Eduardo Porter, a business columnist for the New York Times, writes enthusiastically about a new and inexpensive way to “skip college.”
He writes:
“This week, AT&T and Udacity, the online education company founded by the Stanford professor and former Google engineering whiz Sebastian Thrun, announced something meant to be very small: the “NanoDegree.”
“At first blush, it doesn’t appear like much. For $200 a month, it is intended to teach anyone with a mastery of high school math the kind of basic programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level position at AT&T as a data analyst, iOS applications designer or the like.
“Yet this most basic of efforts may offer more than simply adding an online twist to vocational training. It may finally offer a reasonable shot at harnessing the web to provide effective schooling to the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream.”
“Intriguingly, it suggests that the best route to democratizing higher education may require taking it out of college.
“We are trying to widen the pipeline,” said Charlene Lake, an AT&T spokeswoman. “This is designed by business for the specific skills that are needed in business.”
“Mr. Thrun sounded more ambitious about the ultimate goal: “It is like a university,” he told me, “built by industry.”
Correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds very much like vocational training, not college.
Porter rightly says that college is out of reach for many young people, and he is right. One of the reasons it is out of reach is that many states are shifting the financial burden from the public to the student. That’s short-sighted. Surely higher education should be available to many more young people, and the way to make it more affordable is to reduce the cost by government subsidies.
Job training is not enough. The doors to higher education should be open to all who have the will and the ability to pursue it, without regard to their income.
Once upon a time, community colleges were free. Once upon a time, states subsidized public higher education to keep costs low.
Here is a book that argues that public higher education should be free. What a dream. Our society invests our treasure elsewhere.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
AT&T? How much is he paid to shovel this sewer sludge. I wouldn’t trust AT&T with my trash even after I shredded any important documents.
Couldn’t agree with you more, Diane. Even more than the degree itself, college offers our children the first, and, perhaps, the only time in their lives where their JOB is to delve into learning, thinking, exploring ideas and creativity with peers doing the same, learning who they are in the world and trying out all kinds of ways of thinking and being. I want this possibility for every child I teach just as much as I worked hard so my “own” children could have this time. Of course corporate “reformers” do NOT want this for our kids. Bit they’re not gonna stop us. At least not for long.
The idea of the typical American college student wishing to delve into learning, thinking and exploring ideas is touching but tottaly divorced from reality.
Beg to differ with you. My own two daughters are current/recent college students, and many students who formerly were in my middle-school classes report back similarly. Especially true for kids who are firsts in their families to go to college. AND a goal, I think, for most of our kids. Keeping the dream alive.
I have three in college right now and they are absolutely delving into learning, thinking, exploring ideas and creativity as Kipp Dawson so eloquently says. They are also involved in community service through their various fraternities. They have on-campus jobs and are working in the summer. They are gaining gradual independence and will be ready for the world when they graduate as they will have gained so many invaluable skills. They are all in the STEM fields so I am very hopeful they can find jobs. I’ve seen a lot of teamwork too as they all lived their first two years in professional learning community dorms. I know they will want this experience for their own children just as I knew my parents wanted it for me.
kippdawson & Anne: yes, of course.
But someone has to say it out loud, or write it explicitly.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
I don’t know what young people you are encountering Jim, but I encounter MANY such.
Having returned to college old enough to be the students’ dad, I can assure you the kids today are more serious, better prepared, and more indentured than the beer swilling, cheap credit hour days of my youth. Ignore the “walk 50 miles to school uphill both ways” crowd.
Some students are strong, some not so much. About a third of our first year students take remedial math. About 20% leave after the first year, about 60% of first year students graduate in 6 years.
Remediation is determined by, you guessed it, testing. Tests like Compass do a poor job measuring “knowledge”. I’ve found it most interesting postsecondary points the finger when, unlike public schools, they get a smaller subset of all students by self selection. My own kid did poorly on the placement test, yet he knew the material once it was reintroduced and applied in other courses. He’s still stuck in remediation purgatory which really seem more like revenue streams than honest classes.
Mathvale,
Remedial classes are not viewed as a revenue stream at my institution, but rather something everyone would very very very much like not to have to offer. Even after several math classes, students still have trouble with the basic algebra that I use in my economics classes.
The only future I see with NanoDegrees is a future without on-the-job training (anywhere), where the future employee has to pay for the job training – even pay to be considered for the job.
And if the prospect doesn’t like it, there’s a H1b willing to do it for less and be scapegoated by corporate level management, further justifying the race to the bottom and more for profit education programs because American workers “just don’t have the skills to compete anymore”.
I was reading an article in the Chicago Tribune today about businesses not being able to find skilled workers for manufacturing jobs. The article actually traced the part of the cause back to businesses dropping their apprenticeship programs during the recession. There are several partnership options being explored that will create middle class jobs without college degrees using federal grants. They will allow businesses to take a chance on training with less risk and no cost to those in the programs.
Another way the New York Regents are negatively impacted students who need support the most. http://workingmomfromnys.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/career-development-and-occupational-studies-commencement-credential/
Yes, it is vocational training, not college. But if this is being sold as abbreviated college, then college is being sold as vocational/career training, and maybe that is what it has become. At least this is what the education/industrial/media/military complex would have us believe. And k-12 reformers are selling education now as your ticket to a job or career that doesn’t include the drive up window at McDonalds. It is very hard for me to get my children to understand what college really is when the schools and everyone around us are teaching this view.
Hear, hear. When my children are old enough, I plan to loan them my copy of “Why Teach?” by Mark Edmundson.
This is the problem when college education is conflated with career training.
This is job-training on the cheap with costs passed on to job-seekers who must pay in advance without any promise of employment. It’s a neoliberal plan to make credentialing an educational marketplace sold to consumers course by course on demand. Best voc ed happens on the job in any profession or occupation; apprenticeships; learning from veteran practitioners via interaction with them in real contexts of the work. If voc ed must is done in classrooms, effective practices are actually far more expensive to deliver than “liberal arts” programs b/c voc ed requires hands-on commercial/industrial equipment and simulations in class on which to prep future workers(many of whom will not use such training and not get jobs in their fields of training, research tells us for the last 40 years–see Wilms and see Pincus.) Back in the day, the first gen of working-class students taken en masse into new comm coll’s built in 50s and 60s wanted the degree that counted most in the job market–the 4-year BA or BS–so two-thirds of them enrolled for AAS or AA transfer programs. The comm coll policy planners who did curric design had set up these new campuses to track these students exactly the opposite, two-thirds into 2-year terminal programs.(see cc historians Cohen and Brawer.) But, CC students stuck to their guns and opted preferentially for 4-hr degree transfer track through a prolonged student-institutional standoff until Nixon’s famous “cold bath” was thrown on economy in early 70s, precipitating an economic downturn increasing job-insecurity, reversing student choice to 2/3 vo-tech after that, the ideal mass higher ed for policy planners who would never send their own kids to such colleges. Task of voc-ed is to “cool-out” working-class students as Burton Clark famously declared in 1959 when he studied the early comm coll in Calif., contain and depress ‘over-aspiring’ students in a democracy which must promise more success than it can deliver, according to Clark’s pov. IMO, John Dewey had it right 100 years ago–best to collapse the border betw lib arts and occupational education so as to reduce class differences; put humanities and philosophy and lit in touch with the conditions of everyday life; put voc-ed into a humanities framework–see Democ and Ed 316-320. If mass higher education was actually a class equalizer or “democracy’s open door” as some promoters declared, we would not have had 40 years of increasing econ ineq in America exactly when we’re producing the highest number of coll grads ever.
Ira,
“If mass higher education was actually a class equalizer or “democracy’s open door” as some promoters declared, we would not have had 40 years of increasing econ ineq in America exactly when we’re producing the highest number of coll grads ever.”
Although true higher ed should have a goal of being “democracy’s open door”, the conclusion that higher ed is too blame for the “increasing econ ineq” is just a tad far reaching. Personally, I blame the politicians and the historical moneyed interests who have influenced and made the laws that allow absurdly blatantly income and wealth inequalities to occur so that now the US has a socio-economic structure that rivals the third world.
Here is a better book:
http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Education-Bubble-Encounter-Broadsides/dp/1594036659/
The fact is, many people who are currently pursuing college degrees actually need advanced vocational training. Pursuing a college degree merely as a job credential when there are more efficient ways available is a waste of time and money, as well as a drag on economic productivity. Yes, it would be wonderful if most people wanted a true education, but most don’t — they want the credential.
The higher education system is an inflated bubble. It WILL pop — the only question is when and how painful it will be. Programs like the one described are one way to make the coming changes less traumatic.
“Yes, it would be wonderful if most people wanted a true education, but most don’t — they want the credential.”
And that statement highlights why most education admininistrators aren’t worth the salt we pay them. In doing my masters in ed adm, I found that there were maybe 5-10 out of 50-75 or more students in the program that actually wanted to learn and that did ALL and then some of what was assigned. Those 5-10 usually got invited into the doctoral program.
The rest were “What do I need to do to get an “A” so that I can get a credential and look “intellectually pretty” doing it. And it was the majority, those “intellectually pretty” ones, who usually got the jobs because they knew “what to say” which meant intellectually kissing the ass of the interviewers. They make great “yes maam, no sir” GAGA administrators with no capability to think behind, through and beyond what they are told to do, implementing whatever new educational malpractice that comes along. The only thing that matters is their position and that salt.
And most of the educators here have had to deal with these folks as their supervising principal.
That is why giving salary increases based on earning graduate credit is a poor idea for everyone except graduate programs in education.
I see teachers playing the “get the credit” so that I can move up (or is that sideways, anyway higher) on the pay scale. And many in the rural communities do this through on line courses of dubious educational value.
TE, By the way did you the changes to the opening of my “screed”?
Did you see. . . . ay ay ay no way to correct mistakes, caught it right after I hit the send button
Jobs that REQUIRE a degree…aren’t going to hire someone with out. Jobs that require credentials, however, are somehow going to Broad graduates and TFA “teachers.” RIddle me that.
People don’t go to college for the hell of it, even if they don’t know exactly what they “want to be” ultimately, but many do. To get to their goals, they need the required education/degree. Unless, of course, they want to be plumbers; however, if they want to be licensed electricians, they need math courses, and must pass math tests.
So all the hullaballoo about NOT going to college – when/if employers start opening doors for people without degrees to do jobs that require degrees, then that will be a whole different ball game.
Down the line, I’m sure ed-reformers will have McSchooling for the clerks who wall the aisles ensuring all the little scholars are kept in line.
So agree. I pursued a MPA in nonprofit management, only to realize it was a BS degree. I quit in the midst of it. I acquired the skills that nonprofits REALLY need, not the skills that a professor (who never worked in a nonprofit) dreamed about, and built a very successful business as a consultant.
This is just one more way to cheat poor kids out of their right to a good education. This shameful scam has been going on in higher education for many years (rich kids to UC Berkeley and poor kids to Pay N Pass Tech) and now it’s spreading to K-12 (Scarsdale Public for the rich, New Orleans charters for the poor).
Providing a high quality education to ALL our children is in the best interest of our nation. Let’s hope that soon a majority of our citizens will recognize this and demand legitimate reforms, instead of targeting the people who care enough to be in our classrooms.
All of my sons learned a trade before going to college. Society will tolerate crappy policy philosophy, but they will pay you to fix crappy plumbing. My sons have their degrees and are trying to build their professional careers. In the mean time they do plumbing work and fix heating and ac systems to put food on the table. We now have the W.C. Fields higher education system taking over with the firm of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe overseeing it.
I was lucky enough to attend college when it was free and affordable here in NYC. And I would like to see a return, but still think the standards to get in should remain high given the free cost.
After reading this post, I feel even stronger that it’s so important for high schools to offer vocational training. Not everyone wants to go to college and not everyone should. Some high schools around the nation are teaming up with corporations to train students (for free) on their equipment. And this in turn can lead to employment at their site or a company with similar requirements.
It would be nice if tech companies (or any company that needs skilled workers) around the nation could do the same with all public high schools instead of finding ways to close them. A program like this should require students to take their regular academic courses that they must pass in order to take these classes. I would wager that vocational courses tied with the possibility of a good job waiting when you graduate would motivate kids to stay in school and do well. Even famous stylists could offer classes at their salons, or designers at their studios, or big plumbing and electrical companies since the housing market is making a comeback. The list of partnerships is endless and it wouldn’t cost these students a cent. Bring back vocational training and bring back night school as well for those students who need to help out their families during the day!!
I don’t know if you saw this video of a teacher who explains why the testing culture is toxic. He asked the district to bring back home economics and is told it doesn’t offer “rigor”. He goes on to explain the type of rigor offered in such courses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnC6IABJXOI
The local high school has an amazing trades program. One of my friend’s son studied welding in H.S., and obtained a decent paying job ($50,000) in tool and die at 18. At 19, he purchased a $150,000 house. Now 22, he moved in a bigger house that listed at $200,000.
College is never free. At best you can get someone else to pay for it. Subsidizing tuition is a poorly targets way to help the relatively poor. Yes it will allow some to attend schools (maybe even NYU) who could not afford to now, but it will also allow some to buy a five series BMW instead of settling for only the three series.
????
TE, if you are saying that if we decide to pay for tuition from tax dollars that we will be paying for tuition from tax dollars, then that is quite the revelation!
If the comment about the BMW is a suggestion that we must keep a close eye on spending by institutions receiving tax dollars, that, too, seems rather obvious.
Robert,
As economists often do, I am going just one step further. Tax revenue comes from people, all sorts of people. Some will be wealthy, some will be poor, some will be middle class. My foster son, for example, will help pay for someone else to go to college out of his just above minimum wage job. His children will have to give up a little, but heck that the price we pay for civilization, right?
Now who will get it? Some will be from poor families, some from middle class families, some from very wealthy families. On average they will be wealthier than the people who chipped in to pay for it.
At my university, in-state tuition is about $10,000 a year. Four years at no cost to the physician parents and the kid gets a brand new BMW X3 from the money they would have paid in tuition. Now if taxpayers pay for NYU tuition, a little over $46,000 a year, the child of a hedge fund employee now gets $180,000 that would have been spent on college to spend on something else. In my part of the country it could be a house.
“Free” tuition is a transfer from relatively poor people to relatively rich people. I would have thought you would object to that, but not everyone has an economist’s sense of justice.
well argued, TE.
But I think that we all benefit when the poor kid gets the opportunity not just for training but for an education, and that is the real issue–should there be progressive taxation to pay for the education of children of lower-income parents? Look at how the GI Bill transformed our country! That was money well spent. It’s difficult to argue against that redistribution, for it raised all boats.
Pell grants, a means tested tuition voucher, would be a much more targeted way to help the relatively poor finance a college education without too leakage to the relatively rich.
I agree. I’m concerned, TE, about the number of middle-class kids who have been priced out of college–whose parents make too much for them to qualify for aid, or for much aid, but who nonetheless haven’t the funds to foot the bill. I’ve known quite a few in that situation.
That would be us. We have been paying back loans since the mid nineties.
If you want to minimize costs, first go to a community college and transfer to your state university. Tuition at the nearest community college to my institution is $88 a credit hour for locals, so the first two years of credit (60 credit hours) would be $5,280. Being slightly careful about picking your classes and they will all transfer seamlessly to my university, including fulfilling lower division major requirements. The tuition and fees for two years at my institution (again 60 credit hours) would be $20,896. You end up with a BA or BS from a research one university for a little over $26,000 in tuition. That is the equivalent to about $4,500 in 1970 (using the CPI to adjust for inflation). It also assumes that the student would get no scholarships at either institution.
Reblogged this on jsheelmusic and commented:
I never put faith for the renewal of education and society in one panacea or solution. However, I do believe that we can engage in a multiplicity of efforts to help bridge the gap present in education. This may be one of many (too many to count) efforts/paths that the varied types socio-economic groups and people in America can try to succeed in life.
However, I caution that power from one area to redistribute into another area. Those efforts typically result in envy ….
I was blessed. I spent seven years, roughly, after high school in classes taught mostly by professors who were on a tenure track, years in which I thought about literature and logic and philosophy and linguistics and anthropology and ancient history, in which I studied Latin and French and Italian and Anglo Saxon and heard great music and encountered great art and wrote papers and saw foreign films and sat up night talking about life, the universe, and everything with classmates were were, like me, blown away by what they were learning. I felt very much that I had been included, that I was participating, in the great unfolding of human culture, that I was being given the tools that I would need to push this great enterprise of our human unfolding forward. How extraordinarily important it was to me to have had that time simply to think and explore and to have had the opportunity to encounter and interact with others–my professors–who had themselves had the freedom to pursue the life of the mind–to devote themselves to esoterica like the poetry of W. B. Yeats or the philosophy of Wittgenstein. My life was immeasurably enriched by these experiences. There has not been a day since that I have not returned to that well to drink, joyfully.
I was the first for over a century, on either side of my family, to receive an advanced education. And when I was done, I had at total of about $3,000 in student loans to pay, which meant that others footed the bill–taxpayers who financed those low tuitions and those scholarships that I received. Did my country get back what it put into me? I hope so. In return for that investment in me, my country got a lot of years of my teaching its kids. I’m still doing that. Paying it back.
And I suspect, that over the years, others have had their lives enriched by my learning–because I have told them the story of Agassiz and the student and the fish or the tale of Mullah Nasruddin and the guy who wanted to get across the river or because I can explain to them how to write a sonnet or how ancients who could not read and write managed to compose and perform epic poetry or how to see what Miro or Picasso was doing in a painting or to hear what Bach or Coltrane was up to in a piece of music or what debts the hippies owed to Ralph Waldo Emerson or the Tea Party to Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards.
How does one measure that? The university is a sacred place. It is, or should be, the place where we celebrate and preserve and pass on that which is best in all of this human undertaking–the best that was ever thought or felt, said or made.
It would sicken me if we did not protect that, and if we did not make it possible for kids in the future to have such experiences.
All this said, things are going to change, inevitably.
The Internet is the realization of an ancient dream of the universal library, universally accessible. If we can figure out how not to use school to kill kids’ natural curiosity but rather to nurture and grow that so that they become intrinscially motivated, independent, life-long learners, it holds out enormous possibility for enabling people to remake themselves continually.
It’s probably long past time that we gave up the model that confers a degree for having spent some period of time learning, for learning must be continuous and lifelong. It it not something that one undergoes, but something that one undertakes. It is not something that happens to you for the first 12, 16, or 21 years of your life, but should be something that one does FOREVER.
It’s a really amazing thing that someone, anywhere, with meager resources can go online and teach herself to program in Javascript or to read English or to do statistical analysis of test results. That’s just freaking awesome!!! For how many centuries was learning something that only privileged men had access to!!! Virginia Woolf begins A Room of One’s Own telling about how she was turned away from a library at Oxford that wasn’t open to women! And now, today, a child in a remote village with a $100 laptop and electricity from a windmill can take classes at Yale for free.
That’s just wonderful. MORE OF THAT!!!! MORE, MORE, MORE OF THAT!!!
So, how do we get the best of all this?
Certainly, our credentialing systems have not kept pace with and do not yet recognize the astonishing possibility that access to the universal library provides for the motivated individual.
There’s a saying in the software world: I don’t give a damn what degrees you have. I care about whether you can write the code.
MORE OF THAT!!!
So, how do we get the best of all of these? How do we
a. create times when kids can be free to think and explore and be guided in that by cultured elders, without the pressure of worrying about other matters like a job?
b. encourage individual initiative in online learning that recognizes significant accomplishment outside a traditional university setting?
C. nurture and grow individual intrinsic motivation to make use of this amazing universal library as a means for continual growth throughout a life?
The great shift from print to digital learning doesn’t have to mean a narrowing of focus to the purely utilitarian. It should make that possible, of course. If you work in a job where suddenly it becomes important for you to know how to read and write the code for a web page, you should be able to go do that easily, cheaply, on your own or as part of an online community. But it should mean much, much more.
One of the things that is happening on the net today is a lot of online collaboration. Art students in China get together online and talk about their right to make any kind of art they wish to make without the government telling them what is and is not acceptable. There are vast cultures on the Net of people writing collaborative fiction, of people sharing graphic design ideas and templates, of people using the Net to learn how to build guitars or do macrame, of parents of kids on the autism spectrum sharing war stories and strategies and triumphs.
So, I see vast possibility for online learning.
But I treasure that sacred space, the university, and access to it.
It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.
I’m still paying a 2nd mortgage for my kid’s college. It wasn’t cheap, and unfortunately, she has become a teacher in the worst time for teachers. Go figure.
Reblogged this on Learning and Labor and commented:
So now it has been openly stated: college is nothing more than vocational training. Anyone want to talk back?
It is a vocational training, for sure. But then, that’s what has been a strong selling point for community colleges, as they offered vocational AAs and certificates as well as the more bookish, traditionally academic classes, fit for transfer. I would question the industries’ motives in terms of creating techno-drones who are taught only what the patron saints of a particular business wants them to know, and nothing more. No long term communication, independent thinking, or leadership skills, least of all team building. Would the skills learned be transferable in other areas of technology, would they allow a young adult 5 years of actually valuable experience to compete with fresh college grads? Seeing the curriculum before signing on or endorsing would be necessary.
I think we would have to look at the particular training to answer your question about transferability, but it would be hard to imagine data analyst training that is so narrow as to only be useful to ATT.
In Minnesota, up to two years of college are free, via our Post Secondary Enrollment Options law. Moreover, a growing # of districts have responded to this 1985 law by establishing agreements in which students can earn up to and including an AA degree by taking courses entirely in their high schools.
Here’s more info about how this works – and yes, these are school choice programs.
http://hometownsource.com/2014/03/05/joe-nathan-column-dang-im-really-going-to-college/