Zero Hedge lists 20 genuine college courses of dubious value currently on offer from various universities around the U.S. There are some real doozies here – e.g., “ ‘Oh, Look, a Chicken!’: Embracing Distraction as a Way of Knowing”, and “Zombies in Popular Media” – that help to explain both (a) the vast ability of a free country to generate so much wealth that it can support enormous groups of freeloaders (in this case, a professoriate of the inane), and (b) the huge decline in return-on-investment in higher education.
It’s sometimes very tough to sustain the belief that we are not as hosed as the 5th-century Roman empire.
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You could include the US college students I met in India being dragged around various yoga ashrams by well-paid 'facilitators' as credit towards various degrees. The ashrams are cheap but the students are probably paying huge amounts in course fees to middle-men who actually do very little.
ReplyDeleteThis type of thing may be the US source, note the jargon:
http://www.acenet.edu/leadership/Pages/default.aspx
This page is the one I meant:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.acenet.edu/about-ace/special-initiatives/Pages/At-Home-in-the-World.aspx
Paco, I could not read beyond #3. My prayers are with the USA.
ReplyDeleteAt least the 5th Century Romans could speak Latin, and possibly Greek.
ReplyDeleteCheers
Captain: You've got a good point, there.
ReplyDeleteBruce: Americans seem to have been chasing after holy men in India since at least the Beatles; I doubt that the wisdom ever really takes root, though.
Robert: It is pretty sad. And grads wonder why they can't find jobs (I'm sure the economy has a lot to do with it, but so do bad choices in majors).
Er, except that the Beatles weren't American, of course. I should have written "westerners".
ReplyDeleteApart from whacky courses, this kind of thing, from my link, seems ripe for ripoffs:
ReplyDelete"ACE seeks to enhance access to:
Communication strategies that facilitate productive and mutually beneficial conversations between international and multicultural educators;
Planning processes that identify and support shared priorities between internationalization and diversity/multicultural education initiatives; and
Models that feature new traditions of collaboration between international and multicultural educators and administrators."
Ripe for ripoffs?
ReplyDeleteOr is the very definition of ripoff?
Higher education no longer is higher. Or education.
ReplyDelete