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.

Everything you said is absolutely true and thoroughly shit. It's just a shame that the system's solution is to now rob them of an actual education as well.

The only thing keeping America on any kind of footing at all is that exposure to classical education largely deprograms the religious bullshit most American kids grow up with. Oh, and it actually educates them, as opposed to whatever AI assisted bullshit "workers" this is going to end up giving us.

Edit: although... religion is dying here anyway, so optimistically, maybe kids these days will need the deprogramming less and AI will improve dramatically. We could theoretically end up with a net benefit.

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

Well said, my thoughts exactly

Define "credentialism?"

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.

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.

I largely agree, but one situation I can think of where condensing the work makes sense is experienced professionals who already meet the learning outcomes. Their goal is to prove that they know the material, then have a degree to show as proof, not to actually learn the material.

Corollary: if you have the capability to complete the requirements in a short period you should be allowed to.

But, but, if... degree mills exist... then...

Recruiters would have to do actual work, to vet that!

Clearly you haven't been on LinkedIn enough to understand how the job market actually works.

That's the kind of student that grade focused test prep "education" systems are designed to provide.

The long answer questions were always my favorite in school because I suck at memorization. I can explain a concept well, but never pick the correct answer out of a list because it wasn't my version of the answer.

Yes, but also on the flip side, I have sat thru classes where the teacher did not know the curriculum and I had to explain things to the students. I also built the infrastructure for a computer lab and then had classes in that very lab. When the teacher couldn't set up the conditions for a test, they consulted me to troubleshoot it (in this case, the teacher was not at fault, it was the equipment).

I tried to CLEP, but most of the time (for me) i failed many because I was either bad at the test, covered material that I was never taught, or the course could not be CLEP. The annoying thing is that in almost every case, there was stuff that wasn't in the CLEP that I was taught, or vice versa after taking the course.

If the course doesn't teach you to understand, then the metric being measured is not "understanding".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

There should be regulations on what degrees and certificates employers can ask for, and costs for those degrees should be imposed on employers who demand them

I keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.

The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.

This shit about "become a well-rounded individual" also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out "EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER."

No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.

We cling to this idea that "You are young. This is school time. You learn until you're adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work." Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we're sure you won't negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we're sure you won't negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.

Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills...this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.

I regret going to college, the speedrunners have the right to get the credential they need

I can see that, if you think that just getting the paper is enough. It is contrary to the idea that university was a place to learn how to learn and gain knowledge that could then be used in your life. Undergrads didn't lead to employment, they led to further career or education opportunities. If all a diploma mill generates is slips of paper without the student gaining knowledge, even $4000 is a gross overpayment.

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.

It's been gone for a long time. “They literally just need a certificate” sums up the whole point of the education system as it actually operates, not the fantasy version we wish it was

The point of paying for a college degree is to get a job. Education can be done for free, or the coat of printing out pirated textbooks at most. We don't need institutions to learn