So, perhaps everyone's degree is devalued, because it becomes too easy to see that what the degree represents is not such a big deal. But another thing that's devalued is the experience of in-person education. Why wouldn't everyone switch to the cheaper, more efficient method? The purveyors of in-person education need to prove what they have on offer is better. We assume it's better, but is it? And is it that much better?
April 19, 2026
"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.'"
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85 comments:
MIT's full curriculum is available online for free. It is just the credential that costs money.
I can see the value of in person learning in a few cases, perhaps lab work, or internships, but the rest is just making money for the institution.
The university system will be gone, or drastically shrunken, within decades. The scales are falling from the public's eyes.
What Ann says is true, but only if the in-person pedagogue is truly teaching and not just indoctrinating like so many today.
One of Trump's (genuinely) great ideas was the American Academy which would make universal free (online) college a real thing. Now that would have been a hell of a legacy. Instead, we got the war in Iran. 🥳
Colleges have already devalued their "credentials" quite well on their own.
Certification without production is like knowledge without experience.
"D.D. Driver said...
One of Trump's (genuinely) great ideas was the American Academy which would make universal free (online) college a real thing. Now that would have been a hell of a legacy. Instead, we got the war in Iran."
D.D. are you sitting down? I have something to tell you, and it's going to hurt. Ready? Ok, here we go. As of tomorrow noon, Donald Trump has two years and 9 months left in his term.
At Creighton, that wouldn’t be possible. There was lots of required reading and papers to write.
Yeah, but does the University of Maine at Presque Isle have a football team? No.
Ohio (like many states) has a program called College Credit Plus which provides funding and dual credit (high school and college) for HS student to take college courses. The college credits transfer to all state colleges and many out of state and private. Daughter graduated college in 5 Semesters but did also take 2 credit by examination courses. Big cost saver. Public high schools tend to push Advanced Placement courses over the dual credit as it seems they lose some funding when kids go to the university/college offerings off campus.
Professors will be replaced in the near future.
Not saying it's a good thing. But it's going to happen.
I think we had it good. I feel bad for the kids coming up.
people NEED TO UNDERSTAND,
that The Purpose of EDUCATION is NOT issuing certificates..
The Purpose of EDUCATION is to provide JOBS for educators;
And MORE IMPORTANLY; Jobs for Administrators
rushing through an online course does NOTHING to provide these Jobs; and MUST BE treated as a HATE CRIME.
Students EXIST to provide Jobs for admins.. THAT is their ONLY purpose
I feel like it takes time for stuff to sink in deeply, you need to steep in some things. Are you really doing calculus and physics in synch, are you reading War and Peace or just reading the cliff notes?
If you are taking a history class, how much room is there to disagree with the course’s take. With a professor, they generally care more if your take is well argued than that you are just able to recite facts and received theories.
FWIW, eleven weeks is 672 hours. Assuming she is studying 8 hours a day she’s putting about 20 hours into each class.
Speeding through the on-line coursework, and saying you got the degree, is like ordering takeout from a Michelin 3-star, eating it on paper plates in your kitchen, and saying, yes, you’ve been to the restaurant.
It’s much easier to read and understand for a test ( especially multiple choice) than it is to read and truly understand a topic. Do these online courses allow questions and discussions with the professors? Having said that, however, this isn’t much different than how a lot of my fellow med students approached our non clinical classes 40 years ago. They felt it was a waste of their time to sit through boring lectures, and since the lectures were all recorded, they just watched them at the library and skipped the boring parts or focused on the parts they didn’t already know from reading.
It leaves a lot of room for mischief. For instance, you could teach about the Viet Nam war only in terms of the domino theory and weak willed democracy and tragedy of losing the war and how do exams go then? Multiple choice, pick the right answer?
Welp, if you can complete the work faster, why not?
My youngest is about to graduate in mechanical engineering, and he says he attended a depressing seminar on the effects of AI on engineering that concluded that the students were being taught to be generalists (in his words, "basically a worse version of AI") and were going to need to become specific subject matter experts on their own in order to get jobs.
I'm working my way through a super great podcast on AI called The AI Cookbook Show with Malcolm Werchova, an AI consultant. 150 episodes or so, I'm on about 40.
In one that I listened to Friday, he talks about webbased company training. He says that people are using AI to complete the course. The AI can mimic perfectly the human, taking a normal time to complete the course, random and common wrong answers, taking a lot of time to answer some questions and so on. The AI does it so well that AI programs to catch people using AI can't detect whether the human did the course or AI.
He says it is going to put traditional company training out of business.
OTOH, he explains how to use AI to deliver fully customized courses that people are willing to take.
I wonder if that is what happened here?
Sure glad I'm not teaching anymore.
John Henry
Most degrees are already worthless.
This is fraud and these "universities" are of course complicit.
I love the photo of Christie Williams in her cap and gown, proudly displaying her Bachelors Degree diploma. Farcical.
She's exactly like the women who get those preposterous boob jobs and then strut "their" hot rack in a skimpy bikini.
Glibar is correct. Our education system is optimized to turn out good soldiers, not critical thinkers.
It eliminates the philosophical and moral guardrails of a society and turns college into a trade school, graduating students without the intellectual flexibility to understand new issues.
I guess college becomes a trade school and when you need to understand new ideas, you can do refresher courses to update your thinking, saving the ruling class, which will be sending their kids to traditional universities, a lot of pushback on the policies that they impose on the rest of us.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say it is without value, a college degree has for quite a while simply indicated you have willingness to invest a considerable amount of effort into going along with a structured organization, along with the time and money to do so. In other words, it was a good marker for a generally MC-UMC background which meant you were going to fit fairly well into a similarly MC-UMC white collar work environment. (this is a slightly more positive spin than given by Gilbar) If you can do that in three months instead of five years, it still sends the same signal.
If anyone does a proper update of 1984, this issue of online training, as opposed to an education, would be a rich area to explore.
The administrators are most alarmed, for their $500K salaries, sports contracts, and alumni fundraising gravy trains are threatened.
1. Split off sports as pro junior leagues.
2. Split off woke women into churches.
3. Split off STEM as the backbone of growth.
4. Split off the trades as the backbone of function.
Send all youth to clubs for social development. Suburban malls are often empty, but teens and seniors used to love malls. They can now serve as learning and mentoring centers -- keep the seniors active and engaged, keep the young from becoming feral animals. No tuition required.
"With a professor, they generally care more if your take is well argued than that you are just able to recite facts and received theories." Maybe; more so in the past than now.
1. Memorization of a course syllabus to take a successful test is not the same thing as learning and comprehension.
2. A certain amount of the education process is teaching you the skills that you need to think and learn on your own, outside of the classroom.
3. This makes a person trainable, and thus makes them hireable to eventually do productive work that will turn somebody a profit.
4. There is always a significant slice of people in a cohort that think cheating is the way to go, and that 'fake it 'till you make it' is a concept with merit. Our society has become more and more skewed by rewarding this philosophy, so much so that now people have advanced within the system and think it's both normal and correct, that it is indeed becoming a norm.
5. There is also a significant cohort that is capable of rational thought, that understands what comprehension is, and seeks to understand as a matter of satisfying their intellect's natural curiosity and drive.
6. If I were hiring any young people, my screening process would be a test of general comprehension of what I consider useful knowledge. If candidates couldn't pass this, they would be dismissed as too clueless to be working in the modern world. at least not in my business.
imTay, there's no "turns college into a trade school". Most colleges have been trade schools for decades. That was certainly my student experience at a Locational State University in the 1980s, and why a degree from an Ivy League school signals you're a member of the nomenklatura.
" ... students were being taught to be generalists (in his words, "basically a worse version of AI") and were going to need to become specific subject matter experts on their own in order to get jobs." Engineering curricula that focus too much on specific subject matter can create engineers who are expert in today's technology but can't easily adapt to the next wave. So most curricula skew toward more general knowledge. A.I. may make it harder, but you still have to adapt to new technologies.
UMPI? I remember going to UMPI's presentation at my high school just to get out of gym class. A Harvard professor's son did the same. I haven't heard anything from or about UMPI since.
If there had been online testing and assessment in 1988 for college degrees, I could have passed all of the ones in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology during a single week of testing. I could have passed all the other mandatory classes, literature, history, etal. with a single concentrated semester, or two, in-class. Of course, in the STEM classes I had spent the previous 3 years working through all of the textbooks and problem sets in a comprehensive fashion.
I believe around 60% of students get very little more knowledge from traditional in-person education than they could get from an online degree. They are not interested in mastering or really exploring a subject; they just want to figure out how to pass the tests, and then move on.
Even so, the other aspects of being at a college or university are (or could be) equally valuable: social connections, exposure to ideas or fields of study, athletics, other extracurricular activities. Sitting at home doing online classes misses all of that.
But in practice, universities botch a lot of this: Only certain progressive ideas are allowed, and "fields of study" extend to garbage areas like gender studies.
So the university of the future could cut 75% of the professors and administrators (and 100% of the crap studies professors), offer traditional classes to those who can get something out of them, online classes to the rest, and have faculty and staff manage the extra-curriculars.
There's too much vested interest in the current system, so this won't happen any time soon, but eventually the customers will figure out they are overpaying.
Imagine if you only had to pay for the learning you wanted.
The college purchase is like when you buy a pallet of returned stuff from Amazon, except you pay top dollar for everything in there.
While labwork was a part of my original undergraduate work, the truth is this- 99% of the skills needed for a chemistry lab were only acquired when I was in graduate school working in the lab every single day after the very first semester of grad school.
College is to learning what the public library is to the internet.
"College is to learning what the public library is to the internet."
Except for the distraction level which college and the internet are pretty even on.
Bullshit degrees in simpleton subjects. Only real geniuses going to be able to breeze through all I've got prerequisites for a stem degree. Not to mention, how do you replace lab work? How do you replace building physical objects? How do you replace field mapping in geology with online classes? Basically, the only degree that you can get in that short period of time is something that is completely worthless anyway and that person would be much better to learn those skills on the job.
When I was attending a liberal arts college in the early-mid 1980s, my friends and I concluded that 65% of what we learned there was how to behave at a cocktail party. In the 40+ years since, I've seen no evidence our conclusion was incorrect.
By avoiding "in-person "teaching", they're saved the indoctrination so prevalent today in what was, formerly, higher education.
If people only learned what they wanted to learn rather than were forced to take a broad swath of subjects, then they would be ensconced in a dunning-kruger bubble.
The main thing about young people is they don't know what they don't know. Having to learn things that are outside your comfort zone is a very important skill that will stand you in good stead lighter in life. Also, there's a very good chance that a quarter of the subjects that you thought you weren't interested in will pique your interest in something and potentially start a lifelong fascination with an odd subject that will be of good service either as a hobby application, or you'll figure out a way to apply it directly to your profession.
These are the degrees Ms. Williams has from UMPI. How useful are they?:
"Bachelor of Liberal Studies with multiple minors at UMPI. By Fall 2024, I had also completed my Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership at UMPI. In 2026, I went back to complete an Associate of Arts in Liberal Studies with a Business Administration concentration, "
Here's an example. Bachelor of arts degree required that I take to fine arts classes. I took new German Cinema in which I learned about the great great German film director verner erzog right at the beginning of his career. The other art class I took was documentary film studies in which I learned about how documentary films were used as propaganda, like the why we fight series produced by Frank Capra in World War II, in which the Russians were made to sound like great bunch of people that were United in their love of their socialist Republic and deserved all of our help in winning the war. We also saw Titicutt Follies by Frederick Wiseman and learned about how institutions were helpless in the face of mental illness.
So this produced a lifelong hoppy of enjoying foreign cinema and documentary films.
We also had a 5 quarter language requirement in which I was able to substitute two quarters of computer programming in Fortran and in a quarter of layer algebra, a quarter of differential equations and two quarters of of upper division/graduate level fluid mechanics from the math Department. This was all directly useful in my first consulting job as I was able to BS my way into a numerical modeling position based on my background in college.
The real problem is everyone takes the easy way out because they're so fearful of taking a hard class and getting a lower grade and being embarrassed because someone might think they're stupid.
It can be that much better. But it takes faculty who care about students and teaching, and a school thay supports this. Degree mills or lifestyle schools are going to suffer, rightly so.
It also depends heavily on the degree. Anything that can be done in that short of time means there is no building on previous material amd no need for reflection. So neother a science nor a good liberal arts subject. That short means all busy work, no learning at all, just a credential to put on a resume. But if I were hiring in a lot of admin roles, she shoeed great skills in maximizing the system.
"She's exactly like the women who get those preposterous boob jobs and then strut "their" hot rack in a skimpy bikini."
I dunno, if you take the risks of anaesthesia, getting cut open, and having foreign objects in your body for the rest of your life, you can probably claim the results as your own. Plus the accomplishment of making the money to pay for it.
If I ever get the penile enlargement surgery, you can bet I'm going to parade around showing off "my" bulge! CC, JSM
so..
of all the Comp Sci students i met at Iowa State
(back at the turn of the century)..
the ONE doing well dropped/flunked after his sophmore year..
He then went out and got a job at a company trying to hook up iowa with fiberobtic internet..
first as a help desk person; then as a tech dude.
THEN got a job at a Facebook datacenter working on their routers
(or such).
*THEN* he was supervising a team of tech dudes there.
*NOW* he has bought himself a Ferrari;
and complains about how (because of That Darned TRUMP);
premium gas is Really expensive.
So, in other words; he's a college dropout that is richer than sh*t..
and had no debt
comparison/contrast with a college grad with $150k in school loans
college isn't for losers: College is for Administrators
College is a makework program for college employees
What this lady did was click-through, multiple-choice stuff. Which apparently is what a lot of colleges do in the brick/mortar classroom. And hey, if the purpose of your college is to prep you for a multiple-choice GRE/LSAT/MCAT/GMAT, why not?
But the real remote education is going to be individualized AI instruction. This will eventually give you the same advantages as classroom discussion, individualized essay feedback, Socratizing, and all the other good stuff. And it will also be efficient because you won't have to camp out in the hall for office hours, listen through the useless prattle of the gunners/springbutts in the classroom, or organize your life around a class schedule. The AI is available for you when you need it. So you will still be able to speed through a degree, but maybe not as fast as this lady.
VR will also be able to simulate a lot of lab work, probably meeting the undergrad standard of showing you how the natural world operates. If you are actually trying to learn physical lab skills like scalpel work, titration, soldering, etc, then yeah you will still need a physical lab. Ditto for field work in natural or environmental sciences. CC, JSM
Pedant alert:
So, perhaps everyone's degree is devalued, because it becomes to easy to see that what the degree represents is not such a big deal.
missing an o
Can I return my diploma with a box of elbow macaroni and get a refund?
I am currently enrolled in an on-line accounting program. While the temptation to use AI for everything is there (luckily AI is not good around the edges for obscure accounting knowledge), there is still some measure of work required to actually complete the classes. I do miss the in-person portion. When I got masters in finance, back when on-line was considered substandard, I learned so much more from in-class work and student interaction missing from online work. Online sucks, but I just don't have the free time to commute to school.
The colleges largely brought this on themselves by failing to control quality. I have taught at a mid-tier public university in the east for the past 30 years. We have cut the number of hours in class for every degree program, allowed grade inflation to spiral out of control, offered full-credit courses in summer and winter sessions that can be completed in a month, and measured teaching quality almost solely on the basis of student evaluations. As a consequence, students complete far less work out of class, reading lists are shorter, and students learn less.
The problem with college today is simple. They have exploded the bloated size of the administration, creating hordes of deans covering every little pet project and every little group of people that feels oppressed or slighted in some way. The other thing is they have redesigned the curriculum to include much more b******* subjects don't help anyone with learning about the world or critical thinking.
So now what we have are words and hordes of college graduates who have degrees that qualify them to be a barista at Starbucks saddled with $200,000 of non-dischargeable debt at usury interest rates.
Higher education used to be for the top 1 or 2 percent of IQ, plus rich men's sons. Both of those groups tended to do very well in life, and it was erroneously supposed that everyone would do well in life, if only they had a college education. Expanding to the top 10 or 20 percent of IQ has worked out OK, but you can't learn to be a rich man's son. At least, not in college.
"These are the degrees Ms. Williams has from UMPI. How useful are they?"
Well, Ms. Williams is a "human resources executive". I doubt that another 10,000 hours of higher education would improve her performance much.
missing an o
Flight: Shit. that's just to easy!
Willie: No. that shit is too easy!
Flight: It's to easy!
Willie: No. that shit is... too easy!
Flight: Fuck it. I don't want too play no more.
Willie: I don't want to play no more either.
A tiny "ding".... "it becomes to easy...". To?.
No layers and layers of fact checkers here OR the NYT. And, of course, looking through MY posts with an editor's eye would be blush worthy
FWIW our oldest, in his senior year took advantage of multiple paths to stack credits for (e.g. attend a seminar and submit a written evaluation). He accumulated more than a typical semester's credits. His counselor tried to say he could not do that. But our son was able to show the counselor had signed of on each of the credits. Saved him months and thousands.
Online degrees 🙄
In similar manner, my child got through the 3 years of high school a year early by careful selection of classes and one summer of community college courses. The school counselors told her it couldn't be done, she showed them her planned schedule and they said, well, yes, it can.
"Just Do It" is more than a slogan for footwear.
Demographics are such that the maintenance of existing physical facilities is questionable--even without online and AI alternatives, there will be fewer and fewer young people around to use (and pay for) the classrooms, dorms, gyms, pools, stadiums, food courts and libraries.
When I retired in 2015 the intellectual rot was well advanced, and the Admin Blob was already in bloat. It has only gotten worse since.
Lazuras, did you go to Schenk High School?
I enrolled in the Peterson Academy. More to learn about certain subjects than to work toward a degree.
To be fair to the colleges, not that they deserve it, but some of the administrative bloat is due to government (state and federal). Even private universities have to kowtow to government bureaucrats and accreditation organizations, in order to be in "compliance," and to get all the required approvals. And there are government carrots as well as sticks--grants and other funding that create more needless departments and offices at the universities.
A college degree, any place, any type is an easy screening sieve. Got one? You may pass? No degree? Get thee gone. Mostly sieved through the application process.
Our youngest has returned to college for that very reason. Found certain "requirements" for his chosen degree (English oh my - with Technical Writing as an emphasis - thank goodness) have been eliminated while he was out of school. For example "Shakespeare course? Gone. LGBT++++ courses? Options galore.
Some requirements are, varying by semester, only available on line. Our son hates on line work. Does well, but hates them. He thrives on personal communication.
The school counselors told her it couldn't be done, she showed them her planned schedule and they said, well, yes, it can.
I'm sure the administrators, who recognize the lost revenue from her early graduation, are working feverishly to eliminate that opportunity.
She's an HR Executive? Bleagh. The transition of "Personnel", a service group for a company, into "Human Resources", dipping their paws into areas where they are incompetent, was half of the reason why I retired early.
Looks like in UMPI's YourPace online program course completion is based on final "exams" called "assessments" which are not proctored, so they are "open browser."
In other words, they don't open the box to see if it's full of noodles.
Howard said...
The problem with college today is simple. They have exploded the bloated size of the administration, creating hordes of deans covering every little pet project and every little group of people that feels oppressed or slighted in some way. The other thing is they have redesigned the curriculum to include much more b******* subjects don't help anyone with learning about the world or critical thinking.
So now what we have are words and hordes of college graduates who have degrees that qualify them to be a barista at Starbucks saddled with $200,000 of non-dischargeable debt at usury interest rates.
Howard said almost everything here.
I just want to add that the University system has morphed from whatever it was in 1945 and before into a scam that older generations have used to turn younger generations into their slaves.
It is a lot like Social Security.
We need to start seizing endowments and pensions. This is why we never made it back to the moon among many other things.
The advantage of higher Ed isn’t in the instruction, it’s in confirming that people know things. It’s the assessments, not the lessons, that are valuable.
“Bullshit degrees in simpleton subjects.”
My first thought, as well. Highly doubt that any competent mechanical engineers are produced this way. It’s essentially a charlatan factory.
I’ve watched a few people of my acquaintance get their education degrees this way, though. Clearly not an intellectually rigorous process. One woman even acknowledged that getting her education Masters was basically an exercise in formalistic bullshitting.
"a scam that older generations have used to turn younger generations into their slaves."
This is sort of true, but it's a specific class that does this. For instance, in 1998, Joe Biden pushed through a reform that made discharging students loans all but non dischargeable, and the banks made his worthless cokehead son a vice president in return, and the class that does this brings entire countries into its thrall, makes serfs of their citizens, in the same way, with debt. The lucky ones get to be yeoman.
If you don't know what you don't know, and are nevertheless certain that what you don't know doesn't have any value, well, don't make me say it.
That last post is kind of scrambled because I did a lot of fact checking and revisions.
I think online classes and degrees are fine if they are well done and given as live lectures with questions allowed. But the 4 month ba is laughable.
If you got a math ba there would not be anywhere near enough time to personally do all the required proofs. In math analysis one students do 10 hrs of proof writing per week for 15 weeks, how could you possibly do 8 or 10 classes like that in four months plus semester 8 hrs of physics and 4 hrs of chemistry. I’m sure if you took some classes you just have multiple choice questions and you can pass by just picking the most woke option, but this is just silly.
How would you like to drive over a bridge designed by a civil engineer with 3 months of schooling? You can't speed learn science and engineering. As a chemical engineer myself, I would laugh at the prospect of hiring somebody with such a BS.
The answers to the Professor's questions are "no" and "no". The longer answer is that this woman probably knows as much as most college graduates, i.e., nothing.
"Alarming educators". I'll bet.
Broken rice bowls are always alarming, not to mention the lost opportunity to turn the kids into Molotov-tossing radicals.
Higher education used to be for the top 1 or 2 percent of IQ, plus rich men's sons. Both of those groups tended to do very well in life, and it was erroneously supposed that everyone would do well in life, if only they had a college education.
Reynolds' Law is undefeated.
The purveyors of in-person education need to prove what they have on offer is better. We assume it's better, but is it? And is it that much better?
As long as it's run by leftists, it's worse, and always will be worse
Money Manger said...
Speeding through the on-line coursework, and saying you got the degree, is like ordering takeout from a Michelin 3-star, eating it on paper plates in your kitchen, and saying, yes, you’ve been to the restaurant.
So you're saying the "Michelin 3-star" is not about the food?
I was amused by the title and subtitle of another education article linked from that WaPo page:
"Some of the most popular graduate degrees don’t pay off financially, study finds: The report found advanced degrees in social work and psychology may have a zero to negative return, while medicine, law and pharmacy degrees show the highest return."
Are large lecture courses really "in person" education? Sure, you are physically there and not somewhere else connecting electronically, but lectures are still relatively impersonal. Or are they? Is there something you get from being in the presence of a lecturer than you don't get from a Zoom presentation or a recording?
If there had been online testing and assessment in 1988 for college degrees
CLEP (the College-Level Examination Program) was around back then, though of course not online. It's from the same people (the College Board and Educational Testing Service) who gave us the SAT and AP exams. Curiously, CLEP has withered while AP has flourished. Even when I was going to school it was pretty much under everyone's radar.
The SAT Subject Exams (a.k.a. the Achievement Exams) were dropped in the COVID era. They had declining enrollment and had largely been replaced by AP exams. With all the licensed prep materials AP exams are also probably more remunerative for the non-profit College Board. CLEP probably survives because of the money it gets from the DOD and Veterans Affairs.
All these comments and not a single mention yet of Griggs v Duke Power? No, I cannot offer a strict proof that this decision was a big part of the move to using a college degree as a replacement for employer assessments in hiring, because neither history nor sociology are hard sciences. But that degree of government intrusion and second-guessing had to have had a significant effect. You want a lawsuit from the EEOC? No???
If you really think about it. This is the EXACT SAME THING as speed-running the appalachian trail. Getting a degree in 2 months compared to getting a four year college education; and traversing the Georgia to Maine trail in 40 days supported compared to through hiking the trail with all your own gear are not the same things.
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