Monday, September 07, 2009

College for $99.00/Month?

Yah, well, they said newspapers would be forever, too....

Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

The war will be fought over 'credentialization,' which is the usual refuge of scalawags.

There is no serious dispute over the "necessity" of a college degree for 75% of the people who work, productively, in the USA--that is, there IS no such "necessity." Most occupations are well-executed by people who apply common sense and through practice, which is typically supervised by recognized managers, anyway.

"Apprenticeship" is the term used for skilled labor, but that method could just as easily be applied to administrative, accounting, purchasing, quality, plant-management, maintenance, IT, and production/inventory control functions. (Not to mention "education.")

HT: Lott

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