Ask Slashdot: How To Fix an Outdated College Tech Curriculum?

An anonymous reader writes: As a student, what's the best way to bring change to an outdated college tech curriculum?

The background on this is that I have 15 years of experience in the field and a very healthy amount of industry-recognized training and certifications. I'm merely finishing up my degree to flesh out my resume -- I haven't learned much from the program that I don't already know. However, the program would have benefited me greatly 15 years ago. It's a great program, except for a biometrics class that is absolutely behind the curve. The newest publication on the syllabus is from 2009. This is simply teaching the students outdated and often wrong information.

Additionally, a lot of the material seems like it was stretched to make a full semester class in biometrics in the first place -- most of the material, honestly, could be compressed to about two hours of lecture and still be delivered at a reasonable rate.

What's the best way for a student in my situation to get this fixed so the school stops wasting student's time with outdated and wrong information?

Comments

Skip the classes, take the exam

[guruevi]

If you need some kind of certification or piece of paper that says you know something, there are plenty of institutions that will let you take an exam, do those. In the end nobody cares where you got the rag, just that you have one if you're just starting out (and often we don't even care about that).

If you have 15 years of experience, why still pound on about your education, just demonstrate that you have kept up with certifications and/or on-the-job education.

Unless you want to break into upper management and need an MBA, there is not much reason to go into full-time school with 15y of experience, in some cases it may even demonstrate the reverse - that you needed an entry level class to get up to speed with current events, that's not a good signal.