Eliminate Degrees!

…It would be to get rid of the finite degrees and certifications that are offered as the reward for paying outrageous sums of money for current higher education. 

Degrees only mean that you have passed someone else’s criteria… which is all in the past tense.The person evaluating you had to learn it… and then teach it to you. 

Technology is part of our everyday world now, more so for the generation growing up.

Most academics are behind simply for lack of time to invest in learning new technology if not techno-phobic. But let’s say they did set some time up and learned something useful for our current functional climate. It could take them a year to master the new technology and create a course that fits a model that would allow for someone else to assess its validity, get approval to present the course, and log it into a curriculum. Only after all that are they allowed to teach it. That would be at a minimum 18 months.

Technology doubles every 18 months. Hence the validity of that course is already extremely outdated by the time a student takes the course, to add to his degree, so that when they graduate they are totally antiquated.

Lets make education fluid. Set up universities as mentor/monitoring stations. No longer offering formal lecture classes but offering direction, resources, and recording students efforts, and the results of those efforts… so there is no end point.

Have 3 Ratings:

1. A Propensity to Learn Rating: This is how fast a person learns, unlearns and relearns, which is of course what this next generation is going to have to face in this rapidly changing world.

2. Communication Levels: Record of team building efforts, participation, public speaking, blogging, emails if submitted, how the social component of the individual interacts.

3. Record of Efforts in Action: Everything that you do that you wish recorded goes to the university database for component analysis. If you gardened for an hour… what are the skills used to create the garden. Planning, math on lay out, hand dexterity, ground workings, landscaping. Tons of components could be broken down for that one task. (I am thinking Taylor’s manufacturing-processes level analysis.) 

These then are searchable to anyone you give permission… such as making your resume available online & validated by the university.

Anything you wish the university to record of your research online, the books you read, you just connect to the system while you do it. The hours are logged.

If you have a Propensity to Learn Rating of 100 and spent 7 hrs doing something, but the down-the-street guy spent 7 hrs and had a rating of 200, the probability that he learned more from the experience is high.

Then when someone needs to find someone who would be good at doing widget configs that have never been done before they look for the components of a person’s capability. Do they learn fast, can they work in a team, how good are they with their hands?

NOW we have something usable by corporations, students, and society. That is Education! Learning by doing and knowing everything you do is of value and encourage people to be lifelong learners.

Education would no longer be penalizing the doers and the ones without funds. No longer would the  cookie-cutter drones turned out by academia somehow be MORE valid than the doers and the creators. Everyone would have access to a system of validity for whatever time they wish to have logged into the system.

There is nothing more outlandish than to tell someone who has been doing something for years and is expert at something, that they don’t know what they are doing — based on the fact that they haven’t paid exorbitant amounts of money to get a piece of paper from someone who has spent only a fraction of their time “doing” the very same thing in which they are an expert. 

Sorry, if I get a little Over-The-Top on this subject matter, but I HATE dysfunction.

Click-Here is Ray Kurzwell’s TED talk about the exponential growth rate of technology.