Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Everything controls/warps the education system -- are you going to deny both government funding and corporate funding? Where is the university going to get its funding from then?
The reason I ask this is that universities are not technical institutes where you train for a job; they are designed as education and research centers, where the eventual gain is at some point decades off, NOT after someone completes a 4-year BA in basketweaving (unless they're partnered with an MBA and are going into artisan product manufacturing).
Possibly what is needed is for the government to have a more hands off approach regarding how education funds are spent -- the schools that misuse their funds will still fail (they can't survive solely on handouts) and other schools will become R&D centers for many new and amazing ideas. This is how most of the rest of the western world does it.
are not technical institutes where you train for a job
Yes, they are. Maybe once ago, in a land far, far, away, where only the old money went, that was true, but not any longer. At this point the people with the wealth are not spending it to create new work for people to live off of. College is only increasingly enrolled in because with a shiny piece of shitpaper in hand, you might be slightly more able to support a family. College degrees are not needed for thier merit, but as a way of attempting to leverage yourself into an ever growing labour pool. Trust me, this economic system is going to collapse sooner or later, if the wealthy don't start paying people doing unskilled labour enough to live comfortably on. Either all the poor will starve, and the labour pool will shrink, or the old money will be sodomized with salad forks and sub machine guns, forcibly redistributing their ill gotten wealth to the poorer.
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.
Some jobs require more education than analogous jobs a few decades back, but that's not the only reason an education is important in finding employment. In many (though not all) cases, the education is not really about *training* for the job. It's merely a gimmick for getting hired. The education gets you a job because it gives you an edge over your competition that doesn't have the diploma.
But there's no edge if *everyone* has an education. And it doesn't matter if it's because everyone really learned more or if the education standards have been watered down. If the education is not needed for the job, it's a vast expense that adds no value to the economy, and if it doesn't distinguish one job candidate from another, then it's a vast expense that's serving no purpose at all.
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.
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.
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.
This problem is two folded. What you say isn't necessarily not true but education has been used to replace competency testing of the past.
In the past when higher education wasn't always accredited or common, companies would administer competency tests to application candidates and only the ones who could pass it were considered. In some cases, the higher the passing score was, the more consideration you received. This is where you find the ancient stories of people starting off in the mail room and making their way to a senior executive position years down the road. But the idea was that if you didn't have a high school diploma or other documentation describing your abilities, you could still possess the skills for doing the jobs.
The testing was eventually challenged as a method to discriminate against minorities. It became somewhat impossible from a liability standpoint to design a test that would not open legal problems down the road with this regard. Testing is still used to some degree but not with the emphasis it used to have. So businesses started using a high school diploma and in some cases a G.E.D as the basis of determining qualifications of a candidate. Then the high school systems broke down and started passing and graduating people who couldn't even read or distinguish the difference between 2+2 and 4-2 and businesses started resorting to college educations as markers indicating abilities. Some companies require any college degree, even if it is in Physical education or underwater basket weaving just to be employed there as it is a sign that the people are competent enough to read, write, do simple math and follow directions. It doesn't matter if the degree has anything to do with the actual job requirements or not, just that a degree is there indicating expected abilities.
Now obviously this has limitations in application as you are not going to hire a liberal arts major as an engineer or an engineer as a mental health coordinator without the field specific qualifications. But jobs like management of restaurants and clerical entry, accounts receivables and so on often require some sort of degree even if it has no bearing with the fields in which they are applying to. I worked with a trucking company for a while and they required a college degree to become one of the dispatchers (who made a salary plus a percentage of the loads they handled so it paid very well). You would find people who's degree was in music, art history, political science, phys ed and so on. It has nothing to do about distinguish one job candidate from another, just establishing the competency of the job candidates.
The problem is that it is only going to be designed to weed out the for-profit colleges, whether they are diploma mills or not, and will leave the "non-profit" diploma mills untouched.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
Sometimes it's about whether you know something, but often it's merely a device for choosing one job candidate over another, where both candidates are already overqualified for the work in question.
Interesting... So, the college diploma is being substitute for the high school diploma, because the high school diploma has lost any meaning.