As an example, I needed a test for strep throat. Why do I have to see a doctor to get such a test? I would be happy to go to anyone who I trust has that competency. What do I care if he graduated from Med school or not? What does it matter if he has this degree or that degree and from what school in what country? All I need is the stupid test. As it is, I have to go to the doctor, they take all my vitals, run 400 other tests, the doctor comes in and tell me I need a strep throat test (thanks!) and then I get the test. Seriously!!?
“Here I am janitor. In former Soviet Union, I am physicist; Leningrad Polytechnica - Go Polar Bears.”
Got to agree with the OP about Ed school. Total waste of a year. You need a course in Educational Law and that’s about it. The rest should be student teaching/internship and hands-on learning, not sitting through endless classes on pedagogy and theory.
As for the rest of it, a degree still means something, as others have said. It also means that the person with one has at least been exposed to some higher learning in a variety of disciplines. That’s what General Ed is supposed to do - make you a higher-functioning member of society. The day we abandon that is the day we abandon Civilization.
The Career Readiness Certificate has been frequently touted as a competencies-based (not coursework-based) vocational credential that can be prepared for any way you want (college, on-the-job training, self-study, private tutoring, tutoring on grandma’s lap, whatever) and that provides several earnable ‘levels’ of job performance ability certification that you can try for. E.g. a nuclear engineering supervisor may need the highest level, but the person who resets the meltdown clock every morning and monitors the radiation level probably can make do with a lower-leveled one that represents a more average, but certainly not zero, level of ability. It’s part of a model called “skills-based hiring” that toots its horn quite loud but has frankly been a huge disappointment.
I have a Gold Career Readiness Certificate and actually enjoyed the process of getting it to some extent. What they are looking for on the exams (it’s a series of exams) is that:
- You have basic literacy and math skills. You don’t need Shakespeare or Calculus (but then, you don’t need them for 95% of jobs anyway), but you have to be able to read a wide variety of practical documents that you might find in a workspace (e.g. policy documents, schedules, maps, executive memoranda, complaint letters, quality charts, measurement readouts, etc.) and make sense out of them and not get all tongue-tied when trying to find a ratio, percentage, average, sum, or something like that.
- You can follow directions.
- You can put #1 and #2 together. For example, you might have to read a process or policy document and apply that to a specific situation that is described and then report what percentage of widgets need to be retooled (based on the daily factory report in Figure A), or whether management’s Top 5 Goals for the First Quarter (listed in Table B) were or were not met based on the data in Figure A and the policy statements listed in Table A, and what remedial action (if any) should be implemented per policy based on those results.
So what’s the problem with this model? Are the exams “too easy” and employers want something tougher? Is it more political and people are having trouble envisioning smart, well performing professionals that lack degrees but somehow still manage to get the job done right and on-time?
I think it’s likely that most hiring managers haven’t heard of it, or their higher ups who determine the minimum requirements haven’t heard of it, or just that we still idolize college degrees in this country. Probably some of all of the above.
Yes, I think that’s a big part of it. College=success in our world, even though college still largely doesn’t (and ought not) concentrate on job skills.
Professional degrees (e.g. MD, JD, BSN) are somewhat of a different story, though, because they do have a significant vocational bent that you wouldn’t find in, say, English 101 at State U. Should there be alternative tracks to becoming licensed in a profession without the associated degree? The main problems to this, as far as I can tell, are these:
- People (including several in this thread) are having trouble envisioning a world in which a person could be competent in a profession without the applicable degree.
- There isn’t an agreed-on way to test for the competencies that a degree in the field supposedly provides. We have medical licensure exams nowadays for physicians, the bar exam for lawyers, the NCLEX for nurses, the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam for Professional Engineers (PE’s), PRAXIS exams for schoolteachers, and more. So are these exams not enough? If they really are enough, then the problem is political and the solution is to convince the Powers That Be ™ to open up the exams to everyone. If the reason that you still need a degree (even if you pass the exam) is because the exam doesn’t actually test the full set of competencies necessary to practice, then why can’t we have a tougher or more comprehensive exam for non-degree-track candidates? Sure, a lot of them probably couldn’t pass it, and that means that the exam would be doing its job. But when you get someone who can do it, but for some reason lacks the degree (e.g. their school lost accreditation in the last semester, they attended an “unrecognized” foreign school, they dropped out after the third year to take care of grandma but then engaged in vigorous study with a privately-retained tutor, whatever), you could acknowledge that, yes, they can do it.
If anything, being able to teach yourself how to manage psychotic patients, analyze conflict-of-laws breach of contract lawsuits, or assess bridge structure faults should be something that is recognized as a tremendous gift to be rewarded by society, not as something to mock and force the achievers to go back and take out loans to sit in classrooms and be taught things that they already know.
How do you know you need a test for strep throat? Presumably all you know is you have certain symptoms.
So you have a sore throat and decide you might have strep throat. You go the local testing lab and ask them to run a test for streptococcus bacteria. They do and tell you it’s negative. Thus reassured, you go home worry-free and treat your sore throat with Robitussin.
Robitussin, however, doesn’t treat the Epstein-Barr virus which is causing your mononucleosis. I guess maybe you should have seen somebody who was aware of the other possible causes for a sore throat and might have tested for them as well.
Doctors don’t always get this right either. How many doctors actually check for Lupus and can consistently recognize it in their patients when it does show up?
There’s really a broad spectrum of competencies, to use the term in the OP. Our educational and legal system today is largely based around the ideas that:
- Either you are fully competent to practice (medical license, etc.) or you are completely incompetent (everyone else). In reality, everyone is good at some things and not so good at others.
- The only way to prove that you are competent is by completing a degree in the field. Have a degree in Archaeology but know a lot about Medieval French Literature and have even written a paper or two? Sorry buster, you’re nobody, go do a degree in Medieval French Literature and we’ll talk to you. Have a degree in Nursing but managed to pass the Licensed Clinical Social Worker exam? First of all, cheater, because you aren’t allowed to take it without a degree in Social Work. And anyway, even if you did pass it, you’re nobody unless you also get a degree in Social Work. Hope you enjoy the student loans.
That’s the problem that I see in the OP, and I very much agree that it is a problem.
In many ways, degrees have become a sort of initiation ritual of sorts. If you didn’t get hazed like everyone else you aren’t a member of the club.
My vision of education, which I think is largely the same as the OP, is to smash the concept of accreditation of schools (or at least marginalize it), and set up examination boards for different fields and/or different localities that anyone could apply to. So instead of going to Harvard because you want a degree that says “Harvard”, you go to Harvard because you believe that the education that Harvard provides is of higher quality, provides more smarts per tuition dollar than the leading brand of educational services, or maximizes your chances of passing your Board Exams in the field(s) that you wanted to major in and/or become professionally licensed in. If you really don’t have what it takes (don’t know the field, etc.), you’re very likely to fail your examinations, so problem solved. If you somehow learned the material outside of class, great, we want to reward people who show enough self-initiative to better themselves without being nagged by a teacher and/or taking out more student loans so you can be re-taught that shoes go on feet and that scholars don’t all agree on whether the Spanish Inquisition ought to have been expected given the social, economic, religious, and political realities of Europe in those days.
Perhaps you could even have accreditation of independent examination boards that could use different assessment techniques but grant the same types of recognition. E.g. maybe the North Haverbrook Board of Humanities Examiners largely uses essay testing, a life’s work portfolio that you can draw up the night before and/or build for a lifetime of scholarship, they don’t care as long as it shows you know your stuff, and several hundred pages of multiple choice exams, while the Odgenville Humanities Scholars’ Board of Examination and Degree Initiation follows an oral model where you sit with a panel of examiners who gently probe your brain over a period of 72 hours and pose interesting ideas for you to discuss. If they ask you to discuss foreshadowing in Shakespeare and how that differs from foreshadowing in Star Wars and you get tongue-tied and spout off meaningless garbage and/or your arguments aren’t at least college-level on average, you probably won’t get that degree, sorry, go learn more and try again later.
I would have happily taken every (multiple choice, except for math) exam I had to take in nursing school to earn the right to take the NCLEX. Would have taken me a few days, but that’s a lot less time invested than the two years+two years of prereqs. That’s all my grade was based on, anyway, was the tests. There’s no room for instructors to say, “You know what? She did really well on the tests, but I can just tell she’s going to make a terrible nurse, so I’m going to fail her anyway.” Nope, grades and graduation are all based on test scores. So why not give me the tests without wasting my time in the classroom?
Totally, hazing. They did it, so we have to do it, and we’ll do it to the next bunch.
Do you think someone who actually knew enough of the material (e.g. maybe they had a degree from an unrecognized and/or foreign school plus a non-credit gap course) could actually complete a nursing degree by just showing up for the exams and attending class only to check the syllabus and/or ask minor questions? Would they expel you for truancy or are they officially not allowed to care as long as you pass those tests?
Anecdotally, I remember a high school teacher (1990’s) telling me that he tried to do that sort of thing in an undergrad class. He had taken essentially the same class at another college, but it wouldn’t transfer because it had a different name at his new school, even though in reality he knew nearly all of the material. Per the story, somehow the professor got mad that someone would skip his class and intentionally announced a change to the syllabus during a course lecture (that Future Teacher had, of course, skipped) so as to intentionally cause him to fail to meet the requirements.
Attendance was on the syllabus, yes. I can’t remember the exact requirements, but you couldn’t miss many days and still pass, unless you had a super good excuse and a good rapport with the teacher.
Do you suppose “I am passing the exams” would have been a sufficiently super good excuse?
Nope. 
“My mother died and I’m the only surviving family member to watch my little brother,” might get you out for a few days. We couldn’t even take religious holidays that didn’t align with the college’s holidays. That near caused a mini-riot, but they wouldn’t budge.
When the majority of students figure out it is mostly sabotaging them.
When do we ever hear about this:
Work began on this in the 60s. How powerful is a tablet computer compared to a 1960s mainframe? How much better is the graphics? So if software similar to Watson could be scaled down to tablets what coud computerized tutoring do?
But do our professional educators and institutions want this? I brought some free software to a Community College music course and the instructor didn’t look too happy though he didn’t come out and object.
But part of our problem is competition and information hiding. How often do most people really tell each other about good books?
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (2006) by Stan Gibilisco
EveryCircuit by Igor Vytyaz
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.everycircuit&hl=en
The Art of Electronics 3rd ed(2015) by Horowitz and Hill
Review Part2 The Art of Electronics 3rd edition - YouTubeThe Art of Electronics (1989) by Horowitz and Hillpsik
Bingo. Yes, you can teach yourself stuff, and in many ways it can be cheaper than learning it in a classroom. The problem is how does one convert their newfound knowledge, wisdom, skills, or accomplishments into recognized pieces of paper that they can carry around to different employers and/or schools and use to qualify for employment and/or further education?
So you can learn English Literature at Harvard. Maybe you could even do it at MIT. Cool. You can also learn it by, y’know, reading books and journals and chatting with grandma, who has an MA in English Lit. So, which path do you think would work best for you to give you the required skills and knowledge (“competencies”) to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Degree Examination in English Literature - Bachelor’s Level? It’s really tough, so all you folks that don’t really like to read much outside of the classroom better go ahead and enroll in Harvard. But for those who do, why bother with taking out student loans in order to have an instructor drone on about that scene in Little Women that you’ve read and re-read ten times before and discussed extensively?
Step 1: Abolish all of the teachers’ unions.
Doctors on the board, here, once said that a doctor’s diploma wasn’t a very good indicator of how well a person understood medicine and the human body. It just indicated whether the person had been able to memorize the answers to the tests.
I imagine that, that’s better than nothing. But likely a group of doctors who really “got it” could tear apart those who didn’t, given an hour or so to question them in a free-form inquisition.