Now College is Free! Whopii!

Free college.  Not too sure how they are going to make money, but the idea is very interesting.  Here is how it works.  Lots of people volunteer to teach classes on line.  Students can take the courses and earn a degree from the college.  Couple of kickers are - the college is not accredited.  And, it only offers two courses of study:  business administration and computer science. Well, we can add one more drawback, the name.  The University. of the People.  Sounds a bit hokie.

However, name aside, this idea has some merit.  First is that if employers accept graduates' degrees as valid this could change the status of college financing.  I have lived through the time when people believed that employers would not accept a for profit college degree and an online college degree.  Hard to imagine that these degrees were ever questioned, and no, I am not that old.

The question is, how relevant is a prestigious degree versus what a student knows?  Most college faculty don't want students to passport stamp through a series of prefab courses but want them to actually learn and be able to apply that learning to real life problem solving.  Not all students coming out of all colleges can do this, $50,000 a year or not. 

This concept of the free college needs to be watched as the graduates emerge.  If they can impress employers then we have a viable contender here. 

We Have Shot Ourselves in the Foot; Now the Leg?

We are entering a new public attitude toward higher education and it ain't good.  It is change.  But we aren't sure what the change is going to look like. So we have to analyze what is happening in and outside of the ivory towers to understand the direction we have to go.  This isn't the first time.  Higher education has taken a turn as the economy and industry needs changed in the U.S.  In the beginning, the main job of professors was to teach.

Universities first started mainly as teacher colleges and some prestigious colleges were to educate the rich, white and privileged.  That changed after WWII when we realized after the birth of the nuclear bomb that we needed technology and a lot of it.  With technology we needed a trained workforce from blue to white collar that not only would build and manage technology but create innovative products.  From the transistor radio to the iPad.  The main job of professors flipped to research and science, math, engineering and technology became king.  We even designed our intelligence tests to measure students' probability of becoming a physicists.  Like all kids want to be a physicist!

Now the economy of the U.S. is changing.  Higher education has been able to raise costs easily as federal aid and government backed loans increased as the cost of an education increased.  More and more students have entered college than ever before.  And, standards have been interpreted to have slipped.  And there seems to be an anti-intellectual movement in the U.S. And college loan debt has exceeded credit card debt in the U.S.  So now everyone is questioning if everyone should go to college.  This is all pointing to the perfect storm!

Legislators have pretty much had it with so many high school students going into college, their not being ready, and having to paying for them to take remedial courses that catch them up to what they should have learned in college.  Faculty complain about having too many adjuncts and at the same time complaining that they have to teach more than two courses and adjuncts, at a small fraction of tenured faculty's salary, complain that they can only teach two.

Pretty much the system is not functioning well.  As a result, we have boards beginning to micro-manage colleges.  In Texas they have begun measuring the worth of each faculty member by people with no experience in education.  We even have a hard time defining what constitutes a good teacher.  Sigh.

In the next couple years, experts in education are going to have to work fast to fix higher education before local and state boards jump in and stir up the waters.  However  industry will hold a trump card as the U.S. goes from a consumer economy with intellectual property to sell and finance our treasured lifestyle to a ...........? economy and maybe a different lifestyle.  Colleges will have to adjust to what they need.