It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.
The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s – in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.
Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.
“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked. “It’s kind of a no-brainer if you know about it.”
Many U.S. schools have been experimenting with ways to speed up traditional college programs to reduce the burgeoning cost and help students move into the workforce faster. Some offer three-year bachelor’s programs, reducing the number of credits needed for a diploma by one quarter. Many more allow students to enroll in college classes while still in high school.
But the breakneck pace of the fastest online programs concerns some academics, who say there is a big difference in what students can learn in weeks or months compared with three or more years.
The phenomenon – sometimes referred to as degree hacking, college speed runs or hyperaccelerated degrees – has spawned a cottage industry of influencers making videos about how quickly they earned their degrees and encouraging others to follow suit.
Supporters of the approach tout it as an affordable, convenient way for people to earn credentials they need for their careers. Others, including some online students and academic officials, expressed concern about what the super-accelerated students are missing, and whether a quick path devalues degrees.
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?
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.
…I’m pretty sure reading about psychology or neurology would be more relevant than reading about communism. Communism might be interesting in a historical context, but it’s not science.
Appealing to psychology when the root of people’s problems in this article is the economy, and more specifically societal organisation is exactly the mistake of chasing appearances without getting to the root of issues that Marx criticised.
When you are poor you become mentally ill due to poverty. When people are abused they are abused because they cannot afford to get away from people, they are abused because they are bound up in economical units like the family. When you are relatively rich or don’t have to work to survive you can afford to study phenomena in their isolation detached from the material realities that people face, you are able to psychologise and cut off science as a method of exposing causalities off at a specific point where you create cordoned off areas like physics, economy, biology, maths, engineering, an so on.
Communism may not primarily be a science in the way you think as it is a form of societal organisation, but communism is built on satisfying needs and therefore doesn’t deal with abstractions such as money and debt or phenomena understood to be internal when we can show that they are not. Communism is the society that gets together and consciously plans like an organism would in a concrete way that gets to the essence of things, i.e. is radical. As a result of this its study is inherently bound to a close pursuit of science.
But come at me again with your history when company towns make a comeback due to the shit housing market and you survive to work fulfilling the needs that are not yours, spending ten hours a day working a monotonous profession, two getting to and from work, another two for chores and maybe one hour of quality time and another hour for consuming a piece of media of your choice.
This is as real as it gets. Your psychology has psychoanalysts admitting that their work isn’t within the realm of science and your neurology can’t grapple with the fact that most research on consciousness, upon which a stupid amount of bioethics and therefore medical practice hinges, is not falsifiable.
What happens when education becomes commodified.
I’ll consult a historian.
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:
- Financial Accounting/Managerial Accounting
- Intellectual Property Law
- Political Science courses
- Business Mangement
- Human Anatomy
- Communications and Presentations
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”.
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.
I had 1 employer ask for transcripts. I told him my university does not keep transcripts for students over 30 ago… archived records can be searched for a large fee with no guarantee records would be found. So i told them no transcripts. They hired me anyway.
I’m amazed at how many employers who hire graduates from my lab do ZERO due diligence or even ask me for an opinion. Six figure jobs.
If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them?
That’s half the joke, though. The employers are using automated tools to sift for staff. Why would prospective staff not use automated tools to bump themselves up in the queue for a job?
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?
Because then it’s not a “false” transcript. It’s real and true, fully accredited and identical to a transcript issued by a four year school.
Of course it’s partly the student’s fault
This is a structural failure. It isn’t the fault of any single (non-billionaire) individual. As we pull more and more humans out of the bureaucratic chain and dump more and more automation onto lowest-bidder third parties, we accumulate technical debt. That technical debt exposes vulnerabilities in our bureaucratic systems. And then people naturally move in to exploit those vulnerabilities when they can’t get what they need out of a normally functional bureaucracy.
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”)
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.
This is what happens when you tie education to the job market
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 feel like you’d be potentially skipping some of the best years of your life, but that’s pretty awesome!
What’s he do now?
I dont know how I feel about this.
On one hand, degrees are somewhat good for education in lots of industries.
On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.
Degrees are also very expensive.
I guess if it was a useless degree then it wouldn’t matter in the first place.
Degrees are very expensive in the us* most European countries the cost is much less. I think liberation of the yoke in the us is liberating to be honest. I think going to higher education physically however is more than just doing the content, but also doing the soft stuff — learning how to communicate clearly with others. This is lacking this, and then you have AI ofc which makes it difficult regardless
On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.
But all you’re doing in that case is making them attend a community college with a bunch of wacky misfits for a few years.
why would you fire them for this? that seems absurd. I make pretty good money and I don’t have a degree at all
Thats because you have the sellable skills, which is the most important thing. Degree is helpful in some areas, essential in others and has no use everywhere else (outside of proving that a person is capable of learning and persevering).
Cheating is not a sellable skill, and a huge red flag.
How is it cheating? Who is being cheated? Out of what?
Reading the article, it sounds like these students still need to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the material.
Cheating is absolutely a sellable skill.
Ok, you got me there. Probably not though if you try to lie to your potential employer.
I see what you mean and for jobs where deceit isn’t an asset it’s probably not a great idea to get caught lying.
I will say though, having been employed, the ability to “gracefully massage” the truth is an invaluable skill in a lot of workplaces.
Honesty is my problem with it. If they were open about it I wouldn’t care. But if they hid it and were hired because of the degree I’d fire them almost regardless of their work.
It’s something I value because dishonest people are usually quite horrible in my life experience.
My assumption is that they would tell you where it’s from, because normally the school’s name is attached to the degree, right? it wouldn’t be their fault if you didn’t catch it
We are all arguing different hypotheticals. My problem is my personal experiences.
One of them was a rapist. The other was a high level tech salesman child abuser. So I’m 2 for 2 and my opinions are skewed forever.
those things have nothing to do with college education
On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.
Ideally, I wouldn’t hire them. But if they were already on the payroll, I’m much more interested in their work output than their transcript.
This is just the industrialization of “Fake It Until You Make It”.
I value honesty more than most people I’m realizing. If a hire is open about their credentials I would not care.
I’ve witnessed what happens when people are ok with liars. It’s gross, and no one should normalize it.
If a hire is open about their credentials I would not care.
Typically, any job that gets filled at my company has to have a competitive candidate to consider. I’ve seen them fudge this a few times (bringing in someone they know isn’t qualified just to balance against), but it’s a hiring standard that you have to consider at least two (preferably three or four) candidates for any position.
If you show up and you don’t have the credentials for the position, you’re simply not getting the job.
I’ve witnessed what happens when people are ok with liars.
Sure. The Enron offices are spitting distance from where I work.
But I also see a lot of people fudging resumes to get feet in the door. And I don’t see people who were honest, but got screened out by a filter. So I’m the victim of selection bias, in many regards.
Different life situations for everyone, I think.
I don’t mean strictly professional honesty, but my experiences leak into how I view something like this. The biggest liar I know is still in jail for raping children, so I have a skewed view of honesty.
My industry and group are weird when it comes to credentials. We don’t have a strict, you need this degree situation.
The biggest liar I know is still in jail for raping children
I will happily spot you “Don’t hire child rapists” as a rule of thumb. I think “fudging your resume is a slippery slope to sexually assaulting a minor” is a stretch of logic.
My industry and group are weird when it comes to credentials. We don’t have a strict, you need this degree situation.
I know employers who use “college degree” as a proxy for “capable of following instructions” and won’t hire anyone without a bachelors.
I know employers who are much more fast and loose, bringing in anyone with “potential” as they broadly define it.
Idk exactly what the right answer is. But “powers through a MOOC in a few weeks to get a certificate that says I can competently execute a job” doesn’t strike me as a moral failing.
As someone with severe ADHD. This is the only way I could deal with college. And even this might not work.
So I actually got my BS CompSci from WGU so I probably fall in this category. Did 2.5 years at community college for a math associates, ran out of money and joined the military, then finished the degree online in my last year in. I suppose all together it came out to about 4 years and it’s accredited so {shrug}
I have mixed feelings about the degree, it got me the job I have now working as a Linux Sysadmin for a robotics company and working towards a role with the robotics Dev team but the education was thin.
Strictly speaking, if you did all the supplemental material you were given the classes were actually dense as hell but the problem was it was way easier to cram for each test.
That being said, I know a lot of CS grads that don’t know what an array is so honestly I think I’m on the side of “maybe cramming all your education into 4 years is worse than just slowly picking at it over a lifetime”.
I think I’d like to see a system like that. Like IT certs but not complete shit.
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?
He just really likes pressure.
I go with the flow.
You seem like a dynamic person
To make it worse, I was working full time at the time. It was the only way I could get to the next course in the schedule since certain classes were only offered in certain semesters so if I had missed that window, I would have been set back a year. It was awful.
Agreed, I did something similar where I did 3 courses in 7 weeks and that was by far the worst and most stressful time of my entire degree. Anything more probably would have caused a nervous breakdown.
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.
Certainly not untrue. Many schools have gone the way of business. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.
I’m guessing some areas/industries are better or worse. Mine seems pretty bad, at least in my area. Being involved in hiring co-ops and new grads has given me a good taste for what the expectations are like, and it’s not great. So my view is probably a bit dismal.
That is a good point. You are probably right that it is area based. My degrees were in physics and to my knowledge, there aren’t too many online degrees for it. It’s pretty hard to fake your knowledge in this area. Even if you could, you’ll be found out quickly once starting a job.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.
I agree. I think a lot of degrees are still real degrees, but the entire ecosystem has been degraded to the point that quality across the board has diminished. So, the most “rigorous” degrees now are equivalent to a run-of-the-mill degree a generation ago and so forth. Ultimately, the run-of-the-mill degrees of yesteryear are now just diploma mill degrees.
I hate to say it, but a lot of it is e-learning and online degrees. It’s a lot harder to engage with material, with a class, or with the professor themselves behind a screen hundreds of miles away. Even when you put everything into the work, it still just is not as engaging because you don’t have the same dynamic because you can’t just drop by your professor’s office for office hours or get the same level of help or group learning. In undergrad, I used to help others in my classes, and vice-versa, while also going to office hours to clear up details. Online, if it’s not impossible, it’s at least orders of magnitude more difficult. So, the quality of learning drops a ton.
If I go back for another Master’s or a Doctorate, I will only do in person classes.
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.
This should always be an option. making sitting through and paying for years of courses is predatory and locks so many people out
Kind of, but that would be a fault in the system that ideally would be charged. Maybe with some sort of verification to ensure they have the skills already. Maybe that’s even what this is abusing and they’re not examining enough / tolerant of LLMs yet. But agreed that is something a flaw with credentials
Anything that can be cheated by LLMs can Also be automated away with the same tech, rendering it worthless
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.
Same way it’s always worked. Your best shot is by knowing someone in the field who can get you in the door for an interview.
But you don’t understand, we live in a meritocracy that rewards hard work and skill!
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.
Certificates and goal based stuff is more useful than a generic paper degree.
I’ve never met anyone with a certificate that knew enough about the subject matter to deserve a certificate.
IT certs are a joke.
Oh yeah, I agree. I’m just saying that now that I’m later on in life I have a clearer idea of my interests and an actual desire to learn, as opposed to when I was of ‘university age’. Back then I was only into sex, drugs, and techno. The opportunity was wasted.
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.
The fundies have their own colleges where premarital sex gets you expelled, including being a rape victim, so the bubble isn’t nessesarly popped.
