College Degrees Overpriced, Oversold

The system must change before students are made poorer, society grows less equal, the bright are left ignorant and "college" comes to mean a four-year pajama party intruded upon by the occasional group discussion on gender studies. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it. Colleges should no more vouch for their own academic competence than butchers should decide for themselves whether their meat is USDA prime. _NYP

If you are at all concerned about the cost and quality of a college education, Jack Hough's New York Post article excerpted above is well worth your time. Today's college education often amounts to little more than training in binge drinking, hooking up, cult-like programming in ideological "correctness", and all around cultural superficiality and perpetual immaturity.

Hough's conceptual sketch of the lifelong "knowledge transcript" is worth the time of reading the article. Analogous to a person's lifelong medical record, the knowledge transcript would convey a person's qualifications to potential employer's and contracting agencies in far more detail and accuracy than any college diploma.

Opportunities for learning and developing expertise in today's society are growing exponentially. Most of these opportunities take place outside of university degree programs -- and often provide more relevant skills and competencies than traditional college degree courses will have done. An accurate way of capturing a person's competencies in toto, as they change over time, would provide a far superior evaluation of expected value to others in the marketplace.