Technology

I have several mixed opinions on this.

University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).

Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.

Online course generally implies online assessment.

The level of academic misconduct in those is insane; I caught 35% of my cohort cheating (using a method (one we never taught) they could not replicate in an in-person test) one year, and those were the ones I could prove. Online assessments just test what a search engine/AI knows really.

(For those about to tout "lockdown browsers"; it's called "a second laptop" or just "my phone")

When young people face a system explicitly designed to extract as much wealth out of them as possible, nerfing their economic potential well into adulthood via crushing debt, is such a response really that unexpected?

My only concern would be a question of retention.

It's easy to pass an exam if you're writing it almost immediately after taking in the information. But remembering the information at the end of the school year when you're writing your final exam and it's a topic you learned in the first week takes a different kind of study skill.

It boils down to the old Cram for midterms question. How much do you retain?

My take is that retention comes from revisiting a topic multiple times over the course of a year. One and done studying to pass an exam doesn't leave an imprint on the memory that's going to last.

This should be your call to read communist theory. Education should be about learning and creating knowledge, not cramming and being put off from pursuing your passsions!

What happens when education becomes commodified.

expressed concern about what the super-accelerated students are missing, and whether a quick path devalues degrees.

Nothing devalues degrees more than spending a small fortune, taking on a lifetime of debt, only to find that finding a real job that pays a living wage is nearly impossible.

This is what happens when you tie education to the job market

My brother is a bona-fide math genius, and the summer after he graduated high school, I walked past his room, and there was a 2 foot stack of math textbooks next to his bed. I asked what that was about, and he had driven to every local library and checked out all their books on advanced math, and was teaching himself advanced trig and calc before he started college in the Fall.

When he got to school, he took a bunch of tests, and started college halfway through his sophomore year. He graduated with his bachelor's in 3 years, then got his masters in one more.

Being smart enough to get through college quickly has always been an option. Colleges today don't like it because they are more interested in the money than education.

I think the headline is wrong. It's not that educators are alarmed because educators don't offer a college degree in a few months. These are scam programs run by and taken by scammers.

And it's pretty easy to see how this will burn the students who thought that they had saved a couple of years. If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them? ... Or maybe you'll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?

Of course it's partly the student's fault, but it's much more that money making scam artists who created the scams fault. It's easy to prey on young people who think they have a quick path to cash, and it should be a crime to do so.

As someone with severe ADHD. This is the only way I could deal with college. And even this might not work.

The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.

I always say that if you rely on metrics (like does the applicant have a degree or not), you will get people who have optimized for just the metric. It's a lot like paying programs for the bugs they fix. It just doesn't go the way you planned.

I can only applaud people who do that in the US: the cost of education is outrageous.

Here in Germany people prolong their education by years, since it's almost free, you can work part-time, and there's no need to rush.

If the US system won't be robbing young people of hundreds thousands dollars, they wouldn't feel compelled to try and hack the system.

If you can complete a masters degree in five weeks, it’s a degree mill and not a real degree. The average in-person masters degree requires 30 credit hours with 24 credits being above 500 level (graduate classes). Let’s do the math:

If you take 15 credits per semester (5 classes typically), that would be 15 hours of class time for 12 weeks. For a 3 credit class this would be 3 hours per week of class time. If you condense this down to 5 weeks, that would be 36 hours of class time per week for five weeks.

But remember, this is only half the required credits. So you have to multiply this by 2, leading to 72 hours per week of just class time.

This does NOT include any outside work. Typically, 500 level classes give homework that can take 5-10 hours per week since it is a graduate level class. Let’s assume five hours to be generous.

That would mean for a full semester (15 credit hours at 5 classes) one would be looking at 15 hours of class work per week plus 25 hours of homework/projects per week (5 classes x 5 hours of work per class). For a total of 40 hours per week.

Condensing this down to 5 weeks would multiple this number by 2.4 (5 weeks instead of 12 weeks). And then multiplying it again by 2 since you would have to do both semesters in five weeks. That would be 192 hours of work per week for five weeks. There are 144 hours in a week. These places are degree mills.

I've seen some of the videos online. Some degree mills will let you CLEP (and adjacent services) your way to a degree in General Studies (or Liberal Studies, or Multidisciplinary Studies, or whatever). A lot of the time, it's a degree in nothing in particular from a school nobody's heard of. It's not particularly useful, but better than nothing.

You get what you pay for. I'm not sure who is cheating who: the students, who think they've found a way to beat the system, or the schools, who make a quick buck in exchange for a degree of dubious value.

I returned to university a decade ago to get a degree. I'm not sure I would trust many of the younger graduates to really understand what they studied. They were very good at memorization and most exams had enough MC questions that they could pass but if they were confronted with written long answer questions, the class average went down dramatically. I can only assume that fully online degrees are of this calibre student. Great at memorization, poor at understanding.

So I actually got my BS CompSci from WGU so I probably fall in this category. Did 2.5 years at community college for a math associates, ran out of money and joined the military, then finished the degree online in my last year in. I suppose all together it came out to about 4 years and it's accredited so {shrug}

I have mixed feelings about the degree, it got me the job I have now working as a Linux Sysadmin for a robotics company and working towards a role with the robotics Dev team but the education was thin.

Strictly speaking, if you did all the supplemental material you were given the classes were actually dense as hell but the problem was it was way easier to cram for each test.

That being said, I know a lot of CS grads that don't know what an array is so honestly I think I'm on the side of "maybe cramming all your education into 4 years is worse than just slowly picking at it over a lifetime".

I think I'd like to see a system like that. Like IT certs but not complete shit.