Classes + Degree
This is what colleges sell. An “education”.
Setting aside, for the moment, my aversion to formal education, this is very odd.
Why classes and the degree? Why not just one or the other?
Why not have one institution dedicated to teaching and another to administer tests for certification of some kind? This works in many other areas (driver’s license, real estate license, AutoCAD certification, etc.). It would necessarily make things run more efficiently, and therefore lower costs to the consumer.
For example, if there was a college with low standards of teaching (say, the teachers were hired based on research performance rather than on teaching skills), and this college was not also selling a degree, it would quickly be run out of business by a more student-oriented college.
As it stands today, this low quality of teaching is common, expected even. Stories about unintelligible foreign professors are ubiquitous among college students. The price of a college education has risen faster than the price of inflation - a phenomenon absolutely unexplainable in a free market situation.
This is worse even than the state of our public high schools ([this comment has been censored by the editor]). Why is it tolerated? — Because a lousy education is the path to a valuable degree.
Huh?
This next part had me stumped for a few days: Why hasn’t the market corrected this glaring flaw? Colleges are, after all, primarily private institutions, unlike high schools. Why haven’t consumers found a way to get a good education, and then get a respectable certification in their field without wasting the time and money?
One factor is the classes + degree set-up of public high schools, which would lead, by habit, to consumers looking for a similar college product. But this can’t be all of it - financial incentives are strong, and should be enough to create colleges far superior to public high schools.
What else? Here is a site demonstrating the huge extent of government interference in colleges.
The only conclusion left to me is that government subsidies (directly to state colleges or indirectly as financial aid), by discouraging the search for cheaper alternatives, have halted innovation of the college system. This, of course, hurts mainly the poor, who could profit immensely from the much cheaper option of auto-didacticism and certification.
Government beneficence saves the day again, eh?
To sum things up:
One can practically get a college education on the internet for free! So why isn’t this approach far more common?
Because the government is picking up the tab.
Just think - you pay taxes to support an outdated college system so that you can pay thousands of dollars too much for an education. Lucky you.
Alternatives: Have Fun
Fortunately, our government has yet to completely blow everything to Hell. There are colleges that will give credit for a class when it is demonstrated that you know the material - no classroom instruction required. Try this site.
This creates some fantastic methods for the acquisition of a free (or very nearly) bona fide college degree.
1) Learn on your own, through textbooks, the internet, iTunes U, and apply for college credit.
2) Even better, since most colleges allow students to attend classes without paying (with the professor’s permission - they don’t get credit, of course), one could attend classes for free at one college, and then apply for credit at another - a real college education for next to nothing. Also, because you’re not registering, you don’t have to worry about being accepted, allowing you to attend whatever high-brow college you’d like. Personally, living in the Houston area, I’m thinking about Rice University.
3) There are also a few “homeschool colleges” that I haven’t yet mentioned that send you the course material, and allow you to learn without paying for some professor’s obscure research and fancy building facades (and swimming pools, and recreation centers, etc.).
So my advice:
Allow the economy to work its magic;
Help poor people get an education;
Drop out of mainstream college as soon as possible.
Seriously. I’m doing it. My parents weren’t big fans of this approach, but that’s OK, I can afford it without them. : )
Billy bitch-slaps traditional American education.
