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Originally Posted by malldian /img/forum/go_quote.gif
So focus on cutting costs to public colleges. There is a reason that online classes aren't considered as good as real ones - they aren't. Doing something like this would not just inflate the value of a degree rendering a regular bachelors even more useless. As to the social issue, those people before college educations lived in a very different environment than we do today, close knit small communities and a general different social lifestyle.
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The worth of such a program would have more to do with the difficulty of the testing than with how the information is learned. And I'm not even sure that it would have a major effect on degree dilution. By continually expanding the student pool and manipulating the number of graduates through grade inflation, colleges are doing a pretty damn good job of diluting the value of their educations for their financial gain. Make the testing rigorous enough and it might even reverse this trend.
As for the social issues, roughly 40% of the high school grads never take a college course. And of the ones that do, only 1/3 of associate's and half of bachelor's students ever finish their degree. Practically speaking, there are a whole lot of people out there who didn't need college to teach them how to act. And real world feedback on the current higher education grads on suitability for employment is fairly terrible.
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Originally Posted by Towert7
Marvin, no offense man, but that's called talking out of your @$$. I disagree with everything you said and every idea you proposed. UTTER RUBBISH!
Thank goodness those who make the decisions know how foolish those ideas are.
Again, no offense, but I would wager that you didn't spend a lot of time in the collegiate scene, did you? If you did, you'd instantly know why what you propose is both a bad idea and detrimental to the students education, as well as the general education system.
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4 years, 170 credit hours. Graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering, minored in Biology at Texas A&M. GPA was around a 3.6. Did pretty well on standardized testing before and during college. The Electrical Engineering program there was ranked in the high singe digits to low teens while I was attending. College overall was ranked in the high forties to low fifties. Yay for the lack of (racial) diversity.
College was a pretty fun place. But as far as education value, I found it to be highly overrated. I skipped most of my lectures since I didn't find that they were of high value (read: I was bored out of my skull), though the lab work was generally interesting. Your experience may vary.
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Originally Posted by catscratch
Uh, yes, let's scrap college. Let's get rid of all research, academic and practical, altogether. Technological advancement, who needs it? Oh, you want trained medical personnel? Yup, that's fine, the next guy to operate on you will have his MD from an online university. You just bet that he has all the experience he needs. Yup, no worries there at all. Oh, what's that? Liberal education? You mean, like literature, history, and stuff? Who cares. We've got hip-hop and r'n'b! We've got lolcats and failblog and head-fi to read, we don't need Proust, or Kafka, or Dumas. screw** Dumas... what kind of a name is that anyway? Who reads that ****? Let's play some CS instead. And history? We've got History Channel for that. Never mind that it's a bunch of US propaganda, that's how it happened anyway. No lie. Besides, anything outside of the US doesn't matter anyway
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Interesting strawman.
Research is not the sole province of colleges as other institutions that can perform research. Research grants from the government and private industry would still exist and research institutions may even benefit by removing the drain on time that educating students exacts on researchers during their prime productivity years. Full time grad students would benefit much more as their time could be dedicated to learning and labwork instead of wasting their time doing scutwork for the university.
As for professional training? I couldn't care less how and where my doc learned his book material, as long as they can illustrate their mastery by scoring well on the USMLEs. I know a few docs and medical school students who never attended classes and got through the book learning years by either notes, hitting the books, audiotapes, or watching video lectures. Does it make them worse docs? No. Their real medical education was learned in their on the job training during 3rd and 4th years and residency. The hands on apprenticeship training is what makes them valuable, how they learned the basics is irrelevant as long as they know them.
Nor did anyone say that an education in the liberal arts should be dismantled. And really, what would you gain more value from, series of lectures and coursework from the best in the field or whatever you get from the random joes the local university picks up? IMO, it's not even close. And as for history, might just be me, but at the undergrad level that most people get, it's pretty basic and heavily tinted by whatever the prof happens to believe. Grading is screwed up as not agreeing with the prof on ideological grounds can often result in inaccurate grades. Self directed learning was far better than what I got in college.
In any case, I don't think anyone ever said colleges should be dismantled. You learn best in a college environment or need the maturing time? Go right on ahead and pay your money to learn there. But saying that college is the only place to learn "the right way" is frankly absurd.
