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The End of College? Not So Fast
An anonymous reader writes: The advent of MOOCs, Khan Academy, and the hundreds of other learning sites that have popped up caused many people to predict the decline of expensive, four-year universities. But Donald Heller writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that most of the people making these claims don't have a good understanding of how actual students are interacting with online classes. He points out that it's a lot easier for a 40-year-old who's in a stable life position, and who has already experienced college-level education to work through an MOOC with ease. But things change when you're asking 18- to 20-year-olds to give up the structure and built-in motivation of a physical university to instead sit at their computer for hours at a time. (The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.) Heller also warns that prematurely hailing MOOCs as a replacement for colleges will only encourage governments and organizations to stop investing in institutions of higher learning, which could have dire consequences for education worldwide.
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things. Today I could teach myself almost anything. I know how to assemble the resources, how to study them, how to test my understanding.
Freshman me would not have a clue how to do this.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I think more places that teach free classes is a good thing... maybe it will force colleges to go to more sane levels in pricing
For many (most) traditional four-year college students, the primary value of the experience is something that a MOOC or Khan or whatever online can never ever replicate.
College is for many kids the first time you will live away from home, with all the distractions and temptations of the real world - but without losing your job and ending up homeless if you get too drunk and are too hung over to go to class the next day. It is a concentrated social mixing bowl where members of the opposite (or same as it may be) sexes come together with no parental supervision and have to figure out how to deal with each other - but also surrounded by a throng of peers to help them figure it out or support them as necessary. It is a halfway transition period between full-time schooling in which you are expected to learn and recite facts obediently and a world where you are expected to challenge authority figures and be fully responsible for all your own decisions.
It is, in short, the real world but with "training wheels" on.
I can't speak for anyone else, but four years of training wheels after high school just barely got me to the point of being a functional adult who didn't melt down when exposed to reality. (I also really, really, enjoyed it too.) Away from home, full-time, co-educational college is an experience at that period of life that I think is irreplaceable and can't ever be matched by a different model.
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The cost of college in the usa is to high and trades are being pushed down way to much as well.
Just letting student loans be discharged in bankruptcy can lead to a lot of stuff being fixed. It may force schools to cut costs and maybe even cut the fluff and filler replacing it with classes that cover skill gaps. Also can force trade schools to maybe cost less not be part of the 4 year system.
There are people who want to learn and not go to a 50K-100K party to get a piece of paper.
What I want to know is why anybody would expect online education to replace traditional education any more than the printing press and wide availability of books made traditional education obsolete. Widely available course materials are great and we're a richer world now that we have them, but the fact that universities survived the democratization of books should tell us that real schools still add some value above and beyond the raw information.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
End of college? Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! *raises fist*
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Saddleing people with a lifetime of debt is not the answer. A governments duty to its constituents is to provide them with the tools to thrive in the environments that they find themsleves. This is why primary and eventually high school educations became eventually mandated as free and eventually required of all citizens under their jurisdiction. There is no way that something that can only be obtained by money can be considered equalizing in any democracy.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I've given them an honest shot, but like many I could not finish a course. I found that the lack of a face to face human communication was a huge stumbling block to success. Especially thring to learn python, math subjects, etc. It is far easier to be spoon fed knowledge and walked around complex subjects with your hand held. The main weakness in MOOCs is the lack of human interaction and instruction when you are not able to figure it out on your own.
If I were a kid in around grade 9 I would presently be MOOCing until I turned blue. My goal would be to basically bypass High School. At this point what are the various certificates good for? I don't think that anyone yet really knows. But I suspect that they will be worth more and more and definitely will be worth more than most half assed high schools. I can certainly say without hesitation that I have seen some online courses MOOC, the great courses, plus others that blow my old HS teachers clean out of the water and certainly blow most of my daughters' teachers clean out of the water. (and yes many online things suck too)
But if a grade 9 student has 10 or 20 MIT / Stanford courses under their belt and does well on the SATs then what university can honestly reject that student?
Right now it is all a little hazy but I suspect that a point will be crossed where quite simply the high schools will begin to lose the best and the brightest. Not the majority just the cream. This will leave the high schools with the mediocre and the crap students. Then the pressure will be on the better of the mediocre students to follow online as well leaving a pretty poor lineup of students. This will then start to whittle away at the better teachers who just can't keep going without at least the occasional success in their class.
The percentage of students who will no longer attend highschool still won't amount to a huge number but what will remain of the high school system will be pretty depressingly bad. Plus I just know that the officials will dumb down the standards to keep up with the ever lowering bar. I foresee the first sign of my prediction coming true when the school systems try to put pressure on the universities to not accept students on MOOCs alone or to try to make it so that you can't write the SATs without being registered with a bricks and mortar high school.
But in the very long term when the various online educational systems have been somewhat perfected I do see a day when many people are faced with the choice (or option) to go to their local po-dunk collage or take course from something with a kickass name. I don't doubt that a major part of higher education happens outside of the classroom but the simple reality is that many people are questing for that piece of paper to further their job opportunities and have various obsicals in their way such as money. Online education won't wipe out the universities or anything so silly but it could see some of the lesser universities lose a serious chunk of their students.
Also I see a demographic who will simply say, "OK I will do year one online and then the other three getting the campus experience, OK I will do the last two years getting the campus experience, OK the last year will definitely be the campus year. Look I have a degree, I wish I had done at least one year on campus." But I also see another demographic much like the one that avoided high school not able to go to the kick ass named universities and not willing to slum it in their local school, and thus doing the online thing even more.
But that all said, I think that where it will be most interesting is that right now it is very very very hard to get into a top tier school. But what if you have been taking MOOCs from a top tier school and have been kicking ass and taking names. Does that qualify you for a top tier school more than someone with a top tier SAT?
Then employers are going to be a whole other thing. Which would they rather see, a top tier certificate or a local podunk degree?
to get a piece of paper.
Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
There is value in a college degree. How much value is something to be debated, but the value is definitely higher than 'piece of paper'.
There's no reason whatsoever to spend that much on a 4 year university. Tuition+fees+books/etc. to a decent reputable public state university is around 5-6k per year (google it yourself). For a four year degree, that's $20-30k. Not at all overpriced unless you're studying underwater basket weaving.
Take what you can from a junior college and/or AP credit and you can shave that down to $10-15k.
And, it ain't the piece of paper you are buying. That's what idiots that picked stupid majors and/or had no real reason to go to university (vs say a trade school) say.
One of the few things I learned in college was how to learn things.
I was lucky; I was homeschooled before college, and as a result learned how to learn things with directed self study instead of just doing what teachers said.
It made college way more valuable to me as a result, but it also made life after college better because there was never a point where I thought "Yep, done learning now, time to work for a few decades".
The sooner we can get people into a state where they enjoy and can learn on their own, the better everyone will be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..is that people (employers, students, everyone) are starting to treat universities as trade schools -- job training factories.
That's not the purpose of university. Never has been, never will be (hopefully).
What we need is a better system of trade schools (ala med school, law school, but to expand that to more trades), to revive the concept of apprenticeships, etc.
MOOCs aren't the answer. Like other forms of non-traditional schooling, they are a nice way for adults and others to supplement existing base knowledge (i.e. keeping knowledge of a field current), but are not a replacement for real schooling.
I'd describe it as 'a piece of paper', and I'm currently a 4.0 GPA student studying Computer Eengineering. There's value in learning, and I don't think a college degree is always the best way to achieve that.
I know from experience that I could learn some of the material I'm studying a lot better working on my own, and setting my own pace, instead of wasting time doing a bunch of busy work for material I already understand, and not being free to go slower on material I find harder to understand.
Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit. My degrees are pieces of paper, although they are pieces of paper which for some reason hold clout with VP and C-level executives. That is why I got them after all. And while it is impossible to know which if any jobs I have gotten or which salary negotiations have been enhanced based on these degrees, I feel the cost was worth it.
The main cost of the degrees was not the dollars spent on them, it was the opportunity costs from spending time in class and doing assignments instead of learning more useful information at a more rapid pace. But I have no regrets (I spent a great deal of my free time learning that other information anyway). It is important to take the world for what it is instead of what you wish it would be, and in this world many important people see great value in these pieces of paper.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Why go to college when 50% of the jobs in the economy have simply vanished ? What would you study ?
For people that have a good experience in college, the piece of paper means very little.
I didn't take college that seriously at first, and I almost flunked out, (but I did barely squeak by after I started doing better my later years).
But like the OP said, college is just as much (if not more) about what you learn outside the classroom. It's about shaping your mind to critically evaluate things, learning social skills, learning teamwork, teaching yourself how to function independently, etc.
I have no doubt of the fact that I would be gainfully employed even if I had flunked out given the magnitude to which those other learning experiences have impacted my life for the positive.
The problem you have is you don't understand the point of a University degree. The point of a university degree is not to learn a trade. The purpose of a university degree is to learn to learn, improve your understanding of the world, and to improve yourself in other ways.
The classes you take are just a vehicle for that.
I'm in software, and I hire a lot of folks. Most of the people I hire don't actually have software related degrees (most are english majors, biologists, math majors, etc.). But almost all have a degree.
What that degree tells me about the person is not what specific trade skills they have, but about whether or not they have learned to learn, whether or not they can finish something they start, whether or not they have any knowledge of the world that wasn't spoon fed to them, etc.
A lot of folks don't have those qualities. Having a degree demonstrates that you are much more likely to have those traits (but is certainly not 100%).
This is what's known as a "rationalization". Pick the one explanation you like, and then find some evidence to support it.
To really choose the best answer without experimentation, you write down *all* the possible explanations, and then pick the one that seems most likely.
(If you can do experiments you can eliminate explanations directly - but when you can't do this, the best course is to list all explanations and pick the simplest one.)
A simpler explanation of the low pass rate is that the online courses are of poor quality.
And indeed, many of the online courses are very low quality - especially the ones from high-end players.
The "Probabalistic Graphical Models" course by Stanford is known as a weeder (students get caught off guard with the difficulty), and the online version demonstrates this: the video shows Daphne Koller standing at a lectern droning on and on(*) with no vocal variety, reading the text of the online slides to the viewer... completely uninteresting and making a simple course boring as hell. (sample video.)
I thumbed through the edX course listing and hit on a course I liked - and the introductory video contained absolutely *no* information about the course! The full text of the course description read something like: "Join me as we explore the boundaries of $subject". (Is it a difficult course? Is it introductory or advanced? What level of math is required? What's the syllabus?)
I mentioned it to the head of edX in a private E-mail, and he responded by saying "that's an affiliate course [ie - from an affiliate institution] and we don't have control of the quality or content".
(WTF? You're running a startup and you don't have control over the quality? And he seemed to intimate that he was more interested in building the scope of their selection than the quality.)
Kahn academy is trying to get feedback from students to improve their presentation and make their lectures more effective, but I don't see any other players doing this.
Everyone's just taping their lectures and putting them online(**). The situation won't change until everyone burns through all the seed money and has to start making a profit based on results. For example, edX got $60 million in seed money, and they're burning through it with no viable business plan.
(*) Keep in mind that I'm critiquing the course, and not Professor Koller.
(**) For a counterpoint example, consider Donald Sadoway's Introduction to Solid State Chemistry, which is *not* a MOOC lecture series but is free for online viewing. Light years ahead of any MOOC course and well worth viewing.
Here's the thing—we may not actually want every otherwise unmotivated late teen to be sitting dubiously through college courses just because it's either that or go back to their dorm and twiddle their thumbs. Some things:
- There is an oversupply of graduates these days in most fields and at most levels
- A dawdle-dawdle unmotivated student is not doing their highest quality learning
- Even students that will eventually use what they learn may not do so for years
- In the meantime, what they learned is getting very rusty between learning and use
So with these things said, *how about* a model in which:
- People are not motivated to learn something until they need to
- Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely
- And they will put it to use right away
- And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
I would think this would help to mitigate some of the particular supply/demand problems on all sides (for an education/for students/for graduates as employees).
The one caveat, and it's an important one, is that we do of course want people to be generally mature, thoughtful, capable, and culturally literate if they are goint to be participating in society, and right now high schools are failing utterly at even touching these points.
So to address that need, let's just require a minimal level of "general" college-level education, say a one-year or two-year degree that as no "major" or "minor" selections and issues no grades, but certifies literacy about politics/citizenship, social science (particularly social problems), national culture, basic quantitative reasoning, and so on—enough to become a careful thinker and to better understand "how to learn stuff."
This general education certification would be required in order to:
- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board
But would be disconnected from particular vocational or other subject-oriented learning issued via, say, MOOCS as well as face-to-face alternatives. And instead of a major in a single discpline, outcomes from MOOC courses could be used to calculate a nationally databased and relatively involved (many measures) "bar chart" for each student, that tallied their experience and competence with particular subject areas, expressed quantitatively as a figure without an upper bound, that is added to with each additional course, and perhaps incorporating quantitative feedback about their performance from employers as well:
So instead of wanting someone with 4-year degree and a "major" in computer science, employers could seek someone with their general education certification along with "at least a 1400 in OS design, a 650 in Java, and a 950 in medical organizations and systems" and so on.
Over the course of a lifetime, scores in any particular area could continue to increase, either by taking additional MOOCs to get more exposure, or by having employers report on accumulated skills and experience to the system.
So that someone that took only a few courses in X in school, but in the real world and on the job, became—over 20 years—the best X in the country, would have this gradually reflected in their national education/experience scores as the years of experience and successes mounted.
Meanwhile, we'd also no longer have the weird mismatches that come when an employee has a degree in Y but actually works in Z, and then has to explain this in various ways to various parties. First of all, at the level of the 1-or-2-year general education, they would no longer gret a "degree in" Y. That would be handed by MOOCs and represented in varous numbers that increased as the result of completing them.
But if someone did do an about-face and choose an entirely different subject or work area in life, this would also gradually be reflected in their education/experience scores. We'd know when someone who'd studied chemistry in their '20s finally became a "real biologist" because their scores
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Did these "many people" ever look at the offerings of Khan academy? That's not academic stuff. And Coursera lacks serious cohesion and supervision. Those are two necessary (but not sufficient) conditions.
But university is about more than learning some formula by heart or reading a book. You need to get an understanding of the context of the theories, the process of discovery, and be guided through the history and current practices. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly not something an online course can provide.
Who writes these free courses anyway?
I started off with MOOCs back in 2011 (I think) with the second installment of Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class before Coursera was born (didn't pass). I've taken a bunch of them since then, and gotten Statements of Accomplishment in some, but and in others. Done mostly Data Science and Finance. The Coursera offerings are great for me, as I am in my mid 50s, and just want to learn new things that maybe I can apply to my projects here.
Education on Apps and Websites is the future. Right now you can do it if you're an active learner, but it will keep getting better and better. There will be a transition between active learning to spoonfed education over the next 2-6 years. There will be apps you can sit a little kid down on, and they'll learn English and Math without a teacher... In fact I believe at their own pace, kids will be able to learn better than in traditional school! And even more importantly, smart phones keep going down on prices and 3rd world countries are affording tech here and there now where education is really bad. So anything you can get in terms of education on Apps, that is the future. If we're over saturating the app stores, lets make it educational products. Education online might not be for everyone now, but every year that passes makes it better.
God spoke to me
Off the top of my head..
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
What would you study ?
Liberal arts? Worthless now and worthless in the future, so it cannot get any worse.
That's what this reaction against MOOCs is all about. Colleges have decided they don't want MOOCs after it being all the rage for 5 minutes, and they want their old conservative business model back thank you. Too late. So now people are trashing online education as "inferior" even if it isn't. There are many excellent courses online, free ones on youtube. You have to teach yourself, it's not about falling asleep in a lecture hall.
Why go to college when 50% of the jobs in the economy have simply vanished ?
Because the remaining 50% of the jobs are the skilled ones that demand a good education.
And mostly everyone I've ever known who hold college degrees in high regard are not that good at much of anything.
Perhaps if I had gone to MIT or Stanford I would have a higher opinion of a college education, but that I can never know. (not that my program wasn't highly rated, just not a top 10 school in my field)
I hold my degree in high regard, but not all degrees. I was fortunate enough to be able to study CS at a truly world-class institution, where practically every other week the teaching staff were complaining about how the industry kept trying to tell them to stop teaching CS and just churn out bog-standard "coders". As a result, even after almost a decade without coding, I'm now writing software again using all sorts of computational abstractions from custom datastructures and tree-traversal to propositional logic and FP.
The job of a good teacher isn't just to make sure you learn as much as possible -- students learn (quantatively) most when they're studying stuff that's easy to learn, and that doesn't require a teacher. What the teacher should be doing is teaching the stuff that is hard to learn -- the stuff that students can't do on their own. Most MOOC courses are the former, and a tiny few are the latter, and a few more again are somewhere in between.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
(The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.)
The extremely low pass rate doesn't mean a shit. This guy is an idiot. The motivation to pass a course that doesn't cost you anything and is most of the time not required and even recognized is not the same as passing a grade. Many people are just sneaking around at MOOC, and it is perfectly acceptable. They start some course just to see. There is not requirements, verification you are having the prerequisite before enrolling into a course. You just cannot compare MOOC and traditional education on this basis. That is plain stupid and full of bullshit to do so.
Many people are dropping a course in the middle because they have other obligations and there is no consequences to do so. Some others are overbooking courses and then drop those they are less interested in, etc. This behavior is responsible for the low pass rate. And the low pass rate doesn't mean anything in the context of MOOC. Beside that, some MOOC courses are just badly designed. Some teachers are just taking the material they have for the on-campus course and put that on the MOOC and expect miracles without further involvement. They forget the on-campus course give students access to other resources which are key to success. Since they do not provide the same kind of support for the MOOC, no wonder many people are dropping before the end or end up investing more time than they should to complete the course. Those who haven't planned for such level of investment are just dropping or failing the course.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Whatever it cost you was too much.
People are not motivated to learn something until they need to - Once they need to, they are happy to blast through it intensely - And they will put it to use right away - And their motivation comes from needs (for a raise, to be competitive, etc.)
All too often, that means "too late". My first job out of uni refused to train staff with out a "confirmed need" for a particular training course, but typically (particularly at the junior levels) you were given a new assignment at short notice, and even if you theoretically had time for the training course, they were either all booked up, or weren't running that month. This left you blasting through it unhappily as you were indeed putting it to use right away, before you were really ready to. This is how hacky, unmaintainable code gets written.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
> I didn't take college that seriously at first, and I almost flunked out
I *did* flunk out, or rather, "took time off to work" when my grades were so poor I was put on academic probation. That was 30 years ago, and I've tried several times since to go back and finish but never get very far.
It's probably true that I didn't take it seriously, but a lot of that was due to my frustration and impatience with bureaucracy and red tape.
Most of what I learned in college was how to jump through hoops. Jump through all the hoops in the right order, and you get your piece of paper.
The accreditation I believe is what is holding back colleges and universities from evolving to a more modern approach to education. Like some people commented on here, it would be better to learn what you need when you need it over just mindlessly going to school in hopes you will use what you've learned. Another aspect I keep seeing is in the IT world, employers are asking for experience. Sadly college provides out of date education and very little experience in the IT world. What I mean here, is that the classes at the beginning of a 4-year degree are out of date when the student graduates. So the question becomes; how does colleges help the students gain experience? Internships are still hard to find especially in specific areas.
Everyone I've ever known that described a college degree as 'a piece of paper' was bitter about it it some way - either their family or personal situation had not allowed them to go, maybe they'd been denied a job opportunity without it, maybe they'd flunked out.
Or invested vast amounts of time, energy, and money, and all they got out of it was a piece of paper.
Because the remaining 50% of the jobs are the skilled ones that demand a good education
...to get the interview because the competition is so fierce. Only rarely will the job itself require advanced education.
Predicting the end of College isn't based on the high value of MOOCs so much as the low value of college. You can take your degree straight to McDonalds because there aren't jobs and/or they aren't hiring Americans.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit.
No, that's exactly the point. Vast numbers of kids spend their first couple of years "growing up." Some of them fail miserably, most of them muddle through fairly well, and some of them excel. What company can afford to take the risk hiring an untrained person, without even a 'track record' of trainability, when that kid may decide he'd rather spend lunch drinking beers?
College isn't supposed to be job training - you may get some skills that are useful in a job, but the point is not to teach you how to be a junior programmer at Microsoft. College, especially residential college, is life-training: how do you balance your freedom to do bong hits all day with your responsibility to pay rent? How do you balance your desire to post /. with your employer's desire that you accomplish tasks? How do you get stuff done when your teacher/manager is a clueless moron? What kinds of tasks/problems do you enjoy?
If you've figure that out by the time you're 18, you're truly exceptional. Not special-snowflake exceptional, but Bill Gates exceptional. College, and even a job, are likely to hold you back. Unfortunately, many people think they are Bill Gates, when they are only a special snowflake.
Most of what I learned in college was how to jump through hoops. Jump through all the hoops in the right order, and you get your piece of paper.
Or you could use the time you're not in class to explore the other opportunities the environment offers. Go to work in one of the labs on real problems. Build something kooky, just because you can. Join the flying club.
The piece of paper indicates that you can meet minimum criteria. The education shows up on your resume. The piece of paper shows you're allowed to drive a car; the trophies show you're actually good at it.
Using data on failure-to-complete rates on free courses (ones no one has any reason to complete because they have nothing to lose) as a guide to what would happen with pay-to-complete courses is very stupid.
Money is a motivator. Even when you are young you don't want to waste your money. Now I know plenty of people who dropped out of school mid-way for one reason or another ("college just isn't my thing" being one of them) but most people who paid for university courses finished them.
I sense the real reason there is a push to get rid of the online courses or to somehow say these just won't work is so campuses can continue the ages old tradition of sucking every single penny from students in the form of ruthless room-and-board contracts, on-site cafeterias and cafes, over-priced books (with profs enforcing book purchases) and everyone's favorite; alumni contributions.
BTW, my college nuked my whole four years of courses by giving me the wonderful placement oportunities of "shoe salesman" and Radio Shack Assistant Manager.
Bullshit, I live in South Carolina and our state universities easily hit the $20k/year range, one you factor in housing (at least at Clemson, on-campus housing is mandatory for the first year). The pricing you give is closer to community college.
No, it will do quite the opposite. Colleges do not bear the risk of loans not being repaid, the taxpayers do. Making loans discharged would significantly increase the amount of debt students are willing to take on, because if they fail in their chosen career they can just start over fresh. The government will happily just eat the losses because it is a drop in the bucket to the federal budget. This will lead to higher tuition rates, more students taking on less socially useful degrees, and a further lower of higher education quality.
, instead of wasting time doing a bunch of busy work for material I already understand, and not being free to go slower on material I find harder to understand.
Funny, that sounds like how I would describe high school, but the opposite of how I would describe coworker's and my university experiences. Professors were quite excited about going into more detail about topics. If there were interest, and if enough people in the course were interested, they would spend a day teaching something else, and if not, most were happy to spend quite a lot of time after class discussing it with a student or two. Often they were also happy to allow a project of some sort in place of exams, allowing people to explore particular interests in far more detail. There were still occasionally some busy work, as courses are not infinitely tailorable to a single student. And freshman classes can still be a lot like high school, although there are often options to test out of them (even without a standard procedure/test to do so, if you go talk to the department chair). And this wasn't at some fancy, high end private school, but at an "economy" state university.
There were still plenty of people who didn't take advantage of any of that, who didn't want to ask questions or do any more work than necessary. At that point the students are adults, and it is not the university's fault that some students want to just pay to have someone read a book to them.
There's a simple reason for the low pass rate in online courses: they're pathetic. They're all canned courses you can find the answer sheets to online in a single Google search. They have the intelligence of a 6th grade class and it's seriously insulting that they're asking you to do this stuff at a college level. They also took away one of their best features which was the ability to work at your own pace - now they drag them out over months restricting your access to assignments and encouraging loss of interest.
What would you study ?
How to build automation to replace the other 50%?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
I am still scratching my head as to why MOOCs are supposed to be such a revolution. The problem in education has never been access to the information itself. You've been able to learn all the information and concepts taught in most undergraduate courses for pretty much free since the invention of the public library. Video lectures in correspondence courses have been available since VHS. The only thing the internet adds is the potential for real-time interactivity. But in a MOOC, any interactivity is going to be very limited, as the professor can't realistically answer questions from thousands of students.
"This general education certification would be required in order to:
- Vote
- Get a business license
- Sit on a corporate board"
There's already too much government interference with business. All this interference makes one s abilitity to succeed dependent upon whims of another to grant them that ability. These types of laws enabled the fascist regimes of the early 20th century as well as the Jim Crow laws in the United States. Seems like a very bad idea.
The purpose of a university degree is to learn to learn
This statement gets thrown around a lot when discussing college, but I just don't see how it holds up. It is very rare for an undergraduate to do any significant research, so most of the learning comes from assignments and probably a little group work. Assignments usually just teach that all the answers you need to solve any problem can be found in the 1-3 books provided by the school. Usually you are even told which chapter has the answers, since that is the chapter you are currently studying. Group work teaches that the few talented kids should be careful not to delegate important work to their teammates, and most kids learn they can lean on the talented kids to do most of the work. One could say this helps teach delegation, but I have delegated in college and in the workplace and they are not comparable experiences.
There are plenty of students who take initiative to do research and get more from their professors. They are by far the exception to the rule. And almost always they are the students who already learned how to learn before they entered college.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
... Group work teaches that the few talented kids should be careful not to delegate important work to their teammates, and most kids learn they can lean on the talented kids to do most of the work. One could say this helps teach delegation, but I have delegated in college and in the workplace and they are not comparable experiences.
I'm envious of your work experience. In mine, college group work as you describe it is the perfect preparation for employment. Perhaps it's different in other fields, but it's most certainly the case in IT. Easily 80% of the IT workforce can't program, engineer, architect or admin their way out of a wet paper bag. They turn to the other 20% who struggle to strike some balance between doing great work themselves and spoon-feeding snippets of reasoning and problem solving technique back to the first group.
I learned that I can learn a lot faster on my own. Maybe not everyone can, but after suffering through classes with people that seemed to not be able to get basic concepts in physics and calculus, I realized that I could buy the text books and teach myself at a much faster rate. And since the computer lab was open to the public, I had full use of the facilities to do the homework assignments.
What I hope happens is that those that need college to learn continue to have the opportunity to go. And the smart people that don't need it will stop having to justify themselves simply because they don't have a piece of paper that says they had to spend a lot of money to learn something because they weren't able to do it themselves.
I'd much rather hire self-motivated people who can learn new things by themselves. They are much quicker to adapt to changing technology than someone that had to go to school to learn.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Discharging student loans through bankruptcy doesn't hurt the colleges. They are not financing the loan, and they already received their payment. It hurts the government that made the loan, and it hurts any private foundations that were subsidizing the loans. The long term effect would be a reduction in the amount of loans being offered, but there would be a painful period during which prices were unaffordable for the average student.
What I most learned in college:
How to drink beer.
How to smoke pot.
How to get laid.
I'll bet those, or similar lessons, are the most common recollections of most college graduates.
to
too
Not being a Grammar Nazi, just pointing out how such an error can completely null the point you're trying to make (and null that to any others listening). Some others:
Effect and affect
It's and its
Where and were (this mind boggles me, I suppose it is a West Coast accent thing, I have no idea)
Don't let your argument be straw-manned for the sake of a few basic errors; it happens again and again.
Since it's semi relevant I thought I'd share someting interesting with the ./ crowd.
Elite colleges buy SAT scores from the scoring company, which I believe is College Board. They market their institutions to candiditates with lower SAT scores in order to get them to apply, all-the-while knowing those candidates will be rejected. This increases the rejection rates and decreases their acceptance rate. A low acceptance rate is a bragging right. This braging right is of course used in marketing and also in pricing.
Funny how things work some times... Breaking the hearts of a bunch of hopefuls just to increase a metric. Money is the root of all evil.
No, it really is a piece of paper.
What matter is that it's a piece of paper that other people think means something. The same way a twenty dollar bill is just a piece of paper. Hey it could be counterfeit even. And that's where the analogy ends.
At the end of the day it's just something that gets you past the screening process of interviews. Speaking about software developers specifically, there's little chance you'd even make it to an interview without a CS degree or previous experience working as one. Even if you attach some stellar projects to your resume they're not likely going to look through them. They're going to go, "Welp no degree into the discard pile." Hell, even if you make it you have to be way better than the junior developers they would hire who have degrees just because you don't have one. It's not the best system but that's how it works because it's the easiest and people are lazy. Hence the term of "degree mills".
So in the end you're competing against people who went through the same process as you, getting their freshly minted degree and finally ready to start being productive members of society. Now is when you insert the thousands upon thousands of horror stories about junior developers and how they're utterly worthless. Not all of them, but I'm sure there's not much good to say about the majority, since I happen to know a CS student or two who are A+ programmers. But both of them do projects on their own time and have gone far beyond their curriculum. In short, a degree is not a ticket to a job; it's a ticket to a job interview. And that's all it's really worth.
You're not paying for some unique skill set, everything you learn you can get through OCW or textbooks. Anything you can't get through there is likely to be run down low quality. Of course there is always an exception, most people have one or two great professors who make a huge impact on them throughout their four (or five, who's counting!). But is it really worth the tens of thousands of dollars a year? Don't think so. College isn't the Marines, and you can't expect everyone that comes out of it to proficient with the M16 rifle.
Since almost half of SJS admitted studies needed remedial instruction,the "tech solves all problems" crowd in the form of MOOC house Udacity proposed MOOC remdial courses. However, remedial students are least likely to have the motivation to do self-learning and the project was a huge failure footed by CA taxpayers.
There are plenty of students who take initiative to do research and get more from their professors. They are by far the exception to the rule.
Sounds like life in general. For just about any non-trivial tool, very few people will learn how to fully utilize a tool. That doesn't mean such tools are unable to do great things, or even that there is necessarily anything wrong with those that use them for quick and dirty uses (e.g. people who could in principle learn from a book, but get more done in a structured environment).
They're free I've never given 1 shit about passing a free online course. I take it, extract the information I want, then leave.
Just because Khan academy is not the answer, does not mean that status quo of college education is the answer going forward. The rest of economy has become dramatically more efficient in the last 20 years. If colleges make no effort to embrace globalization and modern IT, there is no hope for them to be affordable to someone who works in a regular job.
It's ridiculous to pay for a sprawling campus, football team and full room and board just to be one of 40 students to hear a lecture from a second grade local professor. Wouldn't you rather watch the life lecture of the world's best professor over a video conference, with full ability to ask questions, book one on one time and get help from TAs?
As for becoming a "well rounded person", there are lots of ways to do this that do not cost a lot of money or even get you paid. Travel the world or volunteer for a homeless shelter. Heck, rent a house with a dozen of other dudes and recreate the experience of a college fraternity if that's what suits you.
I'd argue that a big part of it is being given assignments that stretch you more than you've been stretched. You don't have to do original research to be geniuinely challenged and grow from the experience. You just have to be given an assignment that requires you to dig for answers and fail. You have to exhaust most of your options when trying to figure something out. It's something we should probably be doing much more to kids well before they get to college, but college seems to be where we start doing it, so that's where the value is.
Since this is slashdot, there will be a million posts by clever college students who are doing really well in their classes and see them all as a waste of time. "Nothing at a university can challenge me! I'm the hottest shit that ever was shat!" All I can say is that they either didn't choose programs that were challenging enough for their level of talent or they're unusually talented people--the most brilliant of the most brilliant--and the world was not really designed for them. Or they're badly overestimating their level of talent, but that almost never happens.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I learned orthogonal functions, orthonormal basis and quantum mechanics. But then I was poor and couldn't afford those things you listed.
I have a Masters degree with a near 4.0 GPA in my junior/senior undergrad years and my graduate years (don't ask about fresh/soph, I was still growing up). And all of that means basically shit. My degrees are pieces of paper, although they are pieces of paper which for some reason hold clout with VP and C-level executives. That is why I got them after all. And while it is impossible to know which if any jobs I have gotten or which salary negotiations have been enhanced based on these degrees, I feel the cost was worth it.
I am foreigner so all my degrees are worth less than paper because "not from here". :-P unless you are just big kid who still needs supervision (18yo is usually grown up in Europe, with freedoms but also responsibilities).
I am to old to get into J visa program. So I cannot use my degrees as bargaining chip during salary negotiations.
What I did - I started my company with mostly off shore personnel (graduates from my technical university and other referenced by them).
Our rates are comparable to "local rates" but we are winning on delivery time, quality and quality of support.
If you are young, and do not want to end with 100k debt, search for foreign institutions. The US dollar is strong, it will be much cheaper than second rate local college. And will broaden your experience
Sadly our colleges have been under great pressure to become trade schools and offer numerous courses that should not be taught in college at all to placate parents and politicians. The idea of college has always been for people who love learning and not for job or career training. With education over the net what is happening is that people who love learning can learn endlessly. But on the down side we have many really nasty people offering supposed college level courses that are in fact worthless all the while charging big bucks for what students can get for free. Taking a 60K loan to get degrees from totally non accredited junk schools is beyond idiotic. Worse yet why does our government allow loans for young people to sign up to these scam colleges?
Saying you're not something is not a proof that you're not something.
I agree with you, when I was in school professors told me that the reason for the degree was just so empolyers would go oh look he's not a complete idiot and he can stick with something for at least 4 years.
Some of my "worst" teachers have taught me valuable lessons outside of the class and subject area. How well you can deal with unreasonable people may help you more than you realize when you are just a young college student.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
We continuously have discussion on "big oil", big pharma" big (insert name) of anything that is capitalistic, but how come we never have a discussion about "big academia". College sports coaches making 6 or 7 figures, professors that do nothing but write papers, books and attend lectures. The cost of a traditional 4 year college is astronomical, compared to the outcome of its students, who are then saddled with 40-100 thousand dollars or more in student loan debt. As judge Smails said on caddyshack..."well, the world needs ditch diggers too". I've seen these person on the street interviews where the person would be lucky to cross the street & chew gum without being run over. Can't answer the most basic math or history questions, but, buy golly they can tell you the latest (c)rap song, or which hollyWEIRD nut is banging another hollyWEIRD nut. Most liberal arts indoctrination centers are just that. Instructing kids on how to sit down, shut up and OBEY your master, the government.
(The extremely low pass rate for free online courses provides some evidence for this.)
Most moocs are free unless you want a verified certificate. You can just subscribe to every course that remotely interests you, download the lectures and then, depending on your time and first impression, get serious about the course or not. I've only completed about 5% of the courses I've subscribed to. That doesn't mean I "failed" the other 95%. It means I had the chance to try out a lot of courses and stick with the ones that I expected to give me the most. The courses that I didn't finish are still accessible, I can still take them later or pick single lessons.
Or to get the promotion... I am in a situation now where I think I am not taken seriously, it might come down to that paper. Why promote person A with an associates degree when you can promote person B with a masters. If everything else is equal, the degree could tip the scale.
Actually, one thing it taught me was that I had to work sometimes in order to learn. High school was not a challenge.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Regrettably, my school didn't offer courses in getting laid. I would have signed up so fast....
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
GP's point is that it's not about the "piece of paper". If that's all you want, then yes there are much more efficient ways of getting it.
But that's just a small part of the benefit many people get from college.
You think college debt is bad now, wait until you see what the interest rates that come along with unsecured dischargeable debt issued to those with no meaningful credit history. Rather than being saddled with loans, most loans will become unobtainable all together. Think of how lovely it would be to be paying credit card interest rates on college loan balances.
Oh, don't get me wrong-- I enjoyed my time at college and did a lot of fun and educational things. But the coursework? Meh..
Part of the problem is, I can't really motivate myself to learn if deep down I feel the assignments are mostly empty busywork. It's literally a waste of time and money, but you have to go through it to get to the really "meaty" courses. You learn to bite the bullet and just jump through the hoops.
If I'm studying on my own, I'm motivated by the material itself, if it's something I really want to learn. I'm starting to get inspired again by Scott H. Young's MIT challenge. He completed 4 years of CS coursework in 12 months, using holistic learning techniques (and, admittedly, cutting some corners).
but if some one is 50-100K in the hole and working at mc'ds then bankruptcy will wipe out that balance.