This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What happens when education becomes commodified.
I'll consult a historian.
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.
This is what happens when you tie education to the job market
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
why would you fire them for this? that seems absurd. I make pretty good money and I don't have a degree at all
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.
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.
Cheating is absolutely a sellable skill.
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.
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.
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.
The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.
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
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.
I finished my degree a couple years after I started the job that my degree got me 😉
Can't they fire you if they do somehow find out you don't have a degree?
If that's the case, there may be an actual benefit to the degree mill piece of paper.
In the US they can fire you for any (or no) reason
In the United States? They certainly can, and "fired for lying about credentials" gives the employer a reason to contest unemployment. But apparently there are enough employers that don't cross-check that it can work as a strategy.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I value honesty and want to see dishonesty deterred. OTOH...if you can do the job, what's the point of having the degree as a checkbox on the job application? Bullshit metrics should be removed.
If it's just a checkbox, "yes, has a degree", to get you to the next round of the interview, and it really doesn't mean anything for your field, then do it.
Eventually, if you need the knowledge taught, and you don't have it, you'll be discovered and fired. This is true whether you have the piece of paper, or not.
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 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.
