This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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?
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.
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.
This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.
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.
That's part of it, but its more that you have a basic education with the fundamentals of your field. More importantly, college teaches you how to learn. A Bachelors degree will make you no expert. However the effort you undergo to get the degree exposes you to the various resources and bodies of information that exist. It sets up opportunities for critical thinking usually with pretty vast resources at your disposal to research, answer questions, and build something on your own from start to finish.
A degree usually also means you have a passable command of your native language and can put together a report or presentation that is on-topic and not embarrass yourself or your superiors when your work comes under scrutiny from others. I sometimes remember a couple of my myopic proposals I made before my degree and didn't understand why they were shot down. Today I completely understand. I was out of my depth before, yet I didn't have the self-awareness to even know that.
For those 10 years prior to my degree, I didn't understand why the company made decisions that it made. It made, to my eye, wrong/inefficient decisions. What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.
None of this that if you go to college you'll come away with all of this. If you skate through doing the absolute minimum you might pass with your degree (and debt!) but you'll have wasted an immense opportunity to learn and better yourself.
Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.
While I completely agree that a corporate culture is good to learn to be successful in operating in it, I have doubts a designed curriculum would accurately capture the various "good old boys" or crony decision making processes or those that embrace rules not to end in a good result but just to slow you down from affecting change. Nor would that course explain the simmering resentment of below-average of middle managers that have been passed over again and again as they see their better or more agile peers continue to surpass them and how that can negatively affect your personal productivity or chances of advancement.
This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.
Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.
More importantly, college teaches you how to learn.
Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn. There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest "effort" in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.
What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.
If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.
I don't think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don't even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager. From the very beginning of my university years my goal was to become a specialist and never ever agree to any position that would require skills that I neither posses nor are passionate about. At which I largely succeeded. My chances of advancement are zero by choice and I hope I will manage to keep them this way.
What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to "give a good base" that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case. I guess my take does not match goal "let's advance as high as we can in company".
Thank you for your story though - it was an interesting food for thought.
Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.
Apologies, I probably didn't communicate this point well. University did very little education in my area of expertise. In fact for me, I intetionally got a degree outside of my area of expertise to get greatter educational benefit. I agree with you that a Bachelors degree does not fully prepare a student for immediately executing in that skillset. It does, however, give you a solid basis to start in it. I think this will always be the case because curriculum lags reality. Its nearly impossible to create a curriculum covering a body of knowledge of an industry because the industry evolves simultaneously to the creation of the curriculum.
Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn.
I'll agree there's usually very little overt hand-holding. There's an expectation you seek on your own. When you were stuck at that beginning, did you ask your professors how to approach the problem? Advisors? Librarians? Study groups? These are just some of the things that are baked into the college experience that are available to put you on the path. The act of completing the coursework exposes you to the different situations and the school has the resources to let you explore it.
There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.
I acknowledge this in my first post. Its certainly possible to skate through without learning, but that's a choice of the student. A student is only going to college for the grades then they're robbing themselves of the main benefit of college. If a student just barely passes the classes, but is able to learn and retain the knowledge, that is far more valuable that obtaining a high GPA with zero ability to learn anything.
If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.
Oh that certainly wasn't one class, it was many. Just to name a few:
I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager.
None of this to end up in management (if you don't want to advance that direction).
I assume there are things you want to accomplish professionally in your field? The resources you need to do that are rarely in control of those doing the executing, like yourself. This means that to get your needed resources (or permission), you have to convince others to give it to you. Knowing why they would say "yes" or "no" to your proposal, or say yes to one of your prosposals but not another is understanding what drives them and their goals. Being able to speak at least part of their language means you get what you need to accomplish your professional goals. Without this you have to hope you're talking to people that will choose to enter deep enough into your field of experise to do the translation for you. I have found those people are exceedingly rare. Without those rare folks, you'll be told "no", or worse, lose your job because you're not properly able to communicate your very real value to the organization.
What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case.
Oh, I completely agree with your statement here. I touched on it in my response above. A University education will frequently be behind the times vs the state-of-the-art in the working world. This is especially true of technology fields. I experienced this in my college coursework too, studying certain technologies I already knew were out-of-date. However, those were there for the benefit of those that had never been exposed to the technology at all just to give them a working understanding of a version of technology.
I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.
It doesn't have to. The approach can be "advance as high as you want to in the company, and be able to stay there at that level for as long as you want".
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")
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.
You're talking like my main man John Thorndike and his fundamental principles of learning.
The principle of Recency: Memory fades with time, skills and knowledge practiced in the distant past tend to be more difficult to recall than those practiced recently. This is why we review at the end of chapters, units, classes.
The principle of Exercise: What people mean when they say "practice makes perfect" though I take issue with that phraseology, when training instructor candidates I make sure to stress that one can learn to do something wrong. When I was in 7th grade, my band teacher handed me the all-county band audition music and told me to go learn it on my own. I took it home, misread the sheet music, and became adept at playing something that wasn't the assigned piece. I was not accepted to all-county band. "practice" requires a regulator, either a teacher or coach, or a student who has the means and ability to detect incorrect performance.
But who gives a shit? These college programs aren't about learning anything, they're about extracting money from young people.
The tests are designed to be crammed by students who are required to show up to lecture halls in pajama bottoms to listen to someone who has never worked outside an academic setting speak too fast. Learning is an active process, lecture halls encourage passive behavior, such lectures are almost entirely a waste of time. Professors know this, they know only their students who already give a shit are going to actually study, so they design their tests to be crammable otherwise UNC would have 3 graduates a decade. So students sit in a lecture hall almost falling asleep then they spend the last half of December and May cramming.
So why not do all the cramming back to back to back and graduate in 3 months? What's the point of stretching it to 4 years? Because universities have very lucrative housing and food service divisions.
To be fair, when job listings require any university degree to apply, regardless of its relevance to the job in question, it becomes obvious the actual knowledge and education are secondary to simply checking a box. No wonder so many people are allowing AI to do their thinking for them. Any system defined by its technicalities is going to have loopholes.
That is very true. However (at least from what I was always taught) the reason employers "require" ANY degree is less about what you learn and more about showing them that you have ability and commitment necessary TO learn.
An employer isn't generally interested in what you know; they're always going to teach you their way of doing things anyway.
Employers want to know that you have the focus to actually learn their systems.
So the end result of "fast degrees" will be the opposite of what job hunters think. It'll just devalue degrees in the eyes of employers because it no longer signifies the very metric they were measuring, which was the ability to pay attention
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!
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!
I had never read Marx's Communist Manifesto before going to college. It was assigned reading for a class. I don't necessarily agree with the validity of it all (it depends too much the decency and incorruptibility of humanity of which we have too little of both). Even though I don't agree with much of it, I very much appreciate being exposed to it so I have a better understanding of the perspective of its origins and those that believe in it more than I do.
That probably wouldn't have occurred without me going to college.
Funnily enough the Manifesto is quite regularly criticised by communists for focusing too much on the demands of the time and not moving beyond the state. It's a pamphlet for agitation. They should have assigned you chapters from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or excerpts from Kapital.
I understand your criticism of the dependence on incorruptibility and decency with the current state of the world, sadly Marx' theories on how behaviour and ideology arise are not handled in the Manifesto.
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 did a summer "mini-mester" for my undergrad Fluid Mechanics class where the class was condensed into 4 or 6 weeks but you met every day and it was FUCKING BRUTAL even though I was only doing that one course. I can't imagine doing that for a full 15hrs of coursework. This smells more like a click through the classwork once randomly, figure out the right answers from the online quiz when they pop up at the end, then click the right answers the next time type of situation but for a whole program.
How this got accredited (if it actually is) is beyond me.
You did an intesive for fluid mechanics?! Are you insane, or a masochist?
The problem is that many "legit" colleges are already degree mills, albeit at a slower pace. In the US at least, colleges are run like businesses. More students means more money. As long as they can maintain an okay reputation, they'll churn as many students through as they can. The places that let you fast-track like this are just taking the next logical step, and letting the mask slip a little further. The whole system is broken; this is just another symptom.
Not every institution is this way. In my area, there are one or two schools that consistently produce people who actually know something. But it's a pretty small percentage, all things considered, and I expect the overton window will gradually lessen expectations at those places over time as well.
The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is actual learning vs just gaming the school's systems. And how much of it was just getting an LLM to fake it even more.
I went back to college because I felt inadequate profrssionally and left feeling college was inadequate.
It is a pay to win, group orojects to drag everyone over the line
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.
State funded adult education seems like a really sensible investment in the future. I'm in my 50s, never did a degree - wasn't really interested when I was younger. But I'd love to have the opportunity to study now. Can't afford it, though.
What happens when education becomes commodified.
I'll consult a historian.
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.
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.
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.
Do employers ask for transcripts? I've never had that happen before, and I'd find it incredibly odd if I got that request.
This is what happens when you tie education to the job market
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.
That's the kind of student that grade focused test prep "education" systems are designed to provide.
Completely lost sight of the purpose of education, which has nothing to do with being an effective corporate drone… unless you get a business degree, in which case 4 weeks is too long.
“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked
Gee, I dunno, maybe you wanted to learn something?
forget everything you learned in college. That’s useless to you here.
Said every worker ever to every new hire.
And every time they've been wrong in my experience. Sure there's some learning to actually apply and use it, but it's never been straight useless.
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've already spent more than 4 years in college with little to show for it. If speed-running college to get that piece of paper at the end is what it takes. more power to them.
I know people who lied about having a degree, could do the job, and never got caught. I suppose speed running a degree from a degree mill yields a similar level of education, except with a piece of paper.
I finished my degree a couple years after I started the job that my degree got me 😉
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'm of two minds about this. So many jobs out there require a college degree when the work itself doesn't really require a college degree to do. People who can't afford to go to college but are able to do the work are locked out of that more comfortable life. This makes it easier to get that foot in the door.
At the same time, you learn A LOT about life and people in those 3 or 4 years at college. It's a shame for someone to miss out on that experience. Also, this speed run absolutely could not work for a STEM degree.
