The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational. Why waste money on classes that don't apply for your certificate? Why spend time playing with classes that could lead you to a different certificate when you are already 20% done with this one?
Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s, and several without taking the course. When I actually took some classes in college based on that, I quickly found out how little you need to know to pass a test.
I met an Irish engineer. He said that all of his classes in college had to do with engineering. If he wanted to study the Classics, the attitude was that he could just go and do that in his own time.
Personally, I think this is better. If you try to legislate breadth in your students, then you end up just making a mockery of what you're trying to teach. You end up accomplishing the opposite of what you were trying to do.
I spent a few years teaching Computer Science 101/102 as a TA. A whole lot of my students were in Journalism, Communications, or Criminology or some area like that and just trying to get their math requirement out of the way. My conclusion in retrospect: to most of my students, this was largely just a bureaucratic exercise.
If you want true students, you need to find the students that have the interest and desire.
The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational.
The problem with this view is that some people just want the vocational part, and bundling it with something they don't want, but for which they will be charged, just makes them worse off. Being able to buy A or B is better than only being able to buy A and B.
It would be pretty annoying if some forward-thinking politician realized that a keyboard is worthless without a computer, and unilaterally banned the sale of keyboards that didn't come with a computer. But that would be a terrible plan.
Yeah, but if college's function of "preparing you for work" is taken over by vocational schools, it's not clear that there will still be a market for our current conception of college.
And I'm sure that a lot of you will say that that's an indication that college is mostly a waste, but I don't think that that follows, necessarily; although I haven't been to college yet I feel vaguely that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I could think of to do otherwise, and certainly that it'll be more rewarding than most things that I would in all likelihood do otherwise.
If colleges provide a service that's worth the price they have to charge, they'll stick around. But arguing that we should avoid credentials and vocational school because they could compete with college is like wanting to ban hybrids because you look forward to driving an SUv, and figure that if hybrids become too popular, SUVs will be obsolete and you won't get one. A rational person would ask why your preference for SUVs over hybrids should force everyone else to be wasteful.
But what if everybody (or almost everybody) prefers SUVs? And I guess we need to extend the analogy a little more: what if everybody needs a car, and their parents are buying them one, and the parents choose primarily based on cost, and hybrids cost less? But everybody wants an SUV. Maybe everybody wants an SUV to the extent that they'd be willing to personally pay for the difference in price, if they had the money. Oh, and maybe the SUVs are actually better for the environment.
The point of the analogy was that you are trying to say that you have so looked forward to the old, stupid, obsolete system that you'd like to hold progress back a few years so you can experience it. I think that's ridiculous, and that if we were talking about how you wanted to manufacture buggy whips or VCRs, it would be obvious that getting in the way of cars and DVDs would not be worth it.
If you can give me some reason that the existence of something that performs most of the functions of college, but that is cheap enough to be a viable opportunity for people who work, or people who want to get their credentials faster or whatever, is such a threat to college that it must be stopped -- but college, despite its vulnerability to better ideas, is still worth keeping around -- I'd like to hear about it.
But that might be convoluted. So here's what I would ask: if we had the credentialing system and no college, how would you pitch the concept of a modern college to the typical VC?
Requiring everyone to learn some nonpractical things is a waste of societal resources. If some people want to learn something just for the sake of it, they could join reading groups/attend lectures on their own time.
"The problem with this plan is that it will just make every college vocational."
The system is supposed to be separate from college. That's the whole point. That way kids who don't want to go to college can still get a good job, and colleges can be even better for those who do go because they don't have to teach job skills.
Or better yet, why not get a couple princeton review books to pass the test? I passed 35 credits of AP exams in high school, all with 5 out of 5s, and several without taking the course. When I actually took some classes in college based on that, I quickly found out how little you need to know to pass a test.