I have begun the process of studying "coding" through an online learning website. It is not an accredited college, this website. But that doesn't matter to me. In fact, even though I've completed several college degrees, I find the idea of online learning outside of traditional schools more valid than ever. To be credentialed by a source that does not charge thousands of dollars a class seems, in some ways, more credible than a degree from an institution that treated my education like a cash cow. I'm not even sure that a certificate matters to me—I'm doing the free version of the class.
So why the new attitude about traditional college degrees? Well, in retrospect, I can see that there were problems at some of the colleges I studied at.
At first, everything was good. In 1985, I began taking college classes at a community college. That was fine. Tuition was affordable, the classes were practical, and I was studying with people of all ages from all different backgrounds. I felt a tangible, rather than simply theoretical, connection to a long history of ideas.
Years later, however, studying first toward a PhD and then changing to an MFA, I found the following situations new and alarming:
- At a private, for-profit school, upon contacting the university, a recruiter had me enrolled and had set up financial aid before we hung up from that first phone inquiry. Acceptance was a foregone conclusion. He pushed a button and the university coffers filled to overflowing as money gushed from the pipelines of the banks and the US Department of Education.
- I became immediately dependent upon student loans as a source of sustainable income. In this terribly inequitable economy, I never had as good a job as being a student.
- On the other hand, one single class at a private school in 2017 costs about the same as a whole school year of full-course-load-plus terms in 1985. And the prospects for jobs upon graduation are no better in 2017. This is due largely, of course, to my proclivity toward creative rather than practical pursuits. But let's be honest, both impracticality and costliness have soared side-by-side over the last few decades. Now, with a humanities degree, you hardly even get a chance.
- Like other institutions, the university is "top-down." Many professors who made it to a position of authority got there by being low-key, easy to get along with, agreeable, and sometimes even mediocre (some by nature and some for survival) and then spent their energy keeping the talented students from challenging them too much (in the students' best interests, if mediocrity and conformity are the measures). A good number of these authorities reserved the right to declare truth in the classroom even when their assertions were as patently erroneous as to be laughable in any normal space of discourse.There were brilliant lecturers, too, of course. But I'm listing my concerns, here.
- As far as networking with professors is concerned, many of them rewarded compliance and had less than passionate interest in furthering our careers. Often this was simply because of their isolation from any career but one—that of university teaching. I never felt I was mentored by a large percent of my professors, though I felt like most of them had well-meaning advice to share. Even still, we were in school, not the labor force; the advice was usually about studies.
- Even while some professors may have felt threatened a bit by us students, as a whole they had no problem inviting us into the pyramid scheme whereby we paid for the hopes of one day beating our peers to the throne of our own professorship. But these days, as full-time faculty positions have all but been decimated, this pyramid scheme starts to feel as hopeless as a Ponzi scheme. Still, profs will helpfully illuminate the merits and rewards of making it through the dissertation. You can't help but learn a lot, if nothing else. And there are, of course, rewards in that.
- But speaking of sucking people in, two schools I attended regularly recruited their undergrads to return and be grad students, exploiting them for cheap labor as overworked TAs, and then hired the same folks to be their (ultimately non-tenured, part-time or contract) faculty. This inbreeding has repercussions. Both of these schools displayed an identical tendency toward polar factions in areas of research, in clear differentiation from each other: straight realism on one side and pure abstraction on the other. I blame their institutional provincialism for this. Nothing "in between" was tolerated. At one of the schools an attempt toward anything other than those choices was treated as an impossibility.
- Much of the most important learning that I gained came from my own efforts to study beyond the course curriculum. I was self-directed, despite the regimented programs, but learning for learning's sake was constantly undermined by learning for earning credentials. Or at least learning for learning how to "learn." Compliance was rewarded over broader competence.
- Speaking of learning to learn (and to clarify my use of the phrase), many of the courses I took reinforced bad ways of learning by rewarding us with grades immediately upon completing tasks instead of evaluating us over time when we could have proved retention. In other cases, we were taught how to pass tests instead of how to drill our memory, practice competence, illustrate expertise, or communicate ideas. Predicting the teacher's biases became a skill. While I definitely learned a lot about research and note taking and reading and writing and comprehension and, certainly, thinking, there were times when I engaged in the best forms of study only to be punished when I quickly found myself more knowledgeable than I ought to have been.
- But there were superficialities in other ways, too. Professors engaged in an economy of fifty-cent words that they had no intention of ever really granting deep meaning to: buzzwords and sacred texts used as currency to secure their positions. In retrospect, the so-called leftist philosophers couldn't have been more fundamentalist in their thinking, an odd mix of puritanism, pragmatism, and positivism in drag as progressive thought. I'm talking US universities, here. I have no idea what it's like elsewhere.
- This kind of ideology became increasingly apparent to me the more I studied. I enrolled in an intro class that required only one text book, written by one author, with no references to the history of thought about the subject, no accounting of the contributions of important thinkers on the subject, and absolutely zero citations. Just this one ultra-conservative maverick whom conservative think tanks wouldn't even align with. We called the class "Intro to Economics."
- And while we are on the subject of textbooks. Many classes required textbooks that cost upwards of two hundred dollars apiece. Some were even paperbacks. Almost all were revised (the order of the chapters changed) at least yearly—often every term—to force us to buy them new. Our quizzes came from the questions at the ends of the chapters, which were changed every edition. Sometimes the books were written by the prof or the department and published by the university. They were always twelve inches wide so we couldn't photocopy them. When asked by students to place the textbook on reserve in the library, the instructors would stall and make excuses—they were instructed by their departments to do so. In other, more succinct words, we were treated as captive customers rather than apprentices or eager learners.
- One school even manufactured their own (not quite up to par) supplies and sold them on a website that was designed to look independent, registered by a third party registrant to hide their contact information from us. They then required those supplies for their classes, forcing us to pay quite a bit for them. They did, at least, allow us to resell them to other students at the end of the course.
- To legitimize and market their teaching and to satisfy accreditation, the universities would delude themselves with outrageous conceits of how their products work and how they would deliver them. One school claimed their online program was identical to their onsite program, and instead of promoting the differing strengths of each, attempted to construct the most incredible "virtual reality" for the online students, trying to force them to treat two dimensions as actual objects, and compelling the remote students (and the instructors) to keep their "in-class work" and "homework" straight. To add insult to injury, they would deny resources to the online students to thwart "cheating."
Sure there is some garbage out there. Possibly a lot. But the online courses I've begun to look at (particularly ones taught by industry pros and not academics at a university) seem like they are sharing knowledge with the next cohort of initiates, with the intention of strengthening fields and industries that have not yet run dry. I hope that's the case. The really good courses get numbers of students that a traditional school can't imagine, so that could prove to be a problem very quickly. For now, at any rate, online courses are at least instantly accessible and radically less expensive. The red brick and mortar universities, with their relationships to student loans, have become like hospitals that drain medicare, medicaid, and health insurance with exaggerated costs and over-billing. It's a feeding frenzy on the gravy train. Hopefully online courses fair well on competition and don't become mass markets for billions of students competing for thousands of jobs.
If nothing else, online learning promises to be a democratic market place where students can credential themselves by virtue of their own drive to succeed, be awarded on their merits from peers and from their own knowledge of the subjects rather than the approval of a committee with its petty agendas and desperate infighting despite all its best intentions and hands-on mentoring.
Don't misunderstand my feelings about college. It was a good ride. But no one ever looks at my transcripts. No one knows I likely have the equivalent in credits of an art history degree. Online studies may actually change that paradigm in the future. Self-credentialing online means I can present my competencies by subject. I can say, Yes I know this. And this. And this, too. But not this. This one doesn't fit my career goals. It's about all the important things I've become competent at, not a degree that titles me. Of course, I'm waxing poetic about studying JavaScript online when, as an undergrad, I drank java while listening to poetry in cafés. These are apples and oranges.
And that may be the most important insight. Online learning outside a degree program means I can learn while engaging directly with the new professional field that interests me. If I need to learn something, I buckle in, knuckle down and learn what is essential to know NOW and start using it NOW. Not five years from now. It feels far more practical. Which makes me wonder why going to college on a campus to gain a liberal arts education ever should have been about a job. Doesn't it make sense to go to college for a few years simply to learn how to think and to get a great background. Isn't that enough? Maybe even figure out your calling as a human beyond that of a worker.
And then, after that, after you graduate, gather the practical knowledge for an income earning job and do the learning online in just a year or two. You know how they announce a shortage in an industry and people run out and get a four-year degree while we suffer four years of shortages in that industry and then suddenly there are too many people in the industry four years later? Let's not do that.
For liberal arts and for my studio art adventures, going to a physical college was great. There was very little hope for employment following the path of literature, poetry, philosophy. But I learned a lot about thinking. Looking back, I am disappointed by how much nonsense was circulating as "thought." But there was a lot of good thought, too. Didn't I lie on the college green reading thousands of pages of Dostoevsky and Kafka and Chekov and Tolstoy and Turgenev?
Yet, going to a college campus in the rolling hills to acquire technical skills that I can market in this new economy, alongside my fine art? I don't see why I don't just sit at the computer and learn that part online. Especially since self-directed learning suits the entrepreneurial (and creative) spirit better.
This is down-and-dirty day job stuff.
Will it work? Well, let's see.
