get $37.50 per month per course they're running.
6 years of schooling?
divide that by 3. $12/month/course
they'd have to run 100 courses a month to live.
Unless we're outsourcing to some destitute country where we have apparently highly trained instructors who will work for just pennies a day.
What it really boils down to is that best case scenario a teacher could get at most $1.25/student/semester assuming the site took nothing.
They'd need thousands of students to make it worth their while.

He's setting it up for failure here, or at least not genuine degrees that another institute would accredit.

Re:You get what you pay for

[SteveFoerster]

That's why I said, "There's no way they'd fit into a model where the whole program is $100, though." Mainly I responding to your comment that in an online chemistry course, student's don't actually do any chemistry and pointing out that in the general case that doesn't have to be true.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

What passes for social skills in the U.S. is often considered ass licking and being stupid in other parts of the world. What you refer to is normal, but that's not nearly what's going on at the campuses.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

It usually is, unfortunately -- in the U.S., that is. It's a big social club, like a mutual adoration society, closed to outsiders. That's not very healthy for the long term progress, you know.

Re:You get what you pay for

[FatAlb3rt]

You're assuming that it will require a human to grade the exams. And extended coursework is becoming more come in lieu of a thesis. The time required for a human to teach a course isn't what it used to be. And why should it?

The bigger issue is the honor code. But Udacity just entered into an agreement with Pearson testing centers to allow students to test in a recognized environment.

I admit, I'm a bit biased after taking the Robotic Car class, but I think it's time for a change in our educational structure. Costs are increasing much faster than inflation, yet technology is clearly there to make it cheaper.

Re:You get what you pay for

[FatAlb3rt]

It's really interesting to see this discussion on a site that often promotes the merits of free software.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Missing.Matter]

Given your broad generalizations, you just come of like you have an axe to grind. Seriously, every campus in America is socially deficient compared to the rest of the world? And you've been to how many... you own? And they treated you bad so now you have a vendetta?

Look in the mirror. By your own admission, you didn't even try to socialize. You went from your residence to class to the library and back again. You didn't join any clubs, you didn't join any social organizations, you didn't volunteer... you just hung out with your friends. Seems like your own problem.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Sunshinerat]

Not all students will do the final test.
The assumption here is that if 160000 students enroll and pay their fees, a (much?) smaller number of students actually follow through to the end.
Because the fees are so low, why not give it a try? I suspect the dropout rate is much higher with a low entry fee.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the requirement for a dissertation to be 100+ pages is ridiculous at best. There's being thorough, then there's being ludicrous. You're focusing on a single aspect of a single subject. If you can't manage to simplify it down to 30 someodd pages of text + graphs/images/etc, then maybe a course in writing might benefit.

And yes, I've seen several of these 100+ page dissertations, and read a few of them. Much of the ones I've read seem to be filler, re-iterating things, or just spacing things out a lot. There are of course exceptions, but really... for the purposes of having the document researchable, if you need 100 pages, fine... but surely if you're working a full year on this, you can make a 10-20 page summary of your findings and proofs to be corrected, and all extraneous filler can be left for those who actually need to use this as reference material in the future.

Re:You get what you pay for

[dffuller]

No, it isn't. It has costs that you don't pay directly, but it is most assuredly not free.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

Given if I were hiring, I'd have them all do a few sample things, ask them some questions, and see samples of their work.

I don't give a shit how much you paid or even if you have a fancy piece of paper that says you get to add letters to the end of your name. Are you demonstrating to me that you're superior to the others in the room? If yes, you're hired.

Along those same lines, if you're requesting 5 times the pay BECAUSE you have letters after your name, you DAMN WELL better demonstrate during that interview that you're 5 times better than the guy behind you. I'm all about fair pay (unlike many companies that seem to enjoy the '$1 above minimum wage starting, no matter what your position is), but there's a limit. I could care less if you've put yourself in 5 or 6 digits of debt, if this is a $30k position a year, you having a fancy diploma isn't going to change it to a $150k position a year. It means you get a $30k position a year, but can hang a stupid piece of paper in a frame over your desk.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

if only there was a way to do social networking online...

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

The high demand for college education has caused prices to skyrocket, fueled by the fact that due to cheap student loans, students can actually pay.

Haha - haven't learned anything from the housing bubble yet - "cheap loans" != "can actually pay"

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

due to cheap student loans, students can actually pay

HAH! And that would be the exact line of thought that's literally destroying several generations of lives.

The student can NOT pay. The loan is paying, not the student. The rest of the student's natural life (or at least the vast majority of it) is completely and utterly ruined due to the staggering debt forcing them into positions no man ever should be forced to face, let along vast swaths of the population.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very sad that those connections matter. School should be about what you know and what you can do, not about your ass licking skills :(

I bet connections matter to everyone, even you. Wouldn't you rather hire somebody you went to classes with for 3 years and worked on projects together and know is good ? Or do you pick the guy based on a 30-minute interview. You're trying to build connections the wrong way if you think they're the same as ass kissing.

Re:You get what you pay for

[Anonymous Coward]

It usually is, unfortunately -- in the U.S., that is. It's a big social club, like a mutual adoration society, closed to outsiders. That's not very healthy for the long term progress, you know.

This couldn't be further from the truth. I think you're mistaking Japan with the US.

Re:You get what you pay for

[paiute]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun Do some research before you start tossing insults around. I'd rather take a course from Thrun and the other highly-regarded professors who hold top positions at MIT and Stanford than listen to some no-name middle management chump who has his head crammed up his ass.

Do you really think that $100 buys you the same access to that MIT professor that $40,000 a year does?

Re:You get what you pay for

[frank_adrian314159]

Yes, you would be wrong in thinking that.

In general, although universities need to adhere to accreditation guidelines, quite often these are not checked frequently or at more than a superficial level. As such, the quality of actual education can vary greatly from school to school. And, there would seem to be minimal cost levels required to support particular curricula and/or evaluation in the same. Not many Master's level curricula can be supported (together with a rigorous student evaluation) for $100.

So the OP was quite right in choosing Harvard (vetted by many years of academic history and watched over by eyes intent on "protecting the brand") over MyCousin's$100 University.

Re:You get what you pay for

[hairyfeet]

That hasn't been true for my oldest, but then again he goes to a conservative school where they value such things as charity work. Thanks to him doing charity work with one of the churches affiliated with the campus he's been pretty much given keys to the kingdom, he's now head of his frat and is pretty much getting a free ride and we are not rich or influential by ANY means.

But while that may be true of the Ivy League its not true of all the schools, and considering how many senators and congressmen and governors have gone to that school i'd say that those connections really DO help.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

Well, if you chose not to participate in university social life, then what is your complaint about "the social side" of your US university experience being a "disaster"?

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

Of course, we can automate education this way. Many students don't give a damn about one-on-one human instruction and prefer reading and watching at their own pace.

However, if you do care about personal instruction (and there do seem to be a lot of students that do), it's going to cost you.

Re:You get what you pay for

[MrResistor]

Free software is generally developed to fulfill some need of the original developer, and they then decide to share it for free because it costs negligible time/effort/money to do so. The time/effort/money required to share a graduate-level education and verify that the student has actually learned a sufficient amount to warrant a degree is not negligible. The economics are very different.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

There is nothing wrong with people who have learning problems going to special schools that cost $50K/yr and everyone else goes to the $50/yr school. The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.

That's a nice theory and it applied 100 years ago. Today, 40% of the US population has completed degrees. Do you really think those 40% are capable of figuring out calculus, mechanics, or history by themselves? Do you really think they will be in jobs where that ability is even valued?

The people that are easy to educate and don't need hand-holding are the core 1-2% that have always gone to university. The more you expand enrollment beyond that, the more help and the more money each new student needs.

Re:You get what you pay for

[tibit]

Because the university social life was regrettably bad. That's why I didn't participate in it. In a Big 10 school, too.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

Yeah, I've been to a U.S. school too, and while the quality of education was way better than what I had in Europe, the social side of it was a disaster. I tried to stay on campus only for the classes and library time.

Well, it's obvious you're incapable of articulating any aspect of it that was actually worse. We'll take your comment for what it's worth--nothing.

Re:You get what you pay for

[khipu]

With checks and balances, marking the lower level students could be an assignment for the higher grade ones

That already is practiced widely. But there's a limit to how much teaching load you can impose on students. Furthermore, you can't use higher grade students as slave labor, you need to pay them too.

black people

[Anonymous Coward]

apes

I took his AI class

[John Courtland]

I thought his whimsical attitude and passion for teaching were amazing and I learned a lot for zero dollars. I'd easily pay 100 bucks to have him teach me more stuff.

Re:I took his AI class

[snkline]

I didn't care much for the AI class (I took the Machine Learning class at the same time, which I felt was far superior), however his Robot Car class was really good. It took the practical application aspect the Machine Learning class had, making it far more engaging. I love Udacity, Coursera and MITx, the problem is I think I'm a little ADD, I sign up for just about everything and can't keep up given the limited time I can devote to them outside work.

Re:I took his AI class

[Crazy Taco]

I don't think the issue is whether people can be taught for low amounts money. Clearly they can. Just have a HUGE number listening online, and you can make a living easilly by spreading the cost among them. Per student, it will be very low.

The real problem is the cost of evaluating what students know. You can't give someone a master's degree unless you can evaluate that they know their stuff, or else the degree becomes worthless. And evaluations require tests. True, you *could* make all the tests multiple choice, but what about times when a hands on test in a lab environment is needed? What about times when creativity is required in the answer, or designs have to be drawn, etc, and it can't be fit into a multiple choice test? A computer can't grade that. Humans have to. Hiring TAs for 160,000 people is going to raise the cost far above $100. Unless he plans to just do multiple choice, in which case, his students will likely be good at memorization and not hands on application. And cheating may also be easier with 160,000 people taking anonymous multiple choice tests.

And I would also argue a lot of good educations require hands on lab training too, which is something else that becomes costly when you think of test lab infrastructures for so many people.

Re:I took his AI class

[snkline]

This is why I think this is a better model for things like computer science and engineering, rather than subjects in the humanities for instance. You can't automatically grade essays, but you can automatically grade software projects, which demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter.

Re:I took his AI class

[shimage]

No point in testing their lab skills, if they haven't spent any time in a lab. Not sure how you can spend time in a lab online, but maybe someone clever will figure it out.

Re:I took his AI class

[snkline]

What I would like to see is integration of online learning with things like this Techshop. I would love a 'Bioshop' which contains lots of medical/biological lab tools allowing people to learn lecture material online, and do lab work after of course passing some safety courses. The problem of course, is that such a thing is fairly niche compared to Techshop, but I can dream.

Re:I took his AI class

[Johnny Mnemonic]

160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.

$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.

160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.

One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.

That's not that far off from being reasonable.

If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.

Re:I took his AI class

[discontinuity]

160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.

$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.

160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.

One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.

That's not that far off from being reasonable.

If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.

A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two. One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.

There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

but what about times when a hands on test in a lab environment is needed

Mods, this is not an Insightful post.

On Udacity, at least for the CS courses (which is all they really have at the moment), the test are not multiple choice, and the answers are not emailed in. You must use the online web interface to enter and execute and submit your code. In addition, they've got some guys who are pretty heavy-hitters in the AI realms and are using some pretty slick software to do fuzzy analysis. It's not a perfect system, and yes there are issues with remote testing just like any other form of remote testing which lacks a proctor or other physical oversight.

I would suggest anybody who is doubtful of the quality of these courses to sign up and work through them. They are at least as good as most major accredited university courses, and better than a LOT of courses I've seen on the local and State university system level. These guys are professors who are basically delivering their actual, full-blown university CS courses in a slightly different format.

If it's knowledge you seek, check it out. If you're hoping for a fancy piece of paper which will get you hired instead of being hired on your own skills and merits, then go ahead and get your rich Daddy to buy you a degree from an Ivy League school.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

Could grading other peoples' work be a required part of the course?

Given that there is a right answer, or one of several right answers, and a grading sheet, then another class member can grade the work. Requiring each person to grade, say, 4 other people's papers means that you would have redundant grading of papers and would be able to see if there is a large discrepency between assigned grades. Anonymity would be very high because of the large number of people in the course and the fact that is is on-line.

When my wife was teaching (HS physics and chemistry), I used to help her grade. Some of the AP (and IB) classes were pretty advanced, so this is not a trivial thing for someone without a degree in these subjects (I have a comp sci degree). However, given her grading sheet, I could grade the vast majority of the student's exams. She would do spot checks of my grading. If there was an answer that I did not understand, then she could grade it. But, it essentially cut the workload in half.

In addition, it would be a great learning experience for students to grade each other's papers. You learn a lot at seeing what other people have done to answer a question.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

The MITx class I'm taking doesn't have any multiple choice questions. I have labs using SPICE. Homework and tests are smart enough to see that the equation I entered is equivalent to the correct answer through some sort of Mathematica like processing. I am learning more than I did when I got by BSEE in person. Some of this is because of an existing familiarity with the subject, but the great instructor and awesome learning environment are key.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

160,000 people pay $100 each, that is $16,000,000... I'm pretty sure they could afford to hire TAs.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

The Human-Computer Interaction class (http://www.hci-class.com/) @ Coursera/Stanford solves the evaluation problem with peer evaluation. The evaluation and measurement criteria are clearly explained. Each student will evaluate other students - after passing the "evaluation training" phase of the course.

So, theoretically, a group of 160,000 student will evaluate 160,000 students. This process should boost performance - for both the exercises/assignments and the evaluations.

I believe this is far superior to the measurement process used in the AI class I took with the other 160,000 folks last year.

And, yes, as an occasional adjunct CS professor, I think these courses are the future - in CS and, hopefully, many other fields.

Re:I took his AI class

[Half-pint HAL]

160,000 students @ $100 each is $16M.

$16M at $32k buys 500 TAs / year.

160K students / 500 TAs is 320 students / TA.

One TA could give each student one dedicated hour every other month and maintain a regular 40 hr per week year round schedule.

That's not that far off from being reasonable.

If you pay the TAs only $15K-20K you would have budget for overhead and profit, or more TAs for more FTF time.

A full-load TA generally can work only 20 hours/week at the job, so the numbers are off by a factor of two.

Then append the magic letters FTE to the number of TAs (=Full-Time Equivalent). The exact number of TAs isn't important, just the man hours.

One hour per month is a little low to begin with, and 30 minutes per month is not workable unless the assignments are trivial to grade. 30 min/month is something like 7.5 minutes per week.

There have been leaps and bounds in automatic grading, even to the point where some people use it "in anger" -- which isn't to say they aren't spectacularly useless. But they're becoming more and more the reality in education.

There are some efficiencies to be had by moving elements of education online. For example, discussion boards are a great way to answer a question once for the entire class to see. Sometimes students will even answer questions other students have posted. But there is no economy of scale on grading and providing useful feedback. Some things are inherently labor intensive.

Feedback? You want feedback? You've been out of school too long -- feedback is increasingly rare....

Re:I took his AI class

[AnonyMouseCowWard]

You also can't automatically grade software projects.

Do you think a good programmer is just someone that is able to take an input and provide the required output, regardless of method, without checking what's inside his logic? In a complex project, do you not want to know how an engineer works with peers, approaches a problem? Is a mathematician someone that solves equations for you?

Higher education is about thought-process, be it in humanities or sciences. Measuring thought-process with a simple input-output grading is hard. At the post-graduate level when you're supposed to write a thesis and read and analyze other people's research, I'm not sure how well that's going to work...

Re:I took his AI class

[discontinuity]

but that's the problem. $32k will only get you 20hrs per week. It varies by institution, but the full cost of a TA (stipend, tuition, fringe, etc.) is in the $30k range and for that you only can require they work 20 hours a week on average.

As far as feedback is concerned, it varies wildly by institution, professor, type of course, etc.

And I still don't see how you'd teach a lab oriented course (physics, many engineering subjects) in an online fashion. Maybe lecture, but that lab experience is necessary.

Re:I took his AI class

[stg]

For CS, there are a number of programming goals that can be graded automatically, and that is used in several courses - both in Udacity, Coursera and the ML course mentioned before.

You just have to make the student respond to an interface - i.e.: setting an object or variable to the answers or outputting them in a particular way.

For example, in the NLP course the first exercise involved using regular expressions to extract e-mails from web pages. You had some starter source code and a set of pages included with the exercise. You just fill in your code, and run it locally to test it against the local set. Then you submit your code, and the grading software runs it against another set of pages, from where it gets your score for true positives, false positives, and misses (it also used the set you already have, but that had a lower percentage, I think).

It is not perfect (you can't easily measure the cleverness of the answer or the quality of the code, just how well it works), but it is very nearly free.

Given the average quality of the CS courses out there, I think that this system is very acceptable, and bound to get better with time.

Re:I took his AI class

[Anonymous Coward]

A student will typically turn in 3 assignments a month. Most classes have weekly assignments, but most months a test or project or something else will interrupt that.

  I graded for 3 years and did I think 5 or 6 classes in the physical sciences. The intro classes were mostly multiple choice, simple problems (~5 basic steps), or short answer (i.e. write a 3 sentence paragraph). An assignment would have typically 10 or so problems. The first few were slow, but after the first few I could grade those in under a minute. Meaning each student would take about 3 minutes per month. I could grade a class of ~100 in an hour or two easily.

For the upper division classes they typically take a bit longer to grade, but there's still no WAY graders are spending more than several minutes per student assignment. After the first few it becomes REALLY easy to pinpoint the location of the mistake and estimate what percentage of partial credit the person deserves.

Might be different in the CS departments, so I can't speak for grading software...

Re:I took his AI class

[KingBenny]

woaw...the current system i'm in would let me get a masters for about 15000 euros by the time i'm done... because i never finished the hiskool years or whatchu call it overthere i cant just attend normal college because i lack the paper of submission i would have been granted by doing it according to the rules when i got 18... this sounds really great altho in this shithole the degree would ofcourse not be accepted since the government didnt make any money on it...for someone willing to move across the globe this could definitely be a ticket out of nowhere to a place where life might work

Re:I took his AI class

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

I think the idea here is to give people who don't have $100,000 lying around the opportunity to hold that piece of paper in their hand so they don't get rejected for jobs by uppity hiring managers with old money degrees.

I fit into a demographic where I make too much money to get financial aid but not enough to go to school and pay all my bills. It's a paradox because I can't get promoted without a degree but I can't get a degree without making more money.

Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer. There is no reason it should cost a fortune to become educated. It's a legal racket, much like for-profit healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

What stops me from going back to college now in my mid-forties is ROI. I cannot afford to be in massive debt what with a wife and kid. My wife has massive school debt from her degree and it would be grossly unfair to add to that already burdensome bill.

Great idea... praying it succeeds.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer.

A PhD is free in the United States. I just completed my Doctorate and I was paid $20,000 per year to do it. In the sciences and engineering fields, at a research university, you're paid off of grant money. Tuition usually either waved or paid for you off the grant.

Now if you go into a non reacher field like the humanities or the pure mathematics, you will have to pay your own way.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not free, it's paid for by the tax payers. And those countries usually limit who they allow to go to college rather than vocational school because of the costs associated with funding college. What's more the people who receive those degrees tend to make less than what their counterparts in the US do.

That being said, this shouldn't be an all or nothing proposition, there's no reason why getting a PhD shouldn't be affordable for anybody willing to do the work.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

A PhD is free in the United States. I just completed my Doctorate and I was paid $20,000 per year to do it. In the sciences and engineering fields, at a research university, you're paid off of grant money. Tuition usually either waved or paid for you off the grant.

A PhD who wasn't able to master relatively simple written English. Education ain't what it used to be. :(

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

A PhD who wasn't able to master relatively simple written English. Education ain't what it used to be. :(

First of all it's "Ph.D.:.
Second, "ain't" is not a word. If you are going to chastise someone about gammer and spelling in the English language, you should learn it yourself first.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, "ain't" is a contraction of "am I not".

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't

Ain't is a colloquialism and contraction for "am not", "is not", "are not", "has not", and "have not" in the common English language vernacular. In some dialects ain't is also used as a contraction of "do not", "does not", and "did not". The usage of ain't is a perennial subject of controversy in English. Widely used by many people, and found in most dictionaries,[1] its use is often considered to be informal, nonstandard, or improper.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everyone understood what he meant except you, pedant.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

"A PhD is free in the United States."

That is changing. I know of several PhD students in the sciences who sometimes are not paid and have to come up with their own living and tuition costs. The reason is that students are paid and granted tuition wavers because their professors pay those costs out of their grants. However NIH grants once upon a time were awarded to one in three applicants but that rate is now half (officially, but more like a fourth in my experience) the rate it used to be. PhD students in labs without grant money are forced to be teaching assistants, but there are no longer always enough TA spots to go around. This either forces the grad student even further into debt, since long gone are the days when you could graduate debt free without winning the parent lottery, or quit.

The upside is that we overproduce PhDs and have grotesquely done so for the last 40 years. More than 6,000 PhDs were granted last year in the life sciences alone. There are not remotely 6,000 jobs for them, not even before the collapse of the biotech and pharma industries in the late 2000's. Postdocing used to be able to soak up the glut, but postdocs are tied into the same shortage of money as grad students. As the decay of the American university system continues to increase perhaps the PhD glut might finally end. It will be entertaining then to listen to the shrieks of shortages given how loudly employers scream about it now with hundreds of broke, unemployed, and desperate PhDs applying for each opening.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone understood what the original poster meant too. If someone is going to use poor grammar to chastise someone else on spelling, then they are going to get called out on it.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up you shit-eating retard.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Belial6]

The problem with that is that public education has already failed. Think about it. It is becoming more and more accepted every day that 13 years of education is not enough to function at basic jobs. Of course, colleges are not far off from our public education as it is.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much were the college and masters' tuition to get to a research position for most people? That's the problem. You are a typical PhD spod that misses the crux of the matter. The OP said "thru" clearly meaning "through to".

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[IorDMUX]

Well. You had a good point there until you turned into a troll. Try leaving off the unnecessary flaming, next time, and more people will hear and listen to your valid point.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[hilltop coder]

I agree that for students on a traditional educational path, graduate schools will break themselves in half to cover tuition and even find a way to get the student a living stipend. If you deviate from that path, you're screwed - I'm currently finishing my degree after making a 10 year detour into business, and the degree that was paying me modestly now costs $6-10K per semester.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S NOT FREE. It is paid for by SOMEONE ELSE. That SOMEONE ELSE is the TAXPAYER.

NOTHING is FREE in this world.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently being paid nearly 80K/year for my PhD at a second-tier university. This route is a combination of a full-time job (at a research laboratory) and a part-time PhD on job-related tasks. I am 26.
Previously, I was paid 60K/year for my MS, with a similar setup.
  - NOTE: at the end of this, my research will be owned by my company, and my PhD will be owned by me

For the small-business types, a friend in my advisers' lab is being paid 50K/year for his PhD (paid with company funds). He is 35.
  - NOTE: he will have profit-sharing on the product produced by his research, and own his degree

For the University types, one of my friends in my advisers' lab is being paid 35K/year (and living in France rent-free) for his PhD (paid for with grant funding). He is 29.
  - NOTE: he will own the research and the degree at the end of this

For the foreign types, my roommate is from Jordan. He works as a Research Assistant on other peoples projects for 20 hours/week, for 20K/year (tuition included). He is 28.

Other takeaways: Not a single one of us is borrowing money for our degree. Not a single one of us has a scholarship (I can't legally get the money from a scholarship, person B aged out of scholarship applications, and person C is just not smart enough to get one). Not a single one of us writes the University a check. Not a single one of the US citizens works for the University as a TA/RA/etc.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that you are aware that jobs complexity increases as specialization increases. Specialization increases as society grows. As such, larger societies/populations require larger amounts of education.

Of course the old options still exist. Learn basic carpentry, pig butchering, sharecropping, sewing, cobbling, and go live among the Amish. This requires elementary education. If you want to do business with knowledge-workers, then you need knowledge.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, you are absolutely mistaken about mathematics. It operates much like the sciences, waived tuition plus a stipend (mine was around 20K like yours).

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[proslack]

Add in two young kids and it gets even worse. Even so, 50k to 75k of debt for a STEM graduate degree isn't a big deal and pays for itself in a few years. Just skip a Volvo or BMW for ten years. No big deal.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Half-pint HAL]

Actually, that may be more to do with the "vocationalisation" of degrees in many places. Employers keep calling for degrees with more "career relevance", which essentially means that they're trying to shift the burden of training to the state and/or individual, to prevent employers having to do training.

Mark my words, it won't be long before "kitchen hygiene" is a basic component of most degree schemes -- MacDonald's will demand it....

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

non research field like the humanities or the pure mathematics

I have a Ph.D. in pure mathematics, am heavily involved in research, and got paid while in graduate school.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[olau]

And those countries usually limit who they allow to go to college rather than vocational school because of the costs associated with funding college.

It's free in Denmark. For some popular educations where society can't employ everyone there are limits based on your grades in high school, although there's usually a secondary quota allowed in. So if you really want to do it, you can do some other vaguely related stuff (like visiting a school abroad) and get some points to get in.

What's more the people who receive those degrees tend to make less than what their counterparts in the US do.

On the flip side, as I gather it's common for people in the US to stop at the bachelor level, which is definitly not the case for Denmark. You do know that if you want to live out the American dream, you'd better move to Denmark?

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Belial6]

Absolute and complete BS. While there is a small subset of jobs that have become more complex, the vast majority of them have not. Every single one of your examples shows just how much LESS knowledge is required today than in the past. If you think that an Amish farmer who butchers pigs knows less about the subject of cutting up pigs than the "butcher" (more accurately called a meat cutter) that works in at Safeway, you are deluded.

Specialization DECREASES the amount of education necessary for 99% of all jobs.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[Belial6]

"Kitchen Hygiene" would be a fine example of how badly our public education has failed. It wasn't that long ago that by the time a student graduated from his 13 year public education program, half of them already had taken courses on "kitchen hygiene".

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[pantaril]

I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer.

As a citisen of one of those countries, where education (primary, secondary and terciary) is free, I agree completely. Free education allows greater social mobility. It's one of the few options for poor families to escape their social status. We live in an era where the gap between poor and rich is widening dramaticaly, so upward social mobility is more important then ever. I don't think it's possible for everyone to get huge student loan and even if it were possible, the several years payback period is just undesirable.

It's shame that our current right-wing goverment doesn't see those arguments and under influence of libertatian ideology (less state is better) wants to go away with free terciary education.

Re:Hopefully this succeeds

[LienRag]

I want to see free education thru the PhD level as civilized countries offer.

Here, I corrected it for you.

That's UnAmerican!

[thatDBA]

Everybody knows you can't get a quality education for cheap! This is the land of the Private University that offers freedom by enslaving you in debt.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an education for cheap, sure. I've been teaching myself the equivalent of junior/senior year undergrad mathematics just from books. On the other hand, the difference in the experience between this and my time at a top five CS grad program is simply miles and miles and miles apart.
 
It's even inadequate to compare the disparity by saying it's like learning a language from a book versus living where it's spoken natively. If you want to learn French and move to France, you don't just randomly run into the multiple top level French teachers. You don't get asked to help revise the official lexicon, or get access to new parts of the language that literally no more than a dozen people in the world have seen before you. You don't get to hang out with other similarly talented people who are trying to figure out some of the same things you're trying to figure out, who might have some insight into things that are problematic for you.
 
So yes, I think learning on your own is great, which is why I strive to study for an hour or two every day (along with my work, and the rest of my life). But don't mistake learning from books or online courses for what you can get from a great traditional grad. program, or think that somehow you'll make up for the disparity somewhere down the line.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Darkness404]

But that's the difference between knowledge and experience. College is poor for the knowledge part of things, but can be great for the experience part of things. The problem is, there are 3 major viewpoints regarding college and all 3 have their flaws:

A) College is about knowledge. This used to be the case when a good chunk of information could only be found in academic libraries, but today a simple Google search can find you the information for all but the most specialized of areas.

B) College is about qualifications. This is the main viewpoint today since we've dumbed high school down to the point where everyone can pass, people need another qualification for most professions that qualification is college.

C) College is about the experience. This is true and the viewpoint I tend to take, but at the same time, there are a lot of cheaper ways to get even better experiences than college, especially if you know what you want to do.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[sarysa]

Except the racket is heavily based on public institutions. Look at what's been happening in California for the last 20 years. You're right that it's unamerican -- unencumbered, free market competition should have swept in long, long ago.

I wish Sebastian Thrun all the best.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Fjandr]

While the end result of your complaint is true, the reason it is true is not likely the one you put forward (private education). With the exception of a fairly new breed of commercial diploma mills (which target those who make poor economic decisions, much like any other predatory industry), private universities in the USA are responding to the same pressure sources public universities are. Public universities have had funding cut, while private universities lost major chunks of their endowments to the latest recession.

Private universities have an extraordinarily long history in the USA, and it's not one of excessive tuition. Excessive tuition is a very recent occurrence, and if it was due entirely (or even mostly) to the existence of private universities as a major educational force it would have started a couple hundred years ago. Given that Harvard's yearly tuition as a top university in 1900 ($150) is only equivalent to about $3k today (compare that to any other university, public or private), it stands to reason there's something else behind the increases than "private means slavery!"

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Anonymous Coward]

Excessive tuition is a very recent occurrence

You confused me for a moment until I realized that you were discussing excessive tuition fees!

Excessive tuition itself could, I suppose, be a problem if it exhausted the students...

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's a pretty fair assessment of things, although it seems like you're talking more about undergraduate than grad school (which was both my and the article's subject). In particular:
 
A.) In my brief time visiting grad school, much of what I learned about is either completely missing from the internet, available only in broad description in academic paper form, or I wouldn't have ever known to look for it if not for comments outside of class material. What really amazes me is that when I've had questions about material in my undergrad math books, there's been almost no information available online. I expect I'm going to be completely book-bound by the time I get to graduate level math.
 
B.) Agreed for undergrad. My experience with grad school was a bit of an outlier, since the place was so highly regarded, but just going there made the regular students (i.e., not me) desirable to companies. I think in general, grad school isn't quite as much about that.
 
C.) It's possible to get similar (though not the same) experience elsewhere, but that's more of an exception than a rule. In general, you're not going to get it from a job. You're going to have a near impossible time getting a group of similarly talented people together to work on a project, or to study without a class, and if you somehow manage it, you still don't have those professors who are leaders in their field to be there and interact with you. You may be lacking access to the type of equipment necessary, depending on what it is you're doing. If you do like I have, and eschew academics and instead self-fund your own (all-consuming) project and studying outside of a program, you're still missing that social/academic interaction and the gains from it. In many ways, it would have been much easier for me if I'd simply been a full-time grad student. On the plus side, I should have a salable product within the next two months, but I have no way of knowing if that'll amount to anything. It might give me a couple of bucks or it might fund me for another four years, where I could work on more experimental parts of the project.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[icebrain]

I'd say there are three reasons for the increases in tuition costs.

1. Increased demand - There's been a decades-long push of "everone deserves to go to college" and "this job requires a degree" (even when it doesn't) that has led to more people wanting to go. And as every economics class teaches, when demand goes up without a corresponding increase in supply, the price goes up.

2. Extravagence - As tuition went up, competition among schools to get the better students (i.e., the ones most likely to stay in and keep paying tuition till graduation, instead of dropping out) went up as well. A lot of that competition came in the form of new fancy academic buildings for the front-runner majors, condo-like apartment housing instead of the traditional dorms, full-service athletic and recreational centers for students, and so on. All of that stuff is great when you're a student, but it all costs money, and pushes tuition even higher.

3. Easy credit - As with anything else, people are less careful with, and more willing to spend freely, money that isn't theirs or can be paid later. After all, $20,000 might be a lot if I have to pay cash, but if I can spread that out over twenty years, it's not so bad, right? Easy student loans with little or no qualifications increased the supply of money available to pay tuition, so the demand for tuition money went up. Further, people who had no hope of ever being able to repay their loans (read: paid way too much for a degree in a low-earning-potential field) still had tens of thousands to burn on the degrees.

There seems to be a universal idea (at least in the US) that college must be done right after high school, and you should study whatever your little naive heart desires, regardless of practicality. I believe the focus should be on first finding gainful employment (either technical school, STEM degree, or going straight into the workforce) and becoming economically self-sufficient, then coming back and getting your "fun" degree once you can pay for it yourself. Yes, it means you'll miss out on the "traditional" party-time college atmosphere, your degree might take longer, you'll probably be working full-time as well, and it might violate the spirit of academic purity or something, but it's the more responsible thing to do. And if you're paying for it yourself up front, you're going to care more about what you're really getting from it.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Anonymous Coward]

D) College is also about access to resources that you could not otherwise afford. 'Cause scanning tunnel microscopes are not available at the local convenience store. Just sayin'

(I can see undergraduate education becoming essentially free. But a graduate education, especially a PhD, in certain fields requires access to very expensive and specialized equipment. But perhaps some Maker can come up with an affordable equivalent...?)

-Anon

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[tnk1]

I get paid a lot of money for a job I know I didn't need to go to college to learn. How do I know that? Because I learned everything I am currently getting paid for on the job or on my own. In some cases, I learned it while failing to actually work on my college classwork.

Unfortunately, despite that, I got my first job because I went to college. It is 100% a situation where you need to get the piece of paper to get a foot in the door. After that, assuming no screw-ups, your degree becomes increasingly less useful unless you want to actually do something more advanced like research.

Having said that, people do need to learn other things than a straight line focus on what their job is planned to be. People get laid off, or start hating their jobs all the time in the real world. What are their options if they learn nothing but what they need for IT when suddenly most of the IT jobs go off to India/China or it becomes increasingly automated? I don't know if I want to have to pay 100K to become "well-rounded", but I don't think focused vocational training is always a good idea either.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[White Flame]

A) College is about knowledge. This used to be the case when a good chunk of information could only be found in academic libraries, but today a simple Google search can find you the information for all but the most specialized of areas.

I think this is a bit mischaracterized. I would substitute "knowledge" for "training". I'm an autodidact, but even so it makes learning a lot faster and easier when there is training, coaching, and a useful path of progression that the learner is taken through. Much of the online materials are reference materials or in situ discussion, not geared to be penetrable for those who do not know the field. Especially in more hands-on fields such as electronics, materials processing, chemistry, etc, being able to actually execute and measure what you're learning gives a stronger and more lasting impression. Of course, there are other fields where simply immersing yourself in online reading materials is quite suitable to gain a good, practical understanding (I'd place mathematics and programming languages here).

This might be covered in what you list as "experience", but typically that word is used to describe social development experiences, learning the politics of your field, and starting up a network of contacts in academia.

Having said all that, I agree that the whole university view of things is failing to meet expectations overall, it's just that for a number of fields "knowledge" is not just reference information.

Re:That's UnAmerican!

[Fjandr]

Had I made the post with both definitions in mind, I could have modified it so it could be read snarkily using the much-lesser used definition of "tuition," but I wasn't in that frame of mind when I wrote it.

To bring something useful to this pedantic tangent:
There have been studies done on excessive tuition (instruction), and yes, excessive tuition is exhausting and has diminishing (sometimes leading to reversing) returns.

the old idea of a degree is a poor fit for today

[Joe_Dragon]

"The idea of a degree is that you spend a fixed time right after high school to educate yourself"

Some stuff seems to be padded out to fit a 2 or 4 year plan when offering it NON degree / as badges system is better.

http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/

We need more Tech schools / apprenticeships

[Joe_Dragon]

We need more Tech schools / apprenticeships as yes you do need some training but CS is not IT and 2-4 years is a long time to sit in class room with at times learning very few skills needed to do the job.

Re:We need more Tech schools / apprenticeships

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how I got started. I eventually went to school and got a degree and now I'm working on a second one but honestly the "vocational training" school I went to was harder than most college classes except maybe some advanced math. I mean you went to class every day for 6 hours (including labs) and then at night you have a couple hours of reading. I went from basically zero IT knowledge to knowing more than some of my degreed co-workers in something like 9 months. Granted my college education later made me more "well rounded" as a person instead of just a super IT geek so if you can afford the time and money by all means go to university and do a real degree but if you're a hardcore geek who just wants to get out in the real world and get your hands dirty then doing a tech training program is going to be great for you. Of course a lot of jobs want degrees not for "no reason" but for the "well rounded person" part. You don't want a guy with no communication or writing skills with a shaky knowledge of culture and history managing some global department, know what I mean? So, yeah, the degree reqs on higher salary work can be legit but worry about that later if you want it. Maybe you're happy to just stay in the server room and geek out, in that case tech school will probably be better for you.

...however,

[HomoErectusDied4U]

As a university instructor I recognize that the writing's on the wall - online courses will inevitably replace many aspects of higher education. Much of what I teach is already freely available on the internet. There are already many online lectures from which I crib material for my own lectures.

That said, there are many important things that simply can't be taught via computer. I am an evolutionary biologist (specifically human evolution), so that is what I know: you can't learn anatomy at the graduate level without cadavers, period. You can't learn biological variation without dissecting and studying many cadavers. You can't learn comparative anatomy without dissecting animals. You can't learn the fossil record without handling the fossils (or high quality casts). You can't learn population genetics without spending time in a sequencing lab. You can't learn field biology without going to the field. You can't learn paleontology without going to the field. There are many things that I learned in my graduate training that simply can't be taught on a computer.

Personal tutelage by a master is similarly an irreplaceable experience. I've learned an enormous amount of information from watching online lectures and taking online courses in subjects outside of my specialties - but I would absolutely not consider myself on par with people who have traditional graduate training in these fields. I loved the AI class - but Professor Thrun never discussed my ideas with me, criticized my writings on the topic, and certainly never helped me design a project and then execute it. I can't call, Skype, or email authorities in AI to chat about the newest papers in the field - because I simply never met them through the online course.

As enthusiastic as I am about the exciting possibilities of newfangled gadgetry, computers and the internet are still tools with limitations. Powerful tools, but not totipotent tools. Sometimes newer isn't better. Sometimes newer is worse.

Re:...however,

[shimage]

One of my degrees is a non-thesis master's and I always thought a degree like that (without any lab experience) basically just a pretty piece of paper. More or less everything useful I learned in grad school, I either learned in the lab or from the people I met at conferences.

Re:...however,

[ZPO]

Some classes are enhanced by interaction with the professor, other students, and invaluable hands-on lab time. Other classes can be completed online without losing any of the value. Take for example the common core classes of mathematics, liberal arts, history, etc. Does the student gain anything by physically sitting in a classroom? If these classes can be taken care of online for little cost then the student's scarce time and treasure can be leveraged to attend only the courses which benefit from interaction and lab time in a physical university setting.

The key is to select the appropriate tool for the appropriate task. Online isn't always the answer. In residence isn't always the answer. Having additional tools and methods available can make things more efficient.

Re:...however,

[FrootLoops]

I imagine core courses split between lecture and problem sessions will have the lecture portion replaced by digital distribution in the next 20 years or so. The benefits of physically attending a huge lecture are too low for cost-conscious schools to stomach indefinitely, especially if really high-quality lectures by gifted educators can be used.

Re:...however,

[Manfre]

If the current trend of stupidity continues in America, you won't have to worry about whether or not online education is not as good as hands on. You'll have long given up teaching from frustration when a law passes stating you must give equal time to creationist theories.

Re:...however,

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have to have pretty much a mastery of a topic to benefit much from a conference. You weren't learning the core material at a 2 day conference I assume.

Re:...however,

[DerekLyons]

As a university instructor I recognize that the writing's on the wall - online courses will inevitably replace many aspects of higher education.

In the same way and for the same reasons that McDonald's has replaced a home cooked meal, it's cheap, easy, and convenient.

Re:...however,

[Rogerborg]

That nice. By the way, yes, I would like fries with that.

Re:...however,

[tnk1]

As much as I am against the whole Young Earth Creationism concept, there's really not that much to say about it. You mention it, and move on. What else can you say? You're not allowed to mention God in a classroom already, so you're not exactly going to start elaborating on who the Creator is.

I don't think stuff like this is going to seriously undermine education. It's not like this stuff stopped science from being developed, because as we all know, the scientific method pretty much got its start in universities created to teach clerics and was pioneered by actual clerics in eras that actually believed fully in Creationism because they had no evidence otherwise. If science could get a start amongst a bunch of monks, friars and other people in minor orders, I'd say that it's pretty safe today.

Re:...however,

[tnk1]

Is it really necessary to sit in a huge auditorium listening to a professor drone on about his subject while he writes on a board or an overhead projector... all without the ability to hit rewind and go back to the parts that you didn't quite understand? That was my engineering experience in an Ivy League school until I was an upperclassman. Honestly, very little about the few professors that were good at teaching would have been lost on a webcam. Not to mention, questions would have been so much easier if I could have typed them out afterward.

So, I really don't think the McDonald's comparison is apt or fair in this case, mostly because of the poor connotation. Easy, cheap and convenient is something that is desirable, but it doesn't have to come with a concurrent lack of quality.

Re:...however,

[DerekLyons]

Easy, cheap and convenient is something that is desirable, but it doesn't have to come with a concurrent lack of quality.

Yeah, pretty much it does. Once you start paying professors and having to schedule classes so they and/or other students are available for discussion and interaction... It's no longer cheap, easy. or convenient.

Re:...however,

[Anonymous Coward]

Can u say maker bot? Just print your cadaver.

Split the teaching from the testing.

[khasim]

Right now we have testing centers for vendor-specific certifications.

Run the classes on-line for whatever price.
Those who just want to learn can stop there.
Those who want a degree can pay to take the tests at the testing centers.

For more complex tests either offer them in central locations or have traveling test sites. These would be more expensive than the other tests, but probably a LOT cheaper than the current model.

Re:Split the teaching from the testing.

[csumpi]

Great idea. Wish I had mod points for you.

Re:Split the teaching from the testing.

[Anonymous Coward]

God...as someone that runs a testing center and has to deal with online degrees and the idiots that come in to test with them...

Honestly, I really don't want them coming in fucking with my proctors. I have enough problems with the new Western Governors idiots I have to put up with...people demanding money back SCREAMING because they didn't get a good enough score. Having to threaten to call security on people. Having other tests disrupted.

Yeah...most testing centers don't want to have to deal with the people that don't care about their education enough to get a real degree. This isn't snobbishness...it is the fact that everytime I have to deal with an incident, it is always a distance ed student...not one of our own.

Re:Split the teaching from the testing.

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a reasonable approach for many subject areas, although to be effective, the assessments need to be carefully designed, comprehensive, and hopefully based on some national or international standards. Education seems to be moving in this direction anyway, with several efforts underway to nationalize assessment systems coupled with an increasing awareness that learning can take place in many environments (go Open Badges!).

However... This does ignore out the importance of formative, as opposed to summative, testing which can be a critical factor in improving learning while it's happening. Peer review might play a key role to alleviate this issue.

Difficult and fascinating stuff!

Re:Split the teaching from the testing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I did just this with a Business Writing course I took (many years after University); course was online, and then on a certain day I had to go to a local college and sit in a room (with about 20 other people) and my test was handed to me. Everyone in that classroom had a different test and different time limits; the "tester" would come and take your paper when your time was up.

I had 3 hours for my test, the funny part is that the whole online course was typing, then I get to the exam and had to handwrite it.... oops, I haven't done hand writing in years, let alone 3 hours straight of it. I couldn't move my wrists the next day :(

not college material is on both sides as well

[Joe_Dragon]

there are people going to college who are not cut out off it and there are lot's of classes that should be in college any ways.

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Darkness404]

The root problem is we've dumbed high school down to the point where everyone pretty much has to graduate high school to get a job. When everyone has a high school diploma people need to distinguish themselves even more so they go for a bachelor's degree, we're slowly dumbing that down to the point where people are going to need to distinguish themselves even more and get a master's degree... and so on and so on.

It isn't about the knowledge. Let's face it, on-the-job training tells you 99% of what you need to do in most jobs, Google can tell you just about every fact you'd ever want to know. As much fun as it is for history buffs to memorize dates, for English buffs to memorize poetry, for science buffs to memorize obscure equations, and for math buffs to memorize 1000 digits of pi, its really not all that useful when you have a smart phone that can look any of that up in 5 seconds.

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can tell you just about every fact you'd ever want to know.

Beging educated is not memorizing facts. You cannot google critical thinking.

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Salgak1]

No, it's about how to USE that knowledge, to combine facts and techniques to solve problems. THAT is the value of, and the supposed goal, of higher education.

Despite the fact that it has become a de-facto job credential. . .

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Anonymous Coward]

But the more college is dumbed down (easy to pass/cheat online courses), the more kids will go to college. This will be awesome because:

1. stat looks good on paper

2. schools make more money

3. (which comes from) more loans from the government

4. (which can't be defaulted on, so) more dependence on government

An awesome way to further destroy the middle class and strengthen the elite leadership.

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you can Google critical thinking.

https://www.google.ca/search?aq=f&sugexp=chrome,mod&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=critical+thinking

Re:not college material is on both sides as well

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with dumbing down point, I highly disagree with the memorizing paragraph. Learning science is not about memorizing obscure equation and math buffs rarely know many digits of pi. learning pi is vaste of time. Only small part of learning is memorizing. It is more about learning concepts and understanding.

Take a random biology paper (real paper, not popular science one), try to read it and then tell me how it went. Even is you Google every word in it, you still will have problem to understand much of it.

Of course it is possible...

[Darkness404]

Of course it is possible to get a world class education for $100 or less, but education isn't why people go to college. The real reasons to get a college degree go beyond simple knowledge:

A) Get a worthless piece of paper to distinguish yourself. Sure, it isn't good, it isn't a positive trend, but in many fields unless you have a bachelor's or master's degree your application won't even be looked at.

B) Provides opportunities for networking with like minded students and employers. In high school most people couldn't meet with very many like minded students, especially if they were into computer science. There is a reason many start-ups happen in college, you can get all the "right" type of people, you get the people with vision, you get the code monkeys skilled with every programming language under the sun, you get the hardware people and you have thousands of potential customers right at your university.

C) It provides a chance to go out and see the world. Being a student you usually don't have much of anything tying you down to a single country. I mean, sure, you've got family, but spending a year in France, six months in Singapore, a few weeks in Andorra isn't anything major.

D) It provides a lot of "hobby time" to work on pet projects and research, especially at graduate level. When you are employed for a company, everything needs to be justified in terms of profit. In college you can just do things for the heck of it.


Every "book knowledge" thing you can learn in college can be learned for free online. In the rare case it can't be found online, it can be found in the textbook which you can buy without registering for the class. Yes, you do have a handful of really good professors, but the best thing they provide isn't book knowledge, it is guidance.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are employed for a company, everything needs to be justified in terms of profit. In college you can just do things for the heck of it.

Be employed at a good university, pension for life, good salary and you can work on your pet project as long as you want that is if you want to work at all !

Re:Of course it is possible...

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Only if you get tenure.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

non-tenure jobs in academia have the job security of bucket of warm piss in a forest fire. i've been "let go" from three of them for reasons ranging from trivial to oughta-be-illegal.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Fjandr]

Of course it is possible to get a world class education for $100 or less, but education isn't why people go to college.

Not anymore, though that used to be the primary purpose of higher education. Back when it only cost $150/year ($3,000 in today's currency) to go to one of the top private universities in the US, that's what college was for. Of course, there was always a networking component, but that's actually also been true of just about every practical post-secondary endeavor in existence. I'm not sure why the latter is so often overlooked or the networking in non-higher-educational endeavors considered so much less useful as to be not worth comparing, except perhaps it conflicts with the goal of excusing higher education as better or more noble.

Now that the focus has shifted from education, university admission appeals (or can be made to appeal) to people who cannot or will not use the educational opportunities a place in a university affords them. This increases the demand for finite resources, with predictable results. It increases the number of people holding something that was once useful for filtering spots for finite employment positions, again with predictable results.

I'm all for higher education, but only for people who have a drive to be there. You are either driven to succeed and get in on merit, or you are driven to succeed and overcome the financial barriers to it. If you want summer camp, maybe we should start an industry for that. Then the campers won't make it all the harder for those who are truly driven to getting a high-quality education. On the other hand, I guess those who are must just simply look at them as another hurdle, since that's currently what they are.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[fermion]

I would say a graduate degree indicates that one can create valid knowledge. I know that the for-profit business programs, promoted not only by for-profit but also public universities, have significantly degraded the meaning of a graduate degree, but that does not mean that we must accept that education is no longer a possibility.

Certain things may change over time. We may not all go to work and physically collaborate. We may no longer need to pay huge amounts for journals, or need to pay huge amount to store and bind the journals. But to learn to think, to know the difference between opinion and valid statement, requires some greater interaction than listening to a talking head or reading a book.

What I can see is freelance graduate advisors who charge aspiring PhD candidates hourly or fixed rate for graduate thesis. One may say that not everyone needs a graduate degree, to which the reply would be to say that $100 dollars may get you a post graduate education, but not a graduate degree, or at least not a cheap one since I can probably get a sheet of paper saying I have a graduate degree for less than $100.

This is not to say that online education is not valuable. The amount of good content online is soon going to be better than most of what is in print. But a graduate degree is very specific thing, and saying that $100 will get one is like saying that we graduate high school students based on a series of simpleton tests.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how people say college is great for networking, not learning. If that was the case, maybe that explains why I can't find anyone to hire to do any engineering jobs because they lack the skills to do them, which college was supposed to teach (And they used to TEACH). I have electrical engineers that actually do not know the difference between single phase and three phase electrical systems, they do not know the difference between 480V and 4160V, meanwhile I have lowly electricians that know more than them. This has created a dilemma for me because now I'm always concerned about these idiots killing themselves because of their lack of knowledge (I already had one idiot blow up his meter because he hooked it up to a 4160 supply and they can't even read electrical schematics, this guy was a PHD too btw). If these are the "educated" future engineers I'm supposed to depend on, sorry, no.

If this keeps going on, universities are going to go under and businesses are just going to start their own training programs because of the lack of real education these universities provide. Yes, that piece of paper is already losing value because of all this. You may still find a lot of business still requiring a degree to be hired, but with the economy slowing and the lack of people that are supposed to be educated to do the job, you're going to have less and less requiring higher education. These businesses are just going to turn to the old way of doing things, hiring headhunters to find the right people regardless of education. Even I as an engineer started my own apprenticeship program to hire people for my business, and I don't even care what your educational background is anymore, if you're willing to learn and work at it... So it's kind of silly that you have to spend thousands of dollars for university and gain nothing from it and businesses have to pay thousands of dollars to teach you what these schools were supposed to teach you in the first place.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lucky you just got fired. They could have made you register as a sex offender for walking naked through the girls dorm.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am leaving a non-tenure track position after giving it everything I had. While it provide the security, it was that of a bucket of warm piss. Live in it and bear with the smell and there is no way up, only a way out.

Re:Of course it is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot pussy.

Except for its not a masters degree.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Has what constitutes a "masters degree" really gone that far downhill? I was under the impression that a REAL masters degree required a lot of research, and often a lot of help and guidance from a dedicated advisor who actually reads what you write and helps you along....in other words something you cannot buy for $100. If he wants to sell some pieces of paper that says "I watched a couple of videos and took a couple of tests" then fine, let him do that. But calling it a "masters degree" is complete bullshit, its not a masters degree no matter how much he calls it that.

Re:Except for its not a masters degree.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Has what constitutes a "masters degree" really gone that far downhill? I was under the impression that a REAL masters degree required a lot of research, and often a lot of help and guidance from a dedicated advisor who actually reads what you write and helps you along.

You are confusing a research graduate degree with a non-research graduate degree. No every four-year university or college offers research graduate degrees.

Re:Except for its not a masters degree.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The non-research kind isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

Re:Except for its not a masters degree.....

[Half-pint HAL]

Even a taught masters traditionally requires a lot of research. In Scotland, a Masters-by-research is effectively a one-year mini-PhD of all research, but a taught masters still dedicates one third of its credit to the masters thesis/dissertation, which should be a new research project or publishable quality. Most of this is done over the summer after taking a full year of classes, which by themselves are equivalent to the workload of a honours degree year, but at a higher level of difficulty. I can't imagine a masters with no research component. Other than an MBA, and that's not a real masters.

It is a good start.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been interested in the online education movement for a while. Udacity is certainly better than nothing, but the course content on basic subjects isn't even up to the level of a community college.

If they can't significantly improve the level of the courses, the "masters" degree for $100 won't be worth anything to employers.

MOD PARENT UP AS...

[rueger]

... I'm not sure. Insightful? Funny? Guess it depends on how you view it...

Re:MOD PARENT UP AS...

[dffuller]

Or is just plain Informative? After all, he seems to have indicated having attended college for an undefined amount of time.

and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities cl

[Joe_Dragon]

and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities classes for a IT or engineering job?? at least some of that stuff can be offered at a much lower cost.

It's all the filler (that are some schools you don't have that much choice over) at some schools a over load of GEN edu classes (does a IT / desktop job really need tig and other higher Math classes?) some required classes are just there to fill up classes and to make people pay more (some schools still have the swim test)

Why do have pay fees at the college price level to take a swim test??

A disaster in the making

[Freddybear]

If this man is allowed to cheapen the price of an education in this way it could lead to disaster for the Educational Establishment. The government must step in and regulate this market before people get the idea that they're paying too much for a piece of paper with fancy calligraphy. Students must be forced to enslave themselves with massive debt for years in order to enrich the Establishment or they won't believe that there is any value in all the bullshit that is shoveled at them in the name of a Degree.

Whoops, too late.

when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Joe_Dragon]

when higher edu wants Physical Education as a required class it shows that it is a cash grab and some ways a rip off.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Anonymous Coward]

My school had mandatory PE but it was one credit which costs like a third of a three credit class, obviously. Basically you got a credit for learning how to use the school's gym and sports facilities. Not exactly a "cash grab" considering it cost a hell of a lot less than hiring a personal trainer at a commercial gym. Basically the school doesn't want all their grads to be fat fucks or scrawny nerds with no physical health. Can you really consider yourself educated if you have no idea about healthy exercise habits? Being a fat blob on a couch clutching a bucket of chicken-wings is not a behavior for the educated class.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[snkline]

Your problem (and most people's it seems) is that you think higher ed is supposed to be vocational training. That is what trade schools and community colleges should be for. Universities exist not only to train you in a particular field, but also to make you a well rounded educated person. Yes, that even involves some level of education in physical skills you may not possess (I certainly enjoyed my Archery class). Unfortunately our society has grown to value the Bachelor's degree so much, that institutions of higher education are being pushed more and more into being really long, expensive, trade schools.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[cheekyjohnson]

Basically the school doesn't want all their grads to be fat fucks or scrawny nerds with no physical health.

Likely won't help unless they want to change themselves.

Can you really consider yourself educated if you have no idea about healthy exercise habits?

That's not something you need to take a class for. All that information is easily available.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Guppy06]

Because why would an employer want employees that are more likely to keep fit and keep their health insurance costs down?

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they want you to get off your butt and get some exercise.

The PE requirement at my school introduced me to some athletic activities I've kept up with to today.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Belial6]

Do you really think that taking physical education in college has any measurable effect on the likely hood someone will be fit later in life? If you are not even going to try to make your arguments sound even vaguely plausible, why even bother posting?

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Guppy06]

Intent and effectiveness are two separate issues.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[mcgrew]

Because why would an employer want employees that are more likely to keep fit and keep their health insurance costs down?

I've seldom excersized for the sake of excersize, although I do enjoy walking. I'm 60 and the worst physical ailment I've had was a detached retina. Meanwhile Rocky, a young fellow I used to drink with who worked construction (you're talking REAL excersize there!) died from a sudden heart attack three years ago at age 42.

Then there's my uncle, who had a lung removed in the '60s because of TB and smoked four packs of camels a day through it while working as supervisor (sitting on his ass all day like us nerds do) at a garbage incinerator, died of COPD when he was about as old as I am now. His sedentariness and smoking saved his employer from having to pay him a pension.

Staying fit doesn't reduce your medical costs, good genes do. Dying young actually helps an employer's bottom line because you won't collect that pension.

PE has no place in any school, especially college. School is for learning. PE is for dumb jocks who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[Belial6]

Which doesn't make your comment any less ridiculous in intent or effectiveness.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[mcgrew]

That's not something you need to take a class for. All that information is easily available.

Indeed, when did the fucking jocks start posting at slashdot? Sometimes I think it was better when we nerds were pariahs and left alone. Physical "education" isn't he least bit educational. Education is learning, archery and basketball are not.

Re:when higher edu wants Physical Education

[StikyPad]

True it's not vocational training, but if specialization wasn't important, there would just be one major and one degree. And of the last 5 jobs I've applied for, none of them had "well roundedness" or "1-2 semesters of experience playing badminton" as requisites. That's not to say there's no value in things like PE, but neither is it necessarily the most effective and efficient use of a student's limited resources.

well rounded person is part but CS is not IT

[Joe_Dragon]

well rounded person is part but CS is not IT. Now communication or writing skills with a shaky knowledge of culture and history managing can be done at a community college and have the jobs skills be in there own schools.

CS is more a high level thing

Do you want a some with a Engineering BA working on your car or some who learned on there own / apprenticeships / tech school?

Other trades have apprenticeships and you learn REAL skills doing them. But It's been said that people with CS do not have needed skills (tech skills) to do the job.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

does a IT / desktop job really need tig and other higher Math classes?

Maybe you took more of those Gen-ed classes you would know how to spell trigonometry or trig for short correctly.

His AI class sucked.

[Anonymous Coward]

His AI class sucked. Phoned it in, completely unprepared, drawing on a piece of paper under a camera. It's was an example of how *NOT* to do an online course.

Hopefully he'll put some real effort into his new venture.

Re:His AI class sucked.

[snkline]

His Robot Car class was much better, although still not quite up to the standard where I would pay for it. Now the MITx Circuits class..... THAT is freakin awesome and very professionally done. I can't wait for the next set of course offerings from MIT and Harvard over that system.

Re:His AI class sucked.

[John Courtland]

I took his lessons, and read a bunch of other resources like a mother fucker to get a good grade and I learned a lot. That was the point and I think for a self motivated learner who is willing to search out sources it was a good class.

should we move most gen edu to community colleges?

[Joe_Dragon]

should we move most gen edu to community colleges? With that ending up being a new base level Degree. And from there on the idea of Degrees is rework to them being more about what you are learning and are filled to the skills and not the fixed time tables of the old degree system.

Then after that you can stay at the community college and take vol classes, go to a tech school, take a apprenticeship, go on to a pre med school (reworked with any need higher level gen edu)

College movies of the future

[thereitis]

No serorities, frat parties, or jocks. Just a guy sitting in front of his computer in his underwear filling out quizzes. The plot will center around the reliability of his Internet connection and the pesky neighbours who keep knocking at his door.

Re:College movies of the future

[paiute]

No serorities, frat parties, or jocks. Just a guy sitting in front of his computer in his underwear filling out quizzes. The plot will center around the reliability of his Internet connection and the pesky neighbours who keep knocking at his door.

Dude, you have totally got to log onto our frat's site and get pledged. You want to be a bro at I Tappa Key, man!

Re:College movies of the future

[davmoo]

I'm already pledged to Tappa Keg Aday :)

Re:College movies of the future

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope those frat-tards of Chan Chan Chan Chan house don't cause any trouble at the Second Life Alumni Ball....

Prediction @ IVETA 1999

[barv]

Back in 1999 I read a paper on "Using the WWW for education" at IVETA http://www.iveta.org/members/index.php/IVETA-Basics/What-is-IVETA.html

In the conclusion I wrote:

"What Will Really Happen?

What paradigm will come to dominate education?
There will ultimately be only two or three certifying organizations for each vocation. These organizations will produce marque qualifications of trusted standard, like Coca-Cola or Pepsi for soft drinks; McDonald's for Burgers.

The race has started. Microsoft and Novell have become the certifying organizations for certificates in computing. They have achieved this by publishing a syllabus and franchising a worldwide testing network. City & Guilds are paralleling that evolution. They seek trainers, and already offer franchised testing all over the world. The University of Minnesota has recently taken the first step toward becoming a worldwide agricultural university.

There is room at the top of each vocation for two or three testing authorities. Whoever captures recognition as the quality examiner will come to be the possessor of a marque that is comparable in value to the Netscape or Amazon or even Microsoft domain marques."

I feel somewhat vindicated by this article. I did not anticipate the dotcom bust or expect Netscape to fall under the monopoly onslaught of Microsoft's IE. And the MCSE appears to be of limited value, mainly used for the maintenance of Microsoft products.

Tertiary educators were too greedy to move to the online model as quickly as they could have. Those that further delay will risk sinking into relative obscurity and existing in the future as highly paid trainers for the marque institutions' qualifications.

Re:Prediction @ IVETA 1999

[CastrTroy]

The problem is that Coca-Cola and Pepsi are not the best soft drinks, and McDonald's is not the best burger. Coca-Cola is good at selling lots of mediocre soft drinks, McDonald's is great at selling a whole lot of sub-par burgers. For 2 trips to McDonald's I could go to the local burger place and get a burger made with locally farmed Elk meat. For the price of a single McDonald's trip I could make the burgers at home out of ground sirloin. Similarly with the MS certifications, I've met Microsoft certified DBAs who couldn't write a JOIN query to save their life. Sure there's some people who have certifications who are very qualified, but I don't think there's a big correlation between being microsoft certified and being qualified.

This more look like the description of a future..

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

LAN party.

whimsical attitude?

[csumpi]

You mean the zero effort and no preparation? It was total embarrassment.

Hope he'll put more effort into his new venture.

Re:whimsical attitude?

[John Courtland]

I learned a lot so I guess, no?

Labs are not tied to a university...

[SuperKendall]

There is no reason labs have to be done in university settings.

You could have totally independent, for profit companies running labs for every kind of science that people could take part in. I can also see universities opening up labs only to outside students for a reasonable fee.

As you say, so much learning can be done online... in the end all that will be left for universities is truly the world of higher education, not of freshman level stuff.

Re:Labs are not tied to a university...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost and safety. Have you any idea how much lab chemicals and equipment cost? Yeah, that's what I want for profit companies deciding how much safety they need. It's bad enough when the non-profit universities skimp on protective gear for grad students and faculty.

Too Late!

[SuperKendall]

You can't give someone a master's degree unless you can evaluate that they know their stuff, or else the degree becomes worthless.

Between grade inflation and cheating it seems like that is awfully close to true for the vast majority of degrees today.

Re:Too Late!

[Kjella]

You're not really arguing against his point though, you're arguing for it. The more bullshit degrees are out there the more important it becomes who the accrediting institution is, that they're one that'd weed out the cheaters and won't hand out A's like candy. Still, there's good reasons why you might want to separate the teaching from the exam.

Re:Too Late!

[SuperKendall]

The more bullshit degrees are out there the more important it becomes who the accrediting institution is

Not really, when there's only a few the idea of a degree being useful useful is marginalized - and employers will more generally accept other proofs that you can do what you say, instead of seeking out degrees primarily.

Also, how is an employer supposed to know which few degrees are really trustworthy? When the entire industry is rendering the food they serve into slop, it doesn't matter if a few gourmet steaks are tossed in as well - people will not go diving for them.

College Degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses: "He spent only $100 for a Master's? Must be worthless."

Re:College Degrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses: "Your resume looks ok. Can you send me the contact information of some references?"

and if we don't change the system master / MBA

[Joe_Dragon]

and if we don't change the system master / MBA will take over Bachelor's. So then you will have people loaded with loans. Be in school for 6+ years post HS with few real job skills to show for it.

Re:and if we don't change the system master / MBA

[Anonymous Coward]

ya but look what a "well rounded educated person" they will all be

Re:and if we don't change the system master / MBA

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Never mind if testing is online...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we know he hasn't hired John Doe to take the test for him?

As is, if you attempt to seek out tutoring people will offer to take stuff on your behalf.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you took more of those gen ed classes, you would have learned to compose a sentence without any missing words.

Frank Zappa knew the answer years ago :

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library." - Frank Zappa

His words are just as true today.

What isn't often said is that the diploma is used as a means of bamboozling
suckers into believing that they must obtain their educations only at an organized
institution of higher learning. Sure, this is sometimes true, but the institutions would
have us believe it is always true, which is incorrect.

Perhaps you missed the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those general education classes may have had more to do with having an educated populace with a breadth of knowledge than simply making sure you know how to turn your crank.

That whole general diffusion of knowledge thing George Washington spoke of.

“Promote then as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

I know, a crazy old fashion idea. May as well accept the low information voter and the inevitably apocalypse they come with.

Re:Perhaps you missed the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does this make any sense in a world where the vast majority of gen-eds are incredibly useless and yet cost the student precisely the same as advanced engineering/science classes? Given the choice of taking graduate-level robotics or "asian-american heritage" (for the same price), which is more cost-effective for interested CS students?

"Breadth of knowledge" is a very noble goal in education, but attaching a $4000-5000 bill is not the way of promoting it. I didn't come to the US to study "religion 101"; that I can do perfectly well on my own free time.

Re:Perhaps you missed the point.

[tibit]

The problem I find with this crazy old fashion idea is that there's no way tell if it actually amounts to much, if anything. All I always hear is from people who believe in the idea pronouncing that the world will end because people are not up to snuff on their [insert subject name here]. All I can see in real life is people who get suckered because they fail at fairly basic applied natural sciences, math, psychology, sociology, finance, etc. None of the arts and other humanities seem to matter at all. Even history is exaggerated, because on its own it's just a big body of experimental results, so to speak, with no theories as to how one would apply them to anything. Similar to a lot of psychology and sociology, of course. People point to stuff happening in the past and say: see, had people known this, they'd have averted problem X. And it keeps getting repeated and taken in on faith, with not a single decent study to show that it's actually so. Sad.

Re:Perhaps you missed the point.

[tnk1]

On a daily basis, I see examples of how history needs more emphasis, not less. I agree that more tools to help analysis can assist with making useful decisions based on it, but I am also seeing the understandable, but entirely incorrect idea that you can reduce history to some sort of incomplete science.

Science can use natural laws to make predictions, but history isn't all about predictions or some sort of result. It's also about perspective, a perspective that appears to be stunted in many people. Without perspective, we don't know when what worked in the past isn't possible now, or what wasn't possible in the past is possible now. We also underestimate the intelligence and goodwill of people who lived in times where certain things were not taken for granted and overestimate our own intelligence and goodwill now.

In short, failure to understand history creates the scientific geniuses who bring us the atom bomb, but who don't fully grasp until it is too late what people might do with it. Science without a good understanding of history is like a powerful, but insanely dangerous tool which has no instruction manual.

Honestly, I don't think you should be able to get out of any school without getting that perspective, and you certainly shouldn't be allowed to make important decisions without it.

Re:Perhaps you missed the point.

[tibit]

I don't think you can call it a different name ("perspective") and pretend the problem doesn't exist. The perspective you mention is about applying the historical knowledge in making decisions. Those decisions, you imply, are better when you somehow make them while taking historical facts into account (how? who the heck knows). It's testable, you know, and it's all about predictions. You predict that the decision-making outcome is better when you somehow (magically?) apply history to it.

You also imply that this "underestimat[ion of] the intelligence and goodwill of people who lived [ago]" is somehow necessary to make correct (or better) decisions. If not -- why mention it at all in this discussion? Sure it can make you feel better, but is it any good otherwise?

The rocess that takes you from the facts (the body of historical knowledge) to decisions is left up for everyone to figure out. Heck, you claim that the outcome of such historically-bolstered process is bound to be better. Now you better had some papers to cite to show that it's true, because otherwise it's just a bunch of hogwash to me.

Sorry, but that's the same mistake that's being made in a lot of sociology: they collect the data like crazy, and pretend it's of some use, but it's not for them to figure out how to use it. Making use of history in deciding things, as far as I can tell, requires applying a rather careful process that has solid foundations in science, just like applying any other experimental results.

In 10 years, all these "disruptive" edtechs will..

[Anonymous Coward]

Look as stupid as the ones that cropped up in the 90s. Learning and Education are NOT the same thing, and they never have been. Education offers life changing experiences, conversations, moral support, personal mentorship, confidence, and achievement. DIY learning is and has always been free. The likelihood of real and lasting success is much less overall for DIY learners who do not attend college. (For instance there have been very few contributors to science from outside of the formal educational system).

Udacity, Udemy, Codecademy, Coursera, MITx, etc. will all be footnotes that only supply us with perspective on what Education actually is. Those programs are not it.

Wathcing a bunch of videos is NOT education, and it's barely learning.

Please make free online

[geekoid]

text books. Html 5 interactive text books. Start with K-5, then move on up.

Please.

Re:Please make free online

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look here: :D

http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/

It's not about the cost

[chrism238]

It's not about the cost, nor even about the content - it's about the acceptance of the received qualification. This pathway will have little value until prospective employers recognise its value as being equivalent to bricks-and-mortar qualifications.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the person to whom you are replying took at least one linguistic course as part of their general education requirements. An introductory linguistics class teaches that the human brain is very adept at filling in missing words and even at compensating for misspellings.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

The humanities, social sciences, and pure math/science are there to produce 'educated people' not those who can fill a specific job. Admittedly, some GenEd classes are there as filler, but the fundamental goal behind them is to ensure that anyone given a degree does not embarrass their university. Admittedly, if you get your Greek philosophers mixed up it isn't a big deal, but you should have some appreciation of the role the ancients played in developing western culture. One area for GenEd that is often overlooked is a statistics course at the level needed to understand what is and is not a valid conclusion from data.

Long way to go

[Branka96]

I have just finished a couple of online classes with udacity, Applied Cryptography CS387 and Design of Computer Programs CS212. The latter class was fine although they totally messed up the final. Each problem required corrections and/or clarifications. CS387 was a joked taught by a novice. Things like using padding that you can’t reverse, or sending encrypted messages that only a person who intercepts multiple of them can decrypt (the intended recipients were unable to decrypt the message they received). Or how do you like to have a “professor” who after several attempts over several days can’t correctly phrase a question on the final. Happily we now have a video giving the “correct answer” to a nonsense question. Final stupidity, he subtracted 8 from 64 and got 58. Incompetent in my opinion.
That is what you have to put up with right now. There is a long way for this to be of serious value.

Re:Long way to go

[sisukapalli1]

I felt that the CS212 course by Peter Norvig was excellent -- the clarifications for the finals were so minor that I did not even notice them as odd, especially when we consider that they were multiple programming assignments to be done within a week. As time goes by, these things will only get much better (and will meet your criteria for serious value).

The course, in its present form, definitely beats the equivalent class at a large number of universities (and it will get better with each iteration). We cannot compare this with a similar, in-person course taught by Peter Norvig (though it gets tricky if such a course was in a big lecture hall with the condition that you lose if you snooze). It would be really unfair to compare it with the experience of a highly skilled and motivated group of friends taking a course at a top school.

Some major advantages I see are: (a) the lectures can be understood at one's own pace and are available 24x7 (contrast it with missing a class in college, or not paying attention in class for whatever reason), (b) there is a vast amount of discussion on course material (mostly junk but some material goes beyond how to get the right answer on a homework -- simply because of the vast number of people enrolled, and useful stuff gets modded up), (c) the format itself is highly interactive and engaging -- ironically, it is a more personalized experience (due to the large number of quizzes, ability to rewind, etc.,) than many classes in the university, and (d) this model can scale like crazy, not just with respect to number of students, but also with respect to number of courses [if we take a breather from the grading process, we can simply reuse an existing course].

Most of the information is out there on the web, but there is no systematic or guided process to learn. There is an Indian saying that goes like "knowledge without a guru (guide) is useless". These online universities provide such a virtual guide.

If the complaints about the courses are that some questions on the exams weren't correctly phrased and required clarifications... or that the professor had a math typo, then it is a good thing (since when did a typo became a sign of incompetence? he's not running for a close election in a polarized society).

Nerd alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Lamda Lamda Lamda is my frat bros. I taught myself a bunch of front end stuff but to learn anything hard I need the focus of a program. Schools give you a smorgasboard to help you decide where your "passion" is (mine is money right now) and I;m totally stoked to find a career. My problem is, I already went to school, and yet I am still looking for a career (my other career is painting pictures, which is awesome). SO I guess my question is, once I'm done bonging beer (I'm 42 and still partying) where can I (and others) find a mentor? Because without a mentor, there is no career. Not to mention Kaplan/Phoenix/WaPo axis of evil.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[WastedMeat]

As a scientific programmer, I find it amazing that any significant portion of people in serious IT place no value on math higher than and including trigonometry. Is this actually the case?

And as a citizen in a democracy, I find it amazing and frightening that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in general education courses. When I was a kid in the 90's, we used to call someone a "tool" as an insult.

Evaluation through internships.

[Animats]

The real problem is the cost of evaluating what students know.

That's what internships are for.

That may be the future: DIY college education plus unpaid competitive internships.

Re:Evaluation through internships.

[tnk1]

Unpaid internships are useful for companies, but there are only limited slots open for even unpaid work. Interns take up space, and have to be managed just like any other employee, which means that they have to deal with the same pain for less or no money. If you created an IT apprenticeship situation, you may find that those who go through it might well have preferred in the end to sit though Art History for a CS degree rather than having themselves abused to hell in an actual workplace.

It will be DOA

[SuperCharlie]

Here's the deal.. I agree with the concept, principle, and methodology here. Overall I think it is a great idea. Problem is that the govt is hand over fist into the higher education market. Student loans which are conveniently not unloadable by bankruptcy have reached almost a trillion dollars of unforgiveable, never ending debt, and just a year or so ago the entire financing program was completely taken over by the govt. This kind of money does not simply walk out of Mordor.

Re:It will be DOA

[Anonymous Coward]

My wardrobe is lacking. Could you tell me where you got that wonderful tinfoil hat?

Out of curiosity

[rsilvergun]

what was the catch? My best friend's mom just finished her Doctorate, and paid for it with loans because nobody would just give her money for it. What'd you have to agree to to get the stipend? I'm in America though, I understand the rest of the developed world is a bit better off.

Re:Out of curiosity

[noh8rz3]

I'm in america too. civil engineering master's degree at one of the UCs. a research stipend covered tuition and raman money. I'm lucky - the program had enough grants that all 20 masters students had funding.

Re:Out of curiosity

[nickersonm]

Higher education degrees in the US for science and engineering degrees (not usually mathematics, I don't know about non-science technology degrees) are generally paid for by working as a TA or research assistant half-time. This usually waives or pays tuition and provides a moderate stipend, often funded via grant money or similar from the research group the student is working for. This is less common for Masters than it is for Doctorates, though.

Re:Out of curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same kind of deal, and I just had to TA about 9 hours a week, plus grading. Not too bad since if you consider the free tuition I got, it paid really well compared to a normal college job.

Re:Out of curiosity

[TheRaven64]

Not in the USA, but in the UK I got a stipend for my entire PhD (I didn't do a masters), which was non-taxable. I didn't have to do any teaching, the only 'catch' was that I had to do some research during that time. I also got a reasonable travel budget - I spent a total of over 20 weeks away (travel, food, and accommodation paid) during the three years it took to do my PhD.

I suppose the catch is that I could have been earning more during that time if I'd got a proper job instead of doing a PhD, but since I wrote my first book and a regular column for much of that time to supplement my stipend, I didn't consider it to much of a catch.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the same way. I also feel that those same people do not need a bachelor degree to do that job. The associates degree should be made to mean something these days. The vast majority of jobs now done by BS and BA's should be delegated to AS degrees that are strongly focused on the major with little breath of knowledge. Most non technical jobs that now require a 4 year degree can be done by high school graduates. In the case of a job like human resources the job can be done by someone with about a 6th grade education.

Employers can spot a diploma mill a mile away...

[rsilvergun]

it works for Indians because their gov't is subsidizing them coming to America (and sometimes our gov't too :(... ) and because they're so desperate they'll work 70 hours a week for 2/3rds the pay of an American (effective cost about 1/5 that of an American).

If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.

For the record, those mills serve one other purpose (besides taking advantage of the desperate). If you're already employed and your position suddenly requires a degree for no good reason you use them to keep your job. Oh well, that's what happens when you mix dog-eat-dog capitalism with altruistic education :(.

The Alchemist's dream

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Alchemist's dream. The ability to make gold from garbage, or get a master's for $100 and a pulse. Yes, they are not saying you just need a pulse. How are they going to prevent cheating and enforce any kind of academic rigor for that ammount of money though? I wager they won't. So. It'll be as valuable as all the gold you can make from garbage.

Not to totally mock this though. If the alchemists had known anything about economics, they might have written it off as folly. We wouldn't have had many discoveries that lead the alchemists to eventually become chemists. Alchemists discovered many elements and compounds. These cheap degree programs may discover something also.

So. Let's see what comes of this odd quest.

Time is money

[perpenso]

You get what you pay for

Time is money.

The time you put into your studies is also a payment. Its merely a payment that does not go into the school's bank account.

Some rare individuals are perfectly capable of a university level education through their own independent studies. That said, most people who believe they are capable of doing so are incorrect. One of many reasons is that they will cherry pick topics to study and pass on some topic that they have no interest in, this is often a mistake. Most people need the structure of a formal degree program, or something comparable, to get the broader understanding that they actually should have.

this is meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

call me back when they have associates and bachelors degrees for 100 usd. til then this is meaningless

This is fantastic

[unixhero]

This is fantastic I participated in the AI Class and I learnt so much. The class was so engaging, and it had me finely combing the textbook. I still remember the topics we went over, up until the point where I realised my math skills were insufficient and I would have to study 8-10 hour days to complete the rest of the course. But the experience was great! Now I know what actuators mean, the travelling salesman problem is and so on. Thrun, this work could really change the world, what a good set of news to wake up to.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[flyingfsck]

I'm an Egineer and did Calculus, Complex Math, Applied Math, Statistics etc. In practice I do Reading and Riting and almost zero Rithmetic.

Online course is about the same as a self taught

[Anonymous Coward]

person. Some are naturally talented .... most of the rest suck at what they think they know.

Also, there is one think that on-line courses can't teach .... SOCIAL SKILLS. It is bad enough that today's young generation are becoming more anti-social with a ridiculous believe that they are self-entitle (deserve) everything they want (thanks to the likes of texting, Facebook and bad parents who think that giving their kids everything they ask and allow them to get away with bad behavior is good parenting). Last thing companies need is a bunch of newbies who have no clue about how to work / communicate with other people and can't do a simple presentation in front of the same group he/she works with.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[tibit]

It seems that the only value of general education courses is in making you fit in with other people who think the same. I'm yet to find anything to show otherwise. I'm serious. I'm not saying that nothing else but science should be of any interest. Quite to the contrary, I find it pleasurable to explore areas of theatre and literature that interest me. I'm not going to pretend it's of any use other than giving me the pleasure of learning it. It may perhaps improve my writing a bit, but that's not very important.

He alluded to this being their business model, act

[melted]

He alluded to this being their business model, actually, in an interview a while ago. Prospective employers would definitely not mind paying for detailed score statistics and access to the top few hundred students in the class.

Robotic Car and AI Class tests are NOT multiple ch

[melted]

Robotic Car and AI Class tests are NOT multiple choice. You actually write code, or compute answers by hand. And that code gets evaluated by how far it diverges from the ideal.

Don't run courses in semester/session blocks

[gajop]

What puzzles me is that these online courses don't exploit two main features: they're all digital and there's very little interaction with the teaching stuff that's necessary. Why do they need to be repeated? Why can't I just sign up and do entire courses at my own pace? At least don't restrict the start period.

F.e. coursera had an interesting course about probabilistic graph models, but I didn't notice it until it ended, so I couldn't enroll to do it entirely, and could only watch the videos, without being able to work on any exams.

Recently I enrolled into Thrun's 2nd Robotic Car course, but I had to postpone it until I was done with my masters. The first few lessons I did ahead of schedule and to me it didn't seem there was any work done to modify the original course - I recall repeatedly checking the "Office week" videos to see if any of our new questions were answered, without any changes.

So please, don't re-run courses. If you really do have something to add, just modify a couple of videos/problems and notify students that you're doing a "second release", rather than a new semester - that old teaching model doesn't need to be applied here.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[sisukapalli1]

And as a citizen in a democracy, I find it amazing and frightening that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in general education courses.

Have you been following the news lately?

It seems that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in any education...

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Belial6]

People take 13 years of general ed classes before they ever get to college. If they haven't gotten a decent general education by that time, they are not going to get it with a few more years.

US vs Europe

[giuseppemag]

I paid a total of 10000$ to get a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science in Italy. I now work happily as a researcher in the Netherlands.

Higher education should not be treated as an enterprise. Higher knowledge is a very scarce commodity (an online recording system/whatever is not the same thing, otherwise the easily available books would be more than sufficient to get any degree); this means that schools are effectively a monopoly without much competition.

Who can solve this? The state. Look all over Europe for the simple solution: higher education benefits everyone and is paid (because paid it must be) by the state mostly and the end user a little bit. The little bit in some cases is increased if the student is not passing enough exams. There are also *lots* of scholarships that both look at ability and low income, and these often end up supporting poorer students who do not necessarily have excellent results but just ok results.

Why does the state need to step in? Because Communism is great and Mother Russia is close-by? No: the state needs to step in because the gain with more educated citizens is of the collective, not just the subject of the education.

Re:US vs Europe

[sasha328]

Most of the proposition and the comments that follow come from US readers who's university eduction is exorbitently priced.
But they tend to live in such a cocoon of their own making that if it's state subsidised then it is a communist socialist tool and should be resisted at all costs. Look at what they did with their health care! Everyone in the rest of the western nations just shook their heads at the kind of language that came out in the debate.
It's the same kind of language or at least sentiment shown regarding higher ed here.

Re:US vs Europe

[giuseppemag]

Indeed. It's like the "World" Series in baseball, the US may need to open up more in this global age.

Re:US vs Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

I paid a total of 10000$ to get a BSc, an MSc and a PhD in Computer Science in Italy.

Then you should have obtained your degree in the US; you would have made a lot more money getting a degree here. I was paid $150,000 to get my MSc and PhD in Computer Science. Even if you count the $20,000 I paid to get my BSc, I came out well ahead. This is not uncommon for science and engineering fields in the US. Complaining about the cost of undergraduate education in the US is reasonable; good graduate education is a completely different matter.

Re:US vs Europe

[argStyopa]

What you're misunderstanding is the point of education in the US.

It's not something as simple as the betterment of the individual. I wish it were.
It's now the confluence of esteem, politics, and money (always), with actual education far, far down the list.

First came the premise that colleges shouldn't be elitist. In a well-intentioned quest to broaden the viewpoint/participation in higher education from being exclusively white and male, the state stepped in. "Affirmative Action" (one of the nicest euphemisms for "punitive racism" I've ever heard) was put in place, making it not only legal but morally right (in the collective wisdom) for a school admissions department to prefer women and persons of color regardless of test scores.

Of course (again speaking sarcastically, but the intent was genuine) the logic extended to economics - why should only "rich people" get to go to college? So a plethora of government programs, from direct-grants (piles of money handed out) to government-backed low-interest loan programs all have been implemented to help kids pay for school. Today, it's gone so far that the current standard is that loans are forgiven after some arbitrary number of years (it turns out to be a direct subsidy).

But there's no rigor to it. Students are not required to cross any bar of performance or competence (that would be elitist) that suggests they could complete such an education. Moreover, they're INVITED to 'disregard' college cost in their school choice.

Now you no longer have colleges competing for the best students (since everyone is welcome!) and no market-mechanism to control prices (because the gov't will offer payments and ultimately-forgiven loans to reach any need), so what's happened? The cost of college education has rocketed upward while students idle away for 5-6-7 years or longer 'pursuing' bachelor's degrees, simply little money-engines for the schools.

To look at a "public" local university, the University of MN.
My dad went to the U of MN in 1955 on a full-ride scholarship, which I believe was valued at about $300/year. Inflating according to the CPI, that would equal $2400 in 2010.
I went to the U 1986-1990 and as I recall it was about $3600/year. That would be about $5900 in 2010.
Costs for the U of MN next year are estimated around $13000.

Further, this works out well for everyone (well, except for the students who are academically unable to progress, who are stuck in academic limbo for years, who - since there's little economic understanding behind the college choice - continue to take degrees that offer them utterly nothing in terms of post-academic gainful employment...unless they spend another 6 years plugging away to get their masters/phd and teach). Politicians get to show the public how much they "care" (with taxpayer money). Schools have no competitive pressure to keep costs/tuition down. And there's a constant stream of public money essentially keeping teachers employed, perhaps the most faithful demographic voting for the same political party that keeps this system churning along - who not-incidentally serve to indoctrinate new generations of young minds to the Left.

Whether a kid gets a useful education? Irrelevant.
Whether a kid actually graduates? Irrelevant.

So the old saw that college is paid-for in Europe, and costs people in the US is really only partly true today. Now much (most?) of college education in the US is funneled through a waterwheel of political leverage and patronage in order to fuel other purposes than education.

Why waste time? Get a free Ph.D. diploma

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother?
Japanorama offers a free Ph.D. diploma at
http://www.japanorama.com/images/diploma.gif

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[chthon]

Yes, but are you sure that the things you do are not subconsciously influenced by the knowledge you have from all the math you learned?

Exclusivity

[Anonymous Coward]

Employer's are searching for a variable that a university degree offers, exclusivity. Not every high school graduate is accepted into a 4yr university. Even if the candidate has managed to get accepted there is no guarantee that he will graduate especially from institutions that have a reputation for being more demanding. The problem with this online degree is that it is not exclusive to those that have spent their lives preparing for a career and is open to those that have slacked off and have finally come to the realization that they can't mooch off others indefinitely or those that were content with sliding through college with "D"s. If you attend a private school and earn a valuable degree then paying back your debt should not be a life altering problem. Many private universities offer significant scholarships. Hard work that is exceptional should be rewarded, mediocrity should not. If you lead a simple life the most you should expect are basic returns. This is only my opinion from what I have observed.

We had that in past decades, too...

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

I don't know what decade they started, but by the 90s, it was normal for a community college to have some sections of lecture-based classes replaced with whatever commercially-created educational video series the local PBS affiliate was airing that semester. I recall seeing the idea applauded as the wave of the future whenever it was brought up in the media, basically for the same reasons that this project is.

(Note: I'm focusing on the quality of in-person vs. video classes on the same topic, but skipping the equally important issue of whether a university degree program at any level should mirror a vocational certificate.)

So, I took one class that way to fulfill a requirement for transferring into a UC school; to be honest, it would've been acceptable for facts I could've read about on my own, but it wasn't remotely as enlightening or helpful as attending classes in the same department. The main flaw was that the lack of interaction between the teacher & students or student-to-student -- laughing, exchanging comments, adjusting lecture/perspective on the fly based on feedback, etc. -- made the video equivalent to a "bad" instructor of the sort that spends the minimum amount of time/energy required to squeak by and whose students mirror them in learning.

My thought is essentially thus: if all you want is to learn the mechanics of something you're already interested in, video classes can be useful in the same way reading an instruction manual is. Otherwise: bad teachers exist in our schools, but the solution isn't to emulate them instead of replacing them with good or excellent ones...

Slashdot University

[TaoPhoenix]

"As a university instructor I recognize that the writing's on the wall - online courses will inevitably replace many aspects of higher education. Much of what I teach is already freely available on the internet. There are already many online lectures from which I crib material for my own lectures.

1. What if other online connections provided the question and answer feedback? YAAEBUI (You Are An Evolutionary Biology University Instructor). (Had to try the acronym!) What if we readers of various forums made networks of who is qualified in what area and asked our best questions to *someone other than the professor*? As an Evolutionary Biology University Instructor I presume you have at least heard of, if not read, Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. (That book just randomly ended up in my personal library simply because it looked neat, but I haven't read it yet. It's large!) So what if I saved my two best questions and asked you? (I know, at some point the quantities become out of control but just sayin' what if online students got additional advice on social media forums separate from the original instructor?)

2. Will the prices of grad programs go up if the lower level courses aren't subsidizing them?

what with hands-on experience?

[azery]

This might more or less work for degrees where you only need a computer to do practical work. But what if you want to get a degree in -let's say- RF design? Sure you can do some simulations on your home computer, but how about building the stuff, measuring it with a high quality measurement equipment? A lot of degrees require a well equiped lab if you want to get any experience in the hands-on aspects of your field or just to get better understanding of what you learned in your textbook/online training,.... I think online courses are great to get a better knowledge on a particular topic, but to replace a complete education program by it???

Look at it this way ...

[Taco Cowboy]

Speak with experience here.

I do employ people, and I've been doing so for the past 2 decades.

I find that the quality of newer crops of university graduates are much lower than their counterparts that I had hired 10 or 20 years ago.

With the panflation syndrome ( http://www.economist.com/node/21552214 ) already permeated many of the traditional brick and mortar universities, it wouldn't do me too much harm for me to try hiring some who graduated from the $100-per-degree online universities
 

Re:Look at it this way ...

[__aaeihw9960]

Panflation is an interesting theory - one that there is more truth to than I would like to think about. I also employ people, or rather used to, before I got my soul back.

What I find most interesting about panflation, though, is that it is directly related to the baby-boomer lesson of 'you're special, there's never been anyone like you' that we've been force fed for the last 50 years or so. It starts with participation trophies in youth sports. It is highlighted by inflated grades, and the relative inability to hold a student back in today's educational system. I say relative inability, because this is how it goes: The school says, 'this child isn't learning anything - s/he needs to be held back,' which causes the parents to squawk 'NOPE,' while flailing their arms. Why? Because all of the research states that holding students back isn't effective (in minority and students in poverty), is over applied (in minority and students in poverty), and has alternatives that are as simple as increased parent participation (for minority and students in poverty) and even as simple as better classroom management practices! You hear that? It's not your fault!!! It never was!!! What's the issue here? -----The people who are reading this research are generally White, Suburban, Middle- to Upper-Middle Class folks. NOT the folks living in poverty, or minority groups that it is intended for.

What we are seeing with grade inflation at brick and mortar universities is the end result of two facts: (a) no one wants to be the bad guy anymore, so no one fails, and (b) we have been fed, for 50 years or so, that if we don't agree with a decision, we can FIGHT THE POWER, and DESERVE to get our way; and if we can't get our way, just call Mommy and Daddy, so they can threaten the school with lawsuits or some other bullshit.

I'm not sure where that came from, but there it is. I'm not saying that I disagree with you, I'm just saying that when articles point out whole-life inflation, but refuse to call attention to the underlying problem, I get a bit steamed.

I wish there was an online option for when I went through graduate school. At least then I wouldn't have needed to play monkey-boy for a Faculty Member to pay for it (yes, those words are capitalized; he made that abundantly clear to me).

Re:Look at it this way ...

[Feyshtey]

As one who went back to school several years ago after being out for 2 decades I can say with confidence that today's universities deliver a fraction of the value they once did. I dont which is more sad; that I was paying $3000 per class for knowledge I was forced to demonstrate understanding of in high school, or that I was writing tutorials for classmates that were falling behind.

Try France

[loufoque]

In France, for that price, you can get a degree from a proper university and actually physically attend the classes. The functioning costs are paid by the government through taxes.

However, as a result, almost everyone has a degree and therefore degrees have started to become meaningless.

Re:Try France

[Anonymous Coward]

>> The functioning costs are paid by the government through taxes.
No it's paid by citizens like me through high taxes. Unfortunately 60% people in France do not pay "impôt sur le revenu" so it's easy for them, they get benefits at no cost.

Re:the old idea of a degree is a poor fit for toda

[Anonymous Coward]

what a crock of shit, again. Gamification of education is an adequate thing to motivate a small subset of 3rd graders. We have professional certifications. We don't need another set of words and expenses added to address the misperception that students will only learn if you give them scooby snacks. Today, more than ever, we need well-rounded people with a liberal arts education, who are capable of thinking logically and have a broad knowledge of the world. I've got way too many engineers and techs who are incapable of communicating with people outside of their clan. Perfect example? Yesterday we spent 40 minutes arguing about what the word common means. I won, because the folks funding us have the trump card. Really.

This is the future of education.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I went to a top tier research university. It was the worst "education" you can imagine. Indifferent Asperger cases (one of whom hit... HIT! some guy with his chalkboard pointer because he didn't like where he was sitting for a test ) .It was 100% "sage on the stage" crap where grading was done by TAs who decided whether they liked students or not before determining the curve by their own admission.

My friend was up for valedictorian so he lit the locker containing the class notes of his nearest competitor on fire. When I asked him why he did it. he said "he would have done it to me" , and he was right. It was THAT competitive. TAs were overburdened and HATED the proximal source of that burden, us, the undergrads and they let you know it at every turn. Death through gossip was staple fare. Administrative proceedings were initiated at the drop of a hat on someone-said-someone-said type "evidence". The bookstore was a goldmine (I knew the manager) I mean we're talking HUGE amounts of money and of course the books were trash some rep had bribed the professor into using , and of course we never used it even once in class.

The awesome sewer that university was, my utter inability to complain about the quality of the product I was sold or get my money back in any way shape form or size convinced me that while research and the publishing of peer reviewed papers is the basis of western civilization and the bedrock of The Good Life, at least this university and probably a lot of others like it were , aside from their scientific output, basically sewers that needed to be imploded.

They will fight this guy with everything they have. They will sue and assert patent rights They will seek through all means to discredit this guy, his graduates and his "institution" . I am telling you I tried to get online courses and lectures going in 1999 and they shunned me and shut me down. Inn their eyes, in the eyes of the admins and boards and the whole fraking network of big money donors and politicians and people they employ they are 100% necessary to education and will always exist just as they are now even if ti means bankrupting the nation one student buried under debt at a time.

Is this the start of the implosion of education? Could this be it? Please let it be so.

Re:This is the future of education.

[FatAlb3rt]

If you hated it so much and despise them to that degree, why not name names?

Re:This is the future of education.

[WOOFYGOOFY]

If you hated it so much and despise them to that degree, why not name names?

Uh, because I value my anonymity and my department was pretty small and once it's written, it can't be taken back and I've leaned to never underestimate the power and reach and indifference to the law that these creeps are capable of.... :)

Don't get me wrong, I think the research university and (hypothetical) university culture and especially the end result sausage output are the GEMS of western civilization. I am sure that not all universities are like the one I attended (right...? ), but that's not the point. The point is the experience was scarring, abusive-bordering-on-crazy, and purely destructive to anyone engaged enough to actually give a shit about its quality.

What's more, there was nothing in place to limit what they could do, unless you count the possibility of lawsuits (intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraud, slander and libel) but how realistic is that? Whatever else comes of it, such a lawsuit is an obvious a career-ender for anyone pressing it, so you better win big. They know all this.

This is what happens when you're locked into a market. When your "choice" amounts to a one-time, shot-in-the-dark with no undo button and no real recourse for poor quality of deliverable.

And of course that same "market" dynamic is what breeds the sewer in the first place, right? The above properties are guaranteed to lead to a school that invests everything in gaming the college rankings game and school reps who know what to say to you and your parents and brochures that are pure Disney because once you're in, it's very hard to get out when you discover, say, your classes are either a sad joke fit only for a diploma mill or a cook-off taught by under-developed, morally bankrupt TAs whose primary experience of their student charges is that of one-day potential competitors for grant money and fame. It was Henry Kissinger who said "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." and he was right.

Literally my English comp course was so bad, so freaking awful I just stopped going after 5 weeks... stopped going to class, turning in assignments, papers ...nothing... it was for morons...literally... and they still passed me with a B. Hey.... thanks!

I submitted to some counselor that no one in class X had any idea what professor Y was talking about, none whatsoever, a fact I was privy to since we all knew each other and studied together and what I got back was..... it didn't matter ! It went like this:

Her ":Well professors have absolute freedom to teach the class any way they see fit"

Me: so what I hear you saying is this guy could show up to class and sing an aria in Italian then look at us and say "OK that's it, test Friday on that material" and there's nothing you or anyone would do about it? "

Her: "Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying."

Oh , and my school was also one of the schools that was guilty of "steering student loans" to certain banks in exchange for kickbacks.

I was doing an independent project to put our course lectures online. It makes a lot of sense now and it made even more sense in 1999 . The benefits are obvious, including one I haven't heard other people point out- the accumulated knowledge embedded in documents generations of students have had a hand in creating. Since we all take the same course, why don't we benefit from the past understanding of former students on particularly difficult topics. Other students liked me because I had a way to explain things that was clarifying. People with good explanations of weird concepts ought to commit those in some form for the benefit future graduating classes, who can spend the time they save puzzling over even more advanced material or doing (please god) hands on projects.

Of course they were terrified that the lectures would get out and t

I think this is excellent

[sarbonn]

I am 100 percent for this. I already have two master's degrees from "esteemed" universities, but I'd gladly pick up several others through this method. For me, and for a lot of others like me, at one point I stopped caring about the actual degree itself but became infatuated with the idea of more learning. I love to learn new things, and when more and more legitimate ways of doing so arrive, like this, we're all the better for it.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[pmontra]

A common cultural background for all students (so they can live well together) should be one of the goals of the pre-university school system. If it doesn't it's a big failure. When you're 18 it's late.

Accreditation

[fabeetz]

Many of these new innovations are important steps in developing better educational systems. Be careful not to overestimate the acceptance of these approaches - successful completion of one or more of courses of study may not mean much, at least in this early era.

Accreditation of big box university programs is a rigorous process. Even top-ten schools prepare for these reviews as their highest priority. Why? A degree from an accredited institution means successful completion of multiple courses of study that have all been examined by outside academic reviewers to their standards.

It is difficult to imagine that a $100 Masters degree course of study can be offered by an accredited institution. Employers and graduate school admissions verify the credentials of their applicants quite closely. A non-accredited degree says nothing positive about the qualifications of the holder.

Eventually satisfactory standards will exist, but for today, don't expect your straight-A internet grades to carry equal weight with accredited institutions that have evaluated you all the way from making the admissions cut to passing all requirements for a degree.

The future will be different, but if you need job or admissions credentials right now, be realistic about how interviewers will have little patience for trying to compare your performance in every online course with those known bricks and mortar grades.

how much do you charge for an hour's work?

[fantomas]

How much do you charge for an hour's work? If you were doing a Master's degree, and were hoping for high quality feedback on the work you'd laboured over, and handed in, representing your highest quality academic achievements, what sort of feedback would you like?

Probably you'd like somebody with some knowledge of your field to spend 30 minutes looking over your major assignments and give you some personalised feedback (rather than "78%, v.good").

So how many major assignments should a real, high quality Master's degree include? Let's call it 6 in one year (=3 hours personalised marking) and an extended dissertation? How long should somebody spend reading your 10-20,000 words? a couple of hours at least I'd hope. Now we're up to up to 5 hours marking and feedback on your work.

How much are you going to pay them? 10 dollars / 7GBP an hour? or do you need more pay for a decent marker?

I reckon the maths only add up to automated marking, students, or MaccyD wages for the supervision of a 100 dollar Masters student.

  I'd be cautious of hiring people who weren't adequately checked before starting their course and only had Maccy D mimimum wage quality supervision of their work, and automated pass/fail decisions based on this.

Re:how much do you charge for an hour's work?

[Chrisq]

How much do you charge for an hour's work? If you were doing a Master's degree, and were hoping for high quality feedback on the work you'd laboured over, and handed in, representing your highest quality academic achievements, what sort of feedback would you like?

I agree with you, this is certainly not suitable for post graduate degrees where research needs to be graded.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

As a tools programmer / sysadmin, I have never used math any higher than what was taught in Grade 9. It's too bad you don't like us (I noticed your decision to claim "tool" must mean bad). Somebody must make the various bits of software that glue together your university's systems (I'm assuming you're working in a university, that's typically where the scientific programmer jobs are). I don't suggest the groundskeeper isn't valuable... ...but you seem to. Sad. Perhaps some humanities would round you out a little and give you an appreciation for all the different jobs out there?

IT is a very varied discipline. Your job requires a lot of math. Mine does not. Therefore, you should not find it amazing that I believe there's plenty of IT work out there for people not excited by math, since that's the type of work I do. I also don't find it amazing that someone doing scientific programming would, if they haven't ventured outside of their discipline, be amazed that people can do IT jobs that satisfy employers without particularly high level math.

The highest level math I've used in this entire job was modulus, if you're wondering. I don't hate math, but frankly, I'm just not that interested in it. I enjoy tearing apart computers, and occasionally busting out the soldering iron to repair them, and I'm excited to try out my HAM radio license. I also like to work on cars! I'm willing to bet those things don't excite you. We're all different, and that's good, because it means jobs for you AND jobs for me, and we're all still happy. :-)

Will Google hire them

[Anonymous Coward]

It is great that he wants to lower the cost, but will he HIRE someone whose only qualification is one of his degrees?
We need to make a HS degree mean something good. Then an AA and BA can be worth something.
Making cheaper MA is foolish until the others are fixed.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Bearded Frog]

Not all IT fields have any real use for math. I am a Network Admin and I cant think of a time I have ever needed anything more than basic math skills.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[tibit]

I don't think that a common cultural background is needed to live well together. I find it way more interesting to live with people who share little cultural background. Perhaps it's just me.

Re:Employers can spot a diploma mill a mile away..

[Half-pint HAL]

If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.

If you're dumb enough to equate a qualification from people such as Thrun and Peter frigging Norvig with the degree mills, you're the one who's not worth hiring.

Although having said that, they seem to be having a hard time attracting any other real academics and instead fall back on a mix of .com types, and in the long term, reputation's going to be the make-or-break for Udacity....

I got paid for getting my Masters Degree

[peter303]

I had several tens of thousands dollars saved by the time I finished.

orign of word college: group of people

[peter303]

Pretty much sums up what the word used to mean- a learning community; you learn as much as from each other as from the professor. Online degrees, whether you pay fortune line at Phoenix or almost free at Udacity lack that special sauce of collegium.

FAIL

[Lawrence_Bird]

I've taken quite a few of the Coursera offerings and while on the whole they are good, they are not a substitute for the in class experience. Will this hypothetical graduate degree be awarded based on the successful completion of a series of multiple choice tests? Robo graded programs or essays?

Where is the feed back from the instructor? Where is the feed back from other students? An online 'discussion' forum is a pitifully poor substitute for either especially when the class sizes are in the 10s of thousands.

I think an earlier poster in a somewhat rambling post did hit on one reason why people seem hell bent on moving this way - grade inflation and the general lowering of standards. I saw this over 10 years ago when getting a graduate degree in computational finance. I had a far better grasp of math nearly 15 years after my undergrad degree than those seniors who were taking some of the entry level grad courses. And I'll be the first to say that I was not even remotely a math genius and often struggled to get Bs and C's. But it was abundantly clear that I had actually learned something. So is the push for on-line courses in part driven by what seems to be increasingly weak offerings at the traditional programs? Could be. But I do not expect that to translate into people getting anything better, just cheaper.

Re:FAIL

[White Flame]

There's also the fact that many people learn from lectures and assignments, in step with progressing through the given reading materials, without ever engaging with their instructors or studying with other students. When there are times that they struggle to get something, reviewing up to that point is where they get their "ah hah!" breakthrough.

Those who learn in such a manner are annoyed by the others who try to push a false "community" baggage on top of their learning, which does not help them at all, and fully welcome online courses.

Meanwhile, while those who learn in the opposite way are offended by the notion of online studies that miss out on the interaction they require in order to learn effectively.

Re:FAIL

[Lawrence_Bird]

I assume you are speaking of yourself. Have you never asked a professor or a TA a question? Do you really expect to do so in a 'class' with 10s of thousands? And by 'learning' are you speaking of your ability to pass a multiple choice test? I truly wonder how many who think they have 'learned' something because they pass those and similar online exams could actually go up to a blackboard and, given the questions, come up with the correct answers. My gut says 5% and that is probably optimistic.

Re:FAIL

[White Flame]

I've taken 4 years of university courses (electrical engineering & computer engineering), and have taken a few of these coursera & udacity classes. I think I might have asked a professor a question a few times in my university time during class, but it's often (for everybody) "Oh, I'll get to that", just confirmation of what was said because we couldn't quite hear or see something, or "Slow down, I didn't catch that!". I think the only time I ever had any interaction with a prof outside of class was asking about industry and things beyond the coursework a few times.

For the lecture hall style classes with 100-200 (or more) students, do you expect everybody to be able to ask questions and have time taken out of the class to answer them? Do you expect the majority of them to talk to the prof after hours? Multiply that by the number of classes the prof teaches. The numbers simply don't make sense: The majority of students spend very little time personally interacting with the professors, or else the profs would not be able to get anything else done.

Now, the online offerings always have discussion forums, and in my experience the responses to the video/reading material always percolate up very quickly and are addressed by the staff fast, with updated video or errata, and everybody gets the further explanation or clarification needed. Interaction with industry professionals happens there, too, because it's not just fresh learners of the same age taking the material.

When you don't "get" something in a live environment, you no longer have the lecture explanation to turn to. You've got to either bug the prof to explain things over and over for you, have some student or TA do the same, or review the non-lecture materials (which might not line up with the lectures) until it "clicks". In the online courses, being able to watch parts of the lecture again is a tremendous help, and often has the same effect of having somebody sit down and re-explain the concepts to you until you get it, with infinite patience. ;-) Being able to pause and study equations being presented right in the middle of the teaching is a ton more helpful than having the prof blast through material at his own pace, while you're busy note-taking instead of mentally registering the content (I pause and take extensive notes during the online classes, without missing anything). And whenever I did have a question, I'd pop over to the forum and usually find threads already discussing that exact issue, the persistence of which is a HUGE asset.

Not having hard limits on video length is great; the prof never has to cut things short or rush through content, and never has to contract the syllabus because things ate into lecture time (like excessive questions).

The online classes all have exercises embedded in the lectures in some way. This is the "go up to the chalkboard and do X" moment, but given to everybody at once. Yes, there's some honor code involved, but given that they're free and uncredited right now, there's little point to cheating. And again, if I can't get the exercise I've got the lecture to review and the forums discussing exercises as well (moderated to avoid giving away answers and with staff helping along).

Yes, it is different. But it is quite better in some ways, and I'm not sure the downsides amount to much. And yes, there are definitely some hands-on courses that you're not going to be able to take without equipment & materials to physically work with.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[mcgrew]

I agree, people from other cultures are more interesting, but interacting with other cultures is no different than general studies classes -- you're learning in either case.

Re:Robotic Car and AI Class tests are NOT multiple

[Half-pint HAL]

Click!

And for me, the penny finally drops. Because I was about to say "yeah, but that's a computer course." However, people keep arguing that computer programming is the "new Latin" -- the sine qua non of modern education, and I now see why they're correct. I've been following the Coursera Machine Learning course (to a point) and working through the book Natural Language Processing with Python, and I'm learning a lot about matrix manipulations and list manipulations... and this through Octave and Python respectively. (Well, relearning mostly, but Octave and Python are new to me.)

These languages transform mathematical calculations and manipulations of text into computer programs, and computer programs are fairly easy to assess automatically -- therefore the subject becomes more suitable for quick grading. But more than that, as I go, I'm building up my toolkit of technologies that I can apply to real-world problems in various spheres.

I've not been employed in any dev work in a long time, and in the roles I have, I often see opportunities for automation that my less-IT-literate colleagues miss.

So we need to turn every subject possible into a programming problem , and everyone's a winner.

Spot on

[proslack]

To say nothing of the equipment...IRMS, ICP-OES, SEM, TEM. You don't get access to those for $100.00.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[mcgrew]

People take 13 years of general ed classes before they ever get to college. If they haven't gotten a decent general education by that time, they are not going to get it with a few more years.

That depends on the quality of the 12 years (they didn't have preschool and kindergarten when I was a kid). I learned to read in the first grade, and learned little to nothing else until I reached college; I'd already read what the teachers were trying to teach the other kids. School bored the hell out of me. One high school science teacher gave me an A+ on a paper because it was over his head! Of course, I'm not normal (I read the entire encyclopedia Britannica when I was 12).

But college was completely different. There, I actually did learn, and rather than being bored I was fascinated. To the point that even now, I'll take an occasional class "just because".

Online education is the future

[erp_consultant]

I haven't taken any of Thrun's courses yet so I can't attest to the quality, or lack thereof. But in my line of work I sometimes have Higher Ed clients and all of them are scrambling to create online offerings. Online education is clearly the future. Yes, it's still evolving and needs improvement but I think it's a viable option for many people including working adults, late bloomers or people that simply just can't afford a standard classroom education. Much of the value of the onsite college experience is networking...I get that...but many people are asking themselves if it's really worth running up a six figure debt to get it. In some fields, yes it makes sense. Others not so much. I don't see online education so much replacing in class as much as I see it complimenting it. This idea that going to college is the only way to get a quality education is nonsense. Some of the brightest people I have worked with are completely self taught.

Re:Online education is the future

[Anonymous Coward]

I can attest to Thrun's quality. It's not that good.

He's really passionate and excited about his work and seems like a cool guy, but his teaching is so full of inconsistent terminology, gaps or contradictions in his descriptions, and a general lack of teaching rigor. If you spend enough time deconstructing it, and have good self-learning skills, you can eventually get at what he's saying.

From what I hear, other instructors with Udacity aren't that much better, save potentially for Norvig of which I'd place some of the same complaints having done 1 shared course between him and Thrun.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[mcgrew]

I can't agree. A well rounded education is valuable. I've been taking various classes off and on since I graduated, and intend to go back in a couple of years after I retire.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I actually LIKE learning.

Five Minute University

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Father Guido Sarducci beat him to the punch.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[tnk1]

I hated Calculus. I even failed it once in college (although that was more of a lack of turning in any homework and not going to many lectures). Despite my seething hatred of it, I still understand why you might want to take it. You may not need to derive or integrate anything in IT, but you will still benefit if you know generally what it is used for and essentially how to go about doing it.

I never thought I'd have a need for statistics, and then I ended up working for someone doing some coding where I needed to run some statistical analysis on the data I pulled. There was really no need to hire two people for the job. I had sufficient skills for the task and I got the job.

I do agree, though, that there are limits as to what you need to learn off the beaten path. If you find yourself going off on tangents in pure mathematics, it will become increasingly useless to the realities of an IT career. On the other hand, if you find yourself interested in it, computers are mathematical calculation engines: you won't go wrong if you actually like some advanced mathematical subject and learn what you can with it. Your diversion could dovetail into something new and interesting.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[tnk1]

Oh yeah. And there are these things called "females" in the other classes. Just consider the general education requirement as the college's best efforts to help get you laid.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[ImprovOmega]

As a sysadmin with background as a developer I find it inconceivable that anyone could become a good programmer without working knowledge of Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics (especially graph theory), Boolean Algebra, and Statistics. Added bonus would be a familiarity with Differential Equations, Combinatorics, and Number Theory. Calculus kind of goes without saying (I can't imagine a C.S. degree program that wouldn't require it) but honestly Mathematics is so ingrained into everything that computers do that it's foolish to disregard it.

My C.S. undergrad program required so many math courses that I actually took a couple more as electives and got my math minor on my diploma too. I feel like I might have gotten something out of Real and Complex Analysis too, if I'd been able to schedule them, but alas.

Good idea - $100 seems too low

[walterbyrd]

Tradition universities are massively inefficient, and - in many cases - are not needed especially in the internet age.

Consider what it costs to have a huge, sprawling campus, huge numbers of full time staff: instructors, librarians, grounds keeper, janitors, security, administrators, on an on. Consider the insurance, the utilities,

And practically none of it is really needed. You could learn US history, or Finance 101, just as well on-online - and without any of the expenses I mentioned above.

Still, $100 for a graduate degree seems awfully low. But maybe $2000?

Don't be naive

[walterbyrd]

I work for the federal government, and I have for years.

If you think there is no such thing as influence, then you are seriously naive.

College credit outside of B&M is very old idea

[walterbyrd]

The idea has been around for decades, at least. When did CLEP start?

The funny thing is: upper division credits tend to be extremely expensive, often more than traditional universities.

This makes no sense at all, and is a complete rip-off. All this is about is bring the cost down to something reasonable. What is wrong with that?

Most degrees need no hands-on

[walterbyrd]

You make a very good point. I think health-care would also take some hands-on.

But what about business, history, sociology, and many other fields?

Or, maybe it would make sense to take some courses hands-on, and other courses on-line?

Re:Most degrees need no hands-on

[dante9991]

iam sorry but are you this guy http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw2-d70br-1qPK9gMm6CePQ

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[WastedMeat]

Have you been following the news lately?

It seems that a significant portion of people who actually vote see no value in any education...

It is probably meant as a joke but it is still a good point. Educated people wield power disproportionately in other ways though. Wouldn't you prefer, for example, that engineers for the defense industry have a solid understanding of contemporary history, regardless of whether or not they are sufficiently interested or motivated to study it on their own time?

What is the quote from Jurrassic Park about being too concerned with whether or not you could to stop and think about whether or not you should?

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Missing.Matter]

Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before...
Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

Re:should we move most gen edu to community colleg

[White Flame]

No, we should move that to high school. If that's the level that everybody is expected to have, why bother padding it out past 13 years of education?

In some countries, the typical US high school age is when people are undergoing actual formal career training paths as part of primary education, depending on the field.

Re:Online course is about the same as a self taugh

[White Flame]

Universities don't teach social skills. You do not need them to get your degree, and with angry helicopter parents making a stink even in the higher education levels now, schools aren't willing to step in on that personal field.

You might argue that those without social skills would more often self-select to train at home given the opportunity and thus the concentration of socially-unskilled people might be measurable there, but going off to university won't fix that. It's an indicator of a cultural failing, not an educational failing.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually use higher math more for gaming than computer programming, but it's still useful.

EX: Diablo III uses Effective Heath = Heath * 2^((resistance*10 + armor) / (monster lvl *5)) which is a vary simple math equation IMO, but if you read the forms basically nobody understands what's going on. Because of this most people are suck at understanding how useful a given piece of gear is for them. Note: Dodge is also useful, but it's a little harder to calculate that multiplying your effective heath by 1/dodge chance because a lot of things one shot you etc. Add in healing effects etc, and tanking quickly becomes a Monte Carlo simulation.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[pantaril]

It seems that the only value of general education courses is in making you fit in with other people who think the same. I'm yet to find anything to show otherwise. I'm serious. I'm not saying that nothing else but science should be of any interest. Quite to the contrary, I find it pleasurable to explore areas of theatre and literature that interest me. I'm not going to pretend it's of any use other than giving me the pleasure of learning it. It may perhaps improve my writing a bit, but that's not very important.

We live in a complicated age of information. Every person si constantly exposed to manipulation eforts from politicians, advertisers, entertainment producers, various churches etc.

I thing that solid general education background is more then needed if you want to resist this manipulation, if you want to make your own unbiased opinions and generaly if you want to live as full-fledged citizen and not just consumer subjected to the will of others.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[tibit]

Yeah, but I find humanities to be the least applicable when you deal with manipulation. You need solid fundamentals of sciences, though.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can say is that in a past life, I used to teach English composition at the college level, and this is NOT filler, no matter whether it's for engineering students or humanities majors. It was deeply discouraging to note that in a typical class of 25 students, perhaps 5 would be able to construct a complete English sentence without making one or more serious grammar errors. And yes, that included the English majors - at a research university! The standards for passing English classes seem to have disappeared, or at least they are being ignored. I am not so sure English composition could be taught as well online. It may be possible, but I also think that it helps to have one-on-one help. And for that, doing the work online isn't adequate. It can help a lot, but I think in-person instruction is still best for English composition. And no, I have no vested interest - I left that field long ago. I still work in colleges, though, and see how few people are truly literate, even at good schools.

Re:and why should I have to pay $$$ for humanities

[LienRag]

Worked quite well for Stanley the Tool, though.