The College For-Profits Should Fear | Hacker News Reader

The College For-Profits Should Fear

washingtonmonthly.com

122 pointsblatherard67 comments

The key paragraph:

"WGU’s answer to the status quo is to offer a degree that is based on competency rather than time. By gathering information from employers, industry experts, and academics, Western Governors formulates a detailed, institution- wide sense of what every graduate of a given degree program needs to know. Then they work backward from there, defining what every student who has taken a given course needs to know. As they go, they design assessments—tests—of all those competencies. “Essentially,” says Kevin Kinser, a professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, “they’re creating a bar exam for each point along the way that leads to a degree.”"

The one they should really worry about is Khan Academy:

1. Free

2. Gamification of learning (aka certification)

3. Social web integrated into learning (a network to see your certifications)

4. Inverting the traditional model - do your homework in class watch vids/read at night at home.

KA is on the way toward replacing traditional degrees the same way Stackoverflow and Github are replacing traditional resumes.

Once KA starts offering courses that are at university level, perhaps. But as it stands the level of the topics covered on KA is far to superficial to threaten universities. That's not to say it won't happen, but so far I've seen no indication of it.

PS. With all that being said, I'm huge fan of KA, and rooting for their continued success. I just think they're better suited to take on high schools rather than universities.

Fundamental? Yes. Superficial? No.

I believe hé meant superficial in the way that the courses don't go into the deep end of the subject the way a university course might (which is absolutely ok, as it is not aimed at students at that level, but at the same time it means that it cannot replace a real university).

Really? I guess I am in minotrity, but after watching a few lessons on KA I I left with impression that quality of teaching is quite poor. Educational videos may be one part of education, but they cannot replace all. Teachers are there to stay for a long long time and it has nothing todo with technology.

I don't know about the quality of the other subjects (since I don't know enough about them to judge him) but I do know that his economy lectures were pretty good.

A halfway engaged HS physics teacher would do far better than the videos I sampled on basic kinematics and newtons laws.

The stuff there is just _begging_ for in person demos.

From what I've seen, KA is better than nothing, or a really indifferent teacher. But If you have a better than average teacher, they're going to far surpass KA.

Reminds me of the quote, "Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be."

I love the quote, but of course, I am concerned that in our push to move to computer-based learning, we push out the teachers who can't be replaced by a computer.

Exactly right. Khan Academy's macro effect on K-12 education at present is limited to challenging the value and application of lectures. (Gamification of education which is not an original concept at all.)

It's not even close to replacing instruction, since there are dozens of valuable things that instructors do besides lecture.

And the notion that it will replace or even put a dent in traditional higher ed in our lifetime is pretty uninformed -- that isn't the problem they're setting out to fix.

Not knowing KA well enough, would anyone here hire someone with only KA credentials? Does a KA certification add much in hirability value?

would anyone here hire someone with only KA credentials?

I definitely would NOT hire anyone only with Khan Academy credentials in mathematics. Mathematics courses are what made Khan Academy famous, and as far as I know, Salman Khan does about as well as anyone in online mathematics lectures. (I've seen very little of his lectures, or of anyone's, as I would rather read books about mathematics than watch videos about mathematics.)

But "mathematics is not a spectator sport," in the oft-repeated phrase, and no one can get a complete education in mathematics without solving A LOT of problems.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663

The Khan Academy developers are aware of this issue, and are currently rewriting the exercise engine(s) on Khan Academy to make more challenging online exercises for the Khan Academy math courses. But it will take a long time to get the delivery model of the courses unstuck from exercises and fully interweaved into problem-solving.

An organization that is much farther along in building an infrastructure of sound mathematical instruction based on problem-solving is Art of Problem Solving, which has a free online problem-solving database called Alcumus

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Alcumus/Introduction.php

and many online courses in various levels of mathematics, supported by thoroughly written textbooks

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/index.php?

and an increasing number of video lectures, as well as discussion forums.

KA will matter to for-profit universities the minute a KA score triggers your union contract to bump your salary up. (The existence of this interaction is a major reason why for-profit universities love teachers.)

What is required to trigger the bumb in the salary? I ask, because I assume that the education has to be relevant.

Getting a piece of paper (i.e. degree/certification). Lots of old fashioned rules are still around that automatically promote you to a new pay grade if you suddenly have a new qualification

Paper has to come from an accredited institution, right?

So, there is some bureaucratic stuff involved in order to be able to qualify for issuing the paper. Not sure KA meets that requirement yet.

Yes the bit of paper has to come from The Right Sort of Place. KA probably doesn't count. And that's why The Right Sort of Places aren't worried.

Many teachers are required to have degrees or a specific numbers of Graduate-level credits from an accredited university. It will likely be a long time before they accept KA certificates. KA would need to partner with some of the accredited universities in the interim that could then accept some number of KA certificates as transfer credits.

The 30% profit margin University of Phoenix makes is a signal to other investors to enter the field and innovate! This is a feature not a bug of markets. Non-profit just means they are maximizing more opaque measures of success. Of course the accreditation barriers to entry are still quite innovation stifling.

also, I'd be shocked if WGU doesn't come under fire for 'disparate impact', otherwise known as racism at some point.

how does racism play into this?

Sorry, talking about the history of standardized testing will get me downvoted. Guess how I know.

Disparate impact is orthogonal to education; it's a legal test that applies to employment, in disputes over the direct relevance of a criterion to job performance. This might affect WGU in some 2nd order way if it were claimed that credential requirements have a disparate impact (well duh, enrollment stats), but that claim would apply equally to any tertiary institution. It seems absurd, but I'm curious if that test has ever been tried against a national professional accreditation... Few quick searches didn't return anything.

The 30% profit margin sometimes also signals that there are high barriers to entry. (You already mention what I think is the big one: accreditation.)

FTA: Those fixed standards enable a world of variation. At Western Governors, students aren’t asked to sit in a class any longer than it takes for them to demonstrate that they have mastered the material. In fact, they aren’t asked to sit in a “class” at all.

This article seems to suggest that at other US universities, you actually have to show up to classes to pass them? Is that actually the case????

Good luck passing an in-class final without attending class at least once.

Lucky for me most of my undergrad classes had take-home exams.

Attendance-based grading is the salve a mediocre instructor applies to keep up the appearance that they're creating value for the university.

Sometimes, however, attendance policies are also benevolent paternalism: I say this because I teach English comp at the University of Arizona. Students who don't show up tend to miss a lot of the material and don't do especially well—hence the attendance policy. And the stuff that's done in class (discussion, close reading, sentence construction, and so forth) is stuff that can't really be made up outside of class—as I tell students, if you could do it at home, I'd say, "Do it at home" and I'd do something else in class.

Yeah, there's a correlation != causation problem with weak students who tend to miss class being the ones who most need it, but the overall idea of class doing things that can't really be done otherwise still holds. There are also a certain number of students who say or believe, "I'm already a good writer; I don't need to take a composition class." Out of the ~300 I've taught, that's probably been true of one to five, or so, but far more seem to have believed it.

A school like the one listed sounds great. It also sounds like it'll work best for the highly motivated. One problem with the HN posts about how universities are wasteful, unnecessary, and so on, is that a pretty small percentage of people are willing to do university-caliber work without the structure of the university. HN posters tend to forget about the other 97% of the world. I tend to see them, and so do a lot of other teacher / prof types.

I find this very believable and would like to add that some people learn best by reading about a subject, some by performing exercises, some by listening and conversing and for some it's a mix of all of those. I wouldn't expect the typical 18 year old college freshman to be self-aware enough to know this about himself. That's not to say it's impossible, but I think for the majority, it's something they still need to discover. Graded attendance gives them an incentive to explore this.

From what I've noticed, the more you understand the subject, the better you learn from reading on your own and the less you learn from exercices, listening or conversing. I think the cause is that there is a difference in focus: With books, you can identify the things you already understand ( as-is or as an analogy to something you understand ) and focus on the new stuff, so the more you understand, the better you focus on the new stuff. The problem is that when you don't understand lots of things well enough, your concentration is not focused, so you end up with a superficial understanding and forgetting a lot as you go. The solution comes in the form of exercices, which provide an artifial focus, having your full attention until you understand them very well, which is good if you're a beginner, but redundant if you are experienced.

Often it's required of the prof as well. Mandating classroom attendance is a way for colleges to retain students through two means:

1): Making N% of the grade attendance based means that students have to do even less well to fail the course.

2): For a student who would need to learn the material to pass, there is a learning benefit to attending the class. Moreover, more people in a lecture hall is going to create an impression that you do need to show up to pass.

Baloney. It is a mechanism to keep the lower half of the bell curve in class and absorbing some level of information.

You are too charitable. I think it's a medieval tradition, dating back to the days when lecturers were real authorities on the courses they were teaching.

I'm not saying that lecturers are no longer competent at the stuff they teach, or that they aren't great authorities on something, but they don't have the edge that they used to.

If you want to understand the cutting edge of a field, you go to conferences, and listen to top researchers talking about their field. Perhaps that's what undergraduate lecturers used to be. But research gets more specialized and eclectic every year, while the foundations become more firmly bedded down.

Undergrad education is mostly a solved problem. Courses don't change much from year to year, except the useless faddish ones. New research gradually seeps down, but it's rare that you need an expert to bring it all together.

I'm speaking from experience.

edit:

I was a TA for early CS classes. Sometimes we took attendance, sometimes we didn't. When we did, more people showed up, and more people passed. Teachers have a responsibility to teach both sides of the bell curve, and generally pressuring people to learn helps the lower side pass. I understand that it's kind of old fashioned and authoritarian from the perspective of a top student, but it really winds up better for the bottom students in general.

I don't think this is generally true. I can certainly think of a few classes I passed while hardly showing up.

But there are some reasons you might need to regularly show up even without the case of a teacher who counts attendance (which the school might require of them if it's an intro sort of class). There might be unscheduled in-class quizzes (I think this is pretty rare). More commonly, though, the teacher may not have bothered to set up a course website, so without showing up you won't know what the homework is or when the tests are. The latter is something I remember quite a few cases of.

Even if you don't show up, the course still takes up time in the sense that you can generally only register for so many classes at a time.

rare? almost every one of my classes had random quizzes.

I was trying to think of a college or graduate level course I took that had random quizzes, and I couldn't think of any off the top of my head.

I remember there was one freshman level math class where you can drop off homework assignments and exams in the teacher's mailbox. I diligently completed every homework and exam, but didn't attend a single class. I knew most of the material already so I spent my time more productively elsewhere. To this day I don't even know what the professor looked like.

Some (all? I don't know) schools and regulations tie up your financial aid with attendance in some way or another. It's often more concerning than the grades, but easier to game.

(Response to above, and most of its responses.)

I understand that you can not show up and pass a class, but why in the world would you spend all that money and time on a physical university if you aren't going to go to class? Why not just read a book and get a job?

Sadly, because of what a degree means. This goes doubly so for a degree from a "big name".

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, but I can't deny that a majority of people I meet will be impressed with someone who went to MIT, Yale or Harvard. Likewise, I think a majority of people (albeit a lesser-majority) will have reservations about someone with "only" a high school education.

In most industries, you won't find people saying "show me what you can do" before you show them you have a degree. The tech industry is far more egalitarian in this sense, which is awesome.

The question you should be asking: what is the marginal benefit of ass-in-seat time to a student?

Because you hadn't heard about Western Governors University, and thought you needed to enrol in a brick-and-mortar university to get a half-way credible degree?

Most of the benefits university provides are not gained in class, those being accreditation, networking, and being in a group of really smart people. Moreover a lot of people are spending somebody else's money through scholarships and etc.

I had a course split between low level computer architecture and networks. The low level part was awesome, but the guy who did the network part was reading from the powerpoint slides that came with the teachers manual.

It was so bad, I stopped going to the lectures. Ended up with the highest possible grade, so little was lost.

Not every class has a professor who is engaging, funny, presents the material in an intuitive way, and invested in his/her students' success. My college tuition was on a per-semester basis, and not a per-unit basis, so I took the required classes as well as classes I found interesting, but spent more time on the later than former.

While you may not have to show up to pass some classes at traditional universities, you still have to wait a semester to pass them. Under the WGU system you can simply pass the class whenever you feel ready and move on to other subjects.

This is highly dependent on the professor of the class in question. Professor's will sometimes offer a student the option of testing out of a class. It of course depends on the institution exactly what goes on the transcript in these cases, but usually it will not count towards the GPA an will be treated in a manner similar to AP credit.

That's exactly right. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held. The only value added by GWU in that instance is some form of verification/certification. It seems more appropriate that if you already know the material you be placed into a higher level course, otherwise the educational system runs the risk of stagnating at a base level of knowledge rather than challenging students to excel.

>. It doesn't seem right that one can receive credit hours for knowledge previously held.

Sure it does. It shows you've met a bar of learning.

That's true, I suppose. But in a perfect world, I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject. They should be promoting the growth of their students. In my opinion, one shouldn't leave university the same person they were when they entered (plus a diploma).

> I don't think universities should just be signing off that you understand a subject.

There are many more considerably more transformative experiences than hanging out with a bunch of same aged young adults having lots of sex, parties, and experiences with new subjects.

You're not going to GW for the first two, and honestly, if you have valid knowledge about the degree, why shouldn't you be able to get it accredited somehow? Why must you use years of real life to sit in classrooms with protoadults who don't work?

Actually, it usually depends on the department not individual professors. In some departments you can test out of classes for credit, in others you can test out of prerequisites so you can move directly to more advanced classes but you don't get credit, and in others you can get credit for some classes but not others. From what I have seen, credit tends to be most available for math classes, many computer science courses will let you test out of lower level (especially language) prerequisites but often won't give you credit for them, and engineering departments will often let you test out of math and science and lower-level departmental courses, but limit the amount of credit you can earn this way. And some courses, especially English and other humanities, sometimes actually take roll and penalize you if you aren't filling a seat.

at berkeley, or at least the college of engineering, there's no way to test out of classes (according to my adviser), so you have to take the course, but you don't have to go to lecture, unless the class has an attendance requirement.

Are most universities in the US for-profit, or is it referring to for-profit online-learning companies?

The vast majority of US universities and colleges are non-profit. Kaplan and Phoenix are for-profit and mostly online.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Category:For-...

WGU consists of 4 colleges: Teachers', Business, IT, and Health Professions. All well and good but I wish quality online programs were also offered in Math, Natural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Writing, Humanities, etc... In my view a good College of Arts and Sciences is what makes University good. A great Engineering program would be awesome too.

Seneca College in Toronto has a similar thing going for its Computer Programming diploma. Or at least, this was the case when I went there:

1) You can take an exam for a class at the beginning of the semester if you think you know the material. There is a cost of this exam, but if you pass, then you save money on taking the whole class... and time too.

2) You must complete every single assignment to pass a given class. Your assignments must work 100%. You'll be graded on style.

3) Every class was offered every semester - even during the summer semester. And there was a section for most classes at night.

There's just one issue: I thought universities were supposed to teach you how to learn, while community colleges were meant for specific job-related skills.

Shouldn't doctors, lawyers, nurses, computer programmers etc... all be getting their job-specific diplomas, just like the mechanics and the electricians? And shouldn't 'degrees' be more research oriented anyway? Why are degrees more valued when whats needed in most cases is someone with a specific skill? Do people with degrees really think that people with diplomas are incapable of learning? Do employers feel this way?

Re: your last paragraph

Degrees are less about learning than making sure you will do a certain amount of work for at least two years and more usually four, even if the work is dumb. So it signals intelligence and conscientiousness.

Having a degree tells people you're at least capable of being a member of the middle class. You're intelligent and biddable enough. Elite university graduates also got some implicit training in the social norms of the upper classes, and by virtue of the intense competition to get in you can be sure anyone who graduated from them is smart. More accurately, anyone they accepted, the dropout rate for top tier US universities is very low (except for Caltech).

And yes, people with degrees do think people without are dumber, and employers likewise, because its true. And alternative certifications for different modes of training/types of knowledge fall prey to the same problems. Having separate, respected educational systems, rather than one for the real people and one for the losers requires relatively low social mobility, or at least hard social mobility.

Seneca College sounds real cool.

> the dropout rate for top tier US universities is very low

The dropout rate for non-engineering schools is pretty low. Engineering schools are all over the map. Caltech is a bit silly to compare to larger schools due to the fact Caltech enrolls <1k undergrads.

single page: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...

I took a bachelors from WGU because I dropped out of college many years ago and went out of the country. I came back and just wanted one to say I had a bachelors. I can say I practically learned nothing from WGU and the coursework was incredibly easy. This is for the IT degree. To be fair to them, most courses were IT certifications. So the real problem was the IT certifications were useless, I mean really, what use is Security+ and related certs. Anyway that is my opinion. I did some IT admin work first, then got more into programming with Ruby on Rails. Probably my path is a bit atypical.

As someone who has interviewed candidates from physical universities with IT degrees I can say the same is probably true of them. I see candidates all the time who can recite the OSI Model by heart but can't figure out a Windows XP system isn't connecting to the network because it doesn't have an IP Address.

I found this article really interesting, Read all the way through it on my phone and made sure to come online to comment.

I have to find myself agreeing that the competency based off of actual employers is one of the best way to get stuff done. And now if KA can get actual teachers and setup actual accreditation systems then all these for-profit groups will be under even more pressure. As people that want these services to thrive I feel the best way for us to allow this to happen is to help them market their schools. Blog posts etc etc that link to the site will hopefully make a google search for "online college" send WGU and Khan to the top.

I for one may be signing up. (I already attend Khan to learn about linear algebra.) Having a business degree from WGU would round out my current repertoire rather nicely I think.

WGU seems to be looked at askance from some googling by positions seeking MBAs

IS WGU the only college of this kind?

Some time ago I toyed with the idea of getting a grad degree for "resume dressing" purposes optimized for price/prestige/convenience. I was pleasantly surprised that there quite a few options after you get over the signal vs. noise problem: finding legit, accredited schools in the sea of diploma mills who spends a ton on marketing on spam (just google "online degree").

The best place I've found to do research on accredited programs (both undergrad & grad) school that cater to adult students is http://www.degreeinfo.com/forum.php. It is the home of a community of people who are good at hacking the diploma game and share their info readily. Folks there tend to favor schools that are in the spirit of this school in the OP article (price/prestige/convenience) but there is quite a good range of schools discussed (for example Duke U.'s MBA program tends to be reviewed favorably as is Delaware for undergrad). There even intrepid individuals there who had foregone the traditional 4 year, "physical seat" undergrad for 2 years of working part-time and distance learning (can be with CLEP exams and the right program).

Nice Link!

I've had experience with Baker College http://www.baker.edu/ in the past, Online Degree... but it was a time-based / attendance base system... WGU "Competence" based accredited degrees seems pretty bad-ass...

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