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Questions Raised By Education Dept's Road Show On College Value
lpress writes "Department of Education officials, led by Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter, were on our campus last week, soliciting input on The President's College Value and Affordability plan. The discussion focused primarily on the design of a system for rating colleges and to a lesser extent on innovation and improvement. While the feedback was constructive, many attendees pointed out difficulties and limitations of any college rating system. One solution is to open the process by having the Department of Education gather and post data and provide a platform and tools for all interested parties to analyze, visualize and discuss it. Similarly, open innovation should be encouraged, for example, by providing a hosted version of the open source education platform MOOC.ORG."
I'm skeptical.
it's call the BCS. yeah, right.
Government funding controls/warps the education system priorities and creates inflation.
Anything other than government getting out of the system and allowing the schools spending money unwisely to fail, and not subsidizing the useless degrees which mean nothing other than people taught to think like the government wants and wanting to support anything to pay back their student debt is idiocy,
On the realistic side though we are 3/4 of the way to the Idiocracy world, and the people who think they are the smartest are the biggest idiots or they people teaching people to be idiots to control them, so nothing will change.
Oh, so like, create a Website, like college.gov.
What a splendid idea! Another government Website!
"If you bite your current education plan, you can eat it."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
These people got their education at schools like Harvard, where they spent full-time in an environment designed to educate them, challenge their ideas, let them relax and think, and experiment -- and make the social contacts that helped their careers more than the course content they were ostensibly learning.
Now they're trying to tell us that it's just as good (and cheaper) to get a college class online. If we can only be wise consumers in the free market, we'll find a deal online that we can afford. Nobody walks.
This is a con job. It's like saying Internet porn is just as good as sex. It's like saying that you can find affordable health insurance online.
40 years ago the U.S. had a system of free college education (like most of Europe has today). It worked.
City College has a wall of pictures with the Nobel laureates who graduated CCNY, most of whom said in their Nobel biographies that they couldn't have afforded to go to college if they had to pay for it.
The University of California turned out graduates who gave us the revolutions in digital electronics and medicine. Then Ronald Reagan decided to cut the budget by attacking the liberals he didn't like anyway. If you charge people for college, only the rich can go to college. For the rest of us, the other choice is to go into debt that you may never repay.
The job of government is to pay for education.
We've got the money. We pay for wars, the military, police departments outfitted into SWAT teams, prisons filled with drug offenders spending long terms. We have the wealthiest billionaires in the world, who don't pay taxes. We pay college presidents salaries on parity with Fortune 500 executives.
Let's do what works. Bring back free university education. Pay for it out of taxes.
when you will not be able to find a job with your college degree? Where is the return on investment? Without ROI college has no value whatsoever.
Stop all student lending. If somebody is smart but can't afford to go, the government should give them a full ride. Not a lot of people should be getting that ride. Many colleges should simply shut their doors. Some community colleges should remain open to fix the damage that public high schools have done. Those students should sue their local school boards for educational malpractice. If the local school boards don't want to be sued, they shouldn't give high school diplomas to people who are functionally illiterate and can't do basic algebra.
Result? No more people in hock for useless degrees. High schools graduates who can enter the world of work and learn on the job. People without high school diplomas can dig ditches like they used to. The only difference is that they won't be wondering why their degree is useless while they're digging.
Obama is going to revolutionize and rationalize education, just like he has revolutionized and rationalized health care.
what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
Don't we have that already with IT certifications? The rest of the working world may benefit from something similar, flawed as certifications are.
you could differentiate which ones are primarily research institutes and those that are actually focused on education. (I say that because the institute that I got my BA from pretty much has research as their primary goal. Finding the next generation of researchers is their secondary goal, politics and PR is their tertiary goal, but quaternary goal, oh yeah that's totally undergrad education.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
what about drop the old 4 year idea and moving to an smaller and more skill based badges system?
Don't we have that already with IT certifications? The rest of the working world may benefit from something similar, flawed as certifications are.
Technically, a college diploma is a certification. The difference is that it is offered by the educational institution whereas IT certs usually are from the vendor of a specific product they ultimately want you to buy.
The headline is missing the point. It doesn't really matter whether the rating system is very accurate, because the goal is to identify fake colleges, that is, diploma mills. For-profit diploma mills have been scamming the government (and their students) for money that is supposed to be sending people to college. A simple rating system will identify the most egregious of these offenders and cut them off from taxpayer dollars. When you only need to discriminate between two classes that are very very different, real colleges and fake ones, you don't need a very accurate rating system.
One solution is to open the process by having the Department of Education gather and post data and provide a platform and tools for all interested
How do you think the Department gets the information? Search warrants? Waterboarding?
The information gathered from colleges is provided to the Department voluntarily, with the understanding that much of it will be held in confidence and only published in aggregate. If you insist on all the data be made public, you'll find a lot less data to work with to begin with, particularly from private institutions that have a competitive edge to maintain.
ranking colleges is kind of stupid. It's like ranking the mileage of car _companies_ such as Ford or Subaru.
It's not discriminatory enough.
The cost of every degree at any particular college is the same even though each degree has a different value in the marketplace.
The value of a liberal arts degree from Harvard might be more than the value of a liberal arts degree from local state college, but the Harvard degree will not be more valuable than a degree in nuclear physics from local state college.
You won't get any sort of useful value calculation until we start looking at the correct measurements of degrees versus colleges.
College pay the profs in different departments different wages because of economics, but they charge the same for each credit hour and that skews the valuations.
That's part of the problem. Get rid of it and let the free market work!
Many small,private colleges offer wretchedly bad educations and charge a lot of money. It is time that all colleges and universities are rated by one agency and that the criteria are constant across the board. The same is true for individual departments within universities. It is wrong for students to find out after graduation that the department behind their major is not accredited even though the university is accredited.
I mean these days it seems when the local press or politician needs an expert in some field they go talk to somebody there more than when I was there. (I guess they've build up their reputation since I was there. It would have been nice if they put some effort in education though.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Is the actual name of the presentation.