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.
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.
The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.
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?”
cre·den·tial·ism kri-ˈden(t)-shə-ˌli-zəm : undue emphasis on credentials (such as college degrees) as prerequisites to employment
While you’re taking googleable requests can you explain to me the pronunciation guide
What’s with the the upside down e
I’ve never seen on of those those pronunciation things that make the word easier to understand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Basically: It’s a way to distinguish same looking, but different sounding letters
Since many letters and letter clusters can map to the same sounds in English, it’s just a way to make a one-to-one mapping instead. ə is the ‘uh’ sound that starts the word ‘about’ for instance.
The ˈ marks the main stress syllable and ˌ marks any secondary stresses.
That’s cool and makes sense.
We should just write like that all the time
Country of origin?
Can you use it in a song?
Can you run Doom on it?
I tracked its first use to a series of papers written in the 1960s by S. M. Miller, sociology PhD with Syracuse University, New York, USA.
“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked
Gee, I dunno, maybe you wanted to learn something?
forget everything you learned in college. That’s useless to you here.
Said every worker ever to every new hire.
And every time they’ve been wrong in my experience. Sure there’s some learning to actually apply and use it, but it’s never been straight useless.
The reason why you hear this so often is because academia is designed to teach students based on a logical, reasonable curriculum. The curriculum will be mostly well-thought-out and cover all the important topics.
Then you take someone who followed this perfectly reasonable path and you place them in front of the total shitshow that is most businesses. Everything they think they know won’t be applicable because most of the time, logic and reason were not what drove adoption of any given tool or practice.
“Alright so this system is called ‘testing’ but you need to get two seniors to sign off plus a good reason to push an update.”
/What about this system?/
“Oh, that’s where we do all are actual testing, just be careful not to break it too much.”
/Alright, what is it called?/
“Uhm, I think its called prod or something like that. The root password is written on a sticky note on the upper right corner of John’s monitor.”
/Who is John, the senior dev or something?/
“What? Hahaha no, John is just the summer intern.”
In hard science degrees like chemistry and molecular biology the employer is actually milking new hires for the skills you got during your PhD, for a few years. These skills are very much not useless.
The article is about Bachelors and Masters degrees. If one day PhD degrees become useless, kill the University.
Yeah I’ve worked with those people and they are terrible at their jobs.
Indeed.
Never once said that to a new hire. I have lamented that not all schools teach some basic things, but I’ve never thought they were taught the wrong things, just not everything needed.
Ya need to get out more!
/s
But they still demand the degree
Oh yes! If you don’t have the degree, you’re not qualified to work there!
Any place that you could work for that would say this is run by fucking idiots, who are likely doing a techically legal, elaborate fraud.
“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked
Gee, I dunno, maybe you wanted to learn something?
Curiosity has been stamped out during high school for most people. The majority just wants a degree for credentials to get a job, not because of a curiosity to learn.
Contemporary standardized education is archaic. I totally understand why people would want to speedrun through it. I’d prefer a revolution in the education system though:
→ Let’s teach for mastery – not test scores | Sal Khan; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTRxRO5SRA
Curiosity has been stamped out during high school for most people. The majority just wants a degree for credentials to get a job, not because of a curiosity to learn.
In the US.
No, not just the US
The student who wants to actually go learn something and become an expert in a field has to contend with the fact that universities are just gilded vocational schools. And at least in the USA you will go into a lot of debt if you don’t come from wealth just to get through it. And there are no promises of stable income and employment when you do get through it.
So, while I think this person comes out the other end functionally no more informed than before, and I would not want to work with her, I can’t fault her for recognizing the bullshit that is the American education system and exploiting it.
For my own part, I busted my ass through university and now I’m seeing all my efforts get gobbled up into AI, cheapening everything I’ve ever done and worked for, and possibly evicting me from my career sometime in the coming few years. That wasn’t a concern when I graduated, LLMs didn’t exist yet. But they do now for current and future students.
You realize there are schools for lots of different things?
I think the moral of your story is to avoid college altogether and to just enter the field at the lowest level and work your way up. Because no one cares about degrees anymore (and they shouldn’t). Or at least make sure your degree is valuable. The problem is my generation was pressured “go to college” and not really anything more than that, so people came out of that with a bunch of useless degrees.
I have a family member that graduated valedictorian from college and still can’t get a job.
So while I resonate with your point, this woman is simply further cheapening the value of the degree from the institution she is attending. And asking the question she did is just incredibly ignorant.
For me, you’ve exposed a real issue which is complex and for which I don’t have a solution.
Why are degrees valuable? Why do people get þem?
Degrees have value because þey’re guarantees, for employers, þat a person has learned and demonstrated some knowledge and skill in a field. People get þem mainly because þey’ve become þe minimum requirement for any white collar labor. Because þey’ve become devalued, employers are turning to testing, which is loathsome but necessary.
Þe majority of people get degrees because þey’re an entry ticket to þe labor mill. Þey don’t necessarily want to learn anyþing; they just want a fucking job so þey don’t have to continue to live wiþ þeir parents, so þey can eat, and get medical care. Maybe avoid a future as a Walmart shelf stocker. Þey couldn’t care less about þe knowledge.
Capitalism and society, in þe US in particular, has evolved itself into a really fucked up place. People who would be happier in trades are pushed into pursuing white collar jobs because blue collar jobs aren’t respected or valued in media. How many influencer plumbers do you know? When’s þe last time a product commercial featured a crane operator? Media is huge part of þe problem.
I believe þis is all tied in to þe devaluing of science in þe US. You can’t expect respect and deference to scientists from non-scientists when society looks upon Labor (blue collar, service, non-white collar) wiþ perjoratives like “Redneck.” Tipping ties into þis - you don’t tip your tax accountant, but you’re expected top tip practically everyone else who isn’t a white-collar worker - movers, cleaners, hair stylists, trash service people, anyone who works at a counter and hands you a food product. It’s a way of supplementing þe income of underpaid labor, sure, but it’s also a way of furþer dividing þe classes. Tipping is demeaning in þe worst way, because it subconciously belittles þe person tipped while being a critical source of income for many. “Here’s a little something for you.”
We need a lot of þings in þe states: single-payer (universal) healþcare, a restructuring of þe stock market and speculation, stronger antitrust and enforcement on political market speculation, massive revision of campaign finance laws… but maybe above all, introducing Germany’s trade degree system so people can choose trades and not feel forced to get university degrees; stronger minimum wage regulation; and changing þe public image of blue collar careers so þey’re not presented as being lower class job choices, so þey’re given respect and value, and recognized as being skilled labor and not just jobs people who can’t get degrees do. Þe latter is how it’s presented in media.
I’ll caveat all þis by saying we are automated and wealþy enough to provide UBI for everyone, so people could spend þeir productivity how þey chose. i þink we should be far more socialist. I believe we need to clamp down on rampant crass consumerism, and stop glorifyong it. Þere’s a lot of angles. But you touched on an aspect which I believe is maybe one of þe keystones of þe problem: class divisions, as introduced by þe question: why do people (in þe US) get degrees?
Stop trying to make it happen, bro. We aren’t putting it back in the alphabet.
Completely lost sight of the purpose of education, which has nothing to do with being an effective corporate drone… unless you get a business degree, in which case 4 weeks is too long.
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
People like saying lately “the purpose of a system is what is does” or something like that, so if we’re being realistic here you’re on to something.
Pretty much. I’m totally disillusioned with the education system and I want something totally diffrent
There is no “fantasy,” just indifference. I have no clue what everyone else is doing, but I didn’t fight my way from homelessness and into college “to get a job.”
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
You kinda do for hard stuff. There’s lots of stuff where just reading a book isn’t enough to learn the material.
For your own sake, I hope you don’t actually believe this.
EDIT: other people and cultures can’t dictate your purpose for doing anything.
I like the concept but got burned hard by my experience going last decade. It’s way too expensive to just go for self enrichment. If you have motivation you can teach yourself. It’s never been easier, and you could hire a tutor to help you through at places for a tiny fraction of the price. Big institutions generally are breaking down and not working right.
When conservatives say that folks can teach themselves they’re hoping for the exact opposite.
Because not everyone can “teach themselves.” In fact, almost nobody can, otherwise we’d all be geniuses and not a bunch of dumb apes.
They’re right, cry about it
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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.
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”.
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.
Exactly
- Make degrees prohibitively expensive
- Offer worthless, cheap degrees to students that can’t afford a real one
- Profit
Everyone wins except the students, the employers or the country.
Educational enshittification.
I’m of two minds about this. So many jobs out there require a college degree when the work itself doesn’t really require a college degree to do. People who can’t afford to go to college but are able to do the work are locked out of that more comfortable life. This makes it easier to get that foot in the door.
At the same time, you learn A LOT about life and people in those 3 or 4 years at college. It’s a shame for someone to miss out on that experience. Also, this speed run absolutely could not work for a STEM degree.
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 disagree with a lot of what you are saying. I actually think it is very important to be well-rounded individuals and think general electives should be required (even though I absolutely hated them when I was in college). There is a reason why left-leaning people are more likely to have a college education and right-leaning people are less likely to have a college education. It isn’t because people on the left are smart enough to go to college or have the money to, it’s that more move to the left afterwards because going to college teaches you about life outside your small area and teaches you about people who are different from you. The same thing happens in humanities classes, whether you take them at college or not. They broaden your experience outside of just technical stuff. I think that is very important to building a society of people who care about other people and who want to make the world better for others besides themselves.
I also think you have it wrong about “That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil.” Universities were almost COMPLETELY about creating well-rounded people for a thousand years. It is only in the last hundred or so years that college has been about creating a targeted workforce. The first trade school wasn’t “invented” until 1823, and they didn’t become a big thing until after WWII in the 1940s. Universities pumping out engineers became a thing with land-grant schools in the late 1880s. Basically, the industrial revolution in the 1800s shifted college from creating well-rounded people to being focused on careers. “Majors” weren’t invented until 1885 (at Indiana University, which seems weird to me that it was invented there). Before that, you just took a whole bunch of electives based on what you were interested in or whatever your advisor was interested in. In the 1600s when Harvard and Yale were built, they were built for the reason you specifically say came about in the 20th century.
“This was an especially English ideal, realized in the colleges that made up the universities at Oxford and Cambridge. There, students studied, lived, and worshiped in communities with their teachers—and they would do the same at Harvard and Yale. In that way, education became not merely a training of mind or a preparation for profession, but a comprehensive experience meant to develop character, to develop the whole human being in all its dimensions- intellectual, moral, personal.”
It is true that requiring a general education as part of a set curriculum came about in the early-20th century, but that’s only because so many people were only going to college to get professional skills that schools needed to figure out a way to structure and standardized what was never structured or standardized in the past.
I do agree with you that we should make available to anyone at any age humanities classes. And I do agree trade/certification schools are an awesome way to create a better life for yourself or simply to get to do thing you want to do with your life. I also agree that requiring going into massive debt at expensive universities just to get basic jobs needs to die… but I want it to die by having universities be free to attend so anyone can have access to those basic jobs while also having access to a life-broadening experience.
Expecting students to pay thousands for each course for vague “personal enrichment” is unreasonable and is just gatekeeping job credentials.
The question I’d like to ask is, do you need an expensive big formal institution like a university for general purpose personal enrichment? What alternitives could work? What do they look like? Student debt and GPAs surely can’t be the only way
The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.
Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.
The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…
The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.
Absolutely! I say this as a Comp Sci major who loves the humanities (and almost studied History). General education should encompass introductions to both the STEM and humanities areas. It is equally frustrating when I can’t walk through a 7th grade level algebraic function with someone with a Master’s degree in International Relations and when I can’t reference a fairly common part of mythology with a software engineer.
For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.
You mean like how a History major at Purdue is required to take 5 Science courses, while an Engineering student is required to take 5 Gen Ed courses (only 3 of which need to be in Humanities)?
As a victim of the education system, I’m totally in favor of starting from first principals and redesigning the whole system from the ground up.
I kinda agree. The problem is college became the way to get a job and it was never meant for that. Everything used to be las and then majors pulled off into their own schools because there was just to much to learn in the actual major. If someone is going to do research or education then they are going to need that broad grounding in things outside the main field but like every job should not need that. An LAS school I went to people talked about how at one point it only had a few majors. Pre law, pre med, theology, math, and sciences.
“The way to get a job.”
The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.
Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.
yeah that is exactly what im saying. it was never meant for every job to require it but it kinda became that way at some point. Never should have happened.
Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.
No, fuck that. I will continue to consider learning for its own sake among the most interesting and important things a person can do.
As adorable as that is, hunger and cold have ways of asserting themselves.
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 regret going to college, the speedrunners have the right to get the credential they need
I didn’t get any credential and I consider college one of the better things I did as a young adult. Learned a lot, experienced a bunch of cool things (and people) that make me a more rounded person, and I paid almost nothing out of pocket. (Thanks FAFSA)
I’ve already spent more than 4 years in college with little to show for it. If speed-running college to get that piece of paper at the end is what it takes. more power to them.
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.
it’s not that getting the piece of paper is enough as much as it has become a minimum standard for gaining jobs that frankly-shouldn’t require it. The guy that has “some college experience” looks the same in the eyes of the employer as the guy who never went to college, because they don’t have a piece of paper.
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.
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?
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 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.
In the US they can fire you for any (or no) reason
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.
