I’m pissed. One of my missions in life is to help make education more equal. Equal as in “more access for everyone” kinda equal. And then I come across stories like this one:The Subprime Student Loan Racket and this one: Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails and I get pissed.
Pissed because people are selling education out of one side of their month and doing everything short of stealing money out of the other side of it. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year studying the inner workings of education and it’s amazing how shady many of the companies who operate in it appear to be. Sure, most people know about diploma mills. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. From artificially raising tuition to the student loan cap to schools doing whatever they can to scoop up stimulus/taxpayer dollars, it’s some pretty gnarly stuff. So I think it’s time we did something about it.
When it comes to education, it’s time to start taking the power back.
Too many of us have been sold a bill of goods that just doesn’t cut it. We’ve paid too much for degrees that aren’t worth enough. We’ve taken on an insane amount of debt that we’ll spend years (decades?) paying back. And the thing is…it doesn’t need to be this way. There *are* alternatives. And I’m not talking about crappy, “get what you pay for” alternatives. I’m talking about ways to gain a world-class education for a fraction of the cost that marketing-driven educational machines are trying to shove down our throats.
The guy who really got me thinking about is Josh Kaufman over at PersonalMBA.com. Josh is brilliant and part of his brilliance has been to promote the scandalous notion (I joke, but only partially) that a world class education doesn’t have to cost an insane amount of money. He’s been doing so for years at PMBA and more recently wrote a must-read article “Hacking Higher Education, Part 1: How to Obtain an Accredited Undergraduate Degree in 1 Year for $4,000” (follow-up articles here and here, all must-reads). While I’m not convinced that Josh’s recipe for getting a degree in 1 year is the right thing for most people I think what it speaks to is the larger opportunity to save significant money while pursuing your degree. And more importantly, to take the power back.
Hey Mr. University, want to raise my tuition 32 percent this year?! That’s fine. See this whole CLEP thingie over here?? I’m just going to do that and you can keep your little ol’ tuition hikes!
Students (and parents of students!) sick of paying insane prices for tuition need to start demanding alternatives. And we’re not talking ultra-low-quality alternatives. We’re talking about the opportunity to get a high quality education at a lower prices. Every year your mobile phone gets better and the price gets cheaper. Why shouldn’t your education? Instead, it’s quite the opposite. Every year it gets about 8% more expensive and at least according to many, every year it gets a bit worse (check out Kent Pitman who makes this case way better than I could).
We started offering online CLEP courses at eduFire to give people an opportunity to take the power back. Learn from some of the most engaging and brightest instructors but save 80-90% of the cost of taking the same number of credits at The University of Phoenix. And we’re not the only ones helping people to take the power back. Look at people like Chegg, BookRenter and Flat World Knowledge who are helping students take the power back when it comes to textbooks. Check out sites like AcademicEarth, Peer2Peer University and University of the People are helping people who simply want to learn without money standing in the way to take the power back.
I’m all for education period. But I’m more for education when the number one goal is helping the student succeed. Optimizing profits at the expense of students? Not cool. Playing tricks on students to force them into unnecessarily buying new editions of textbooks? Lame-o. As Umair Haque would say, these are classic cases of thin value creation.
The era of playing games with our education is over. Pink Floyd woke up a generation of kids and young adults with their rallying cry “Teacher, leave them kids alone.”
Our generation needs a new rallying cry around education.
Perhaps that one should be “Take the Power Back“.
(I’ll be back with Part 2 of this in a little bit. Excited to hear your thoughts in the comments.)
Mon, Nov 30, 2009
Disruption, eduFire