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")

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 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.

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

“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked

Gee, I dunno, maybe you wanted to learn something?

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.

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.

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.

1. Make degrees prohibitively expensive
2. Offer worthless, cheap degrees to students that can't afford a real one
3. Profit

Everyone wins except the students, the employers or the country.

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

What happens when education becomes commodified.

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 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.