On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown.
On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers.
Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.*
What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses.
* To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.
I really enjoy MIT's free course material. I loaded every lecture pdf onto my iphone and slowly but surely have been making my way through their mba program. Based on my experience, I do not think a dedicated school program would work based on this material, and I am someone who is ALL for reform in higher education.
The main reason is the nature of the content. Anybody can work their way through a management psychology or communication class, but you'd have to be very far out on the bell curve to teach yourself optimization models and statistical data mining based on this material alone. You could be familiar with how to do it based on lecture notes, which is my goal, but without help not one of your 18-year-olds could correctly solve these problems in the real world. They could educate to a degree, but their ability would be nowhere near traditional students. The pedigree's value will be preserved.
Most of the classes have missing or incomplete material since OpenCourseware is clearly an afterthought. Someone would really have to go through the course reading list to be able to say they took the class.
There are a substantial number of people who go to med school and law school while living off campus. Those are of course different and many of the people probably had on campus under grad experiences but I wouldn't be so quick to discount living at home.
I did mention off-campus housing as acceptable. Most med/law students I've known did live in apartments close to campus, but they were definitely immersed in their respective student communities.
Perhaps the issue with living in your parents' home is that you aren't forced to opt into the campus community because you can still hang out with your old friends from high school.
Why not start this now? Even if you're seasoned, I'm sure the experience and refresh would be a nice experience to anyone. I'm in a distance grad program right now and could use a real cohort.
Living at home during college would suck. If they were willing to put up with that, imagine how much crap work they might have been willing to put up with at your office.
On one hand, I've watched a few OpenCourseware lectures and think it's a spectacular way to learn. If I received a resume from someone who had "taken" 20 of such courses via an informal online study group, I'd interview the person simply for the initiative shown.
On the other hand, I used to interview a lot of college students. After awhile, I found that I could quite easily differentiate between those who had lived in a dorm/off-campus house/etc. vs. those who had lived at home and commuted. Students who had lived at home lacked perspective, spoke poorly, and were much less self-aware than those who had been immersed with like-minded peers.
Perhaps socio-economic status can explain most of my observation. However, this is difficult to prove because almost no upper-middle class and above kids live at home and go to the local state school. It may be that upper-middle class graduates could still have achieved the qualities I identified previously if they had lived in their parents' basements, bu the sample size is too small. For those of lower classes, I do believe that an immersive college experience can make up for differences in upbringing.*
What if a couple hundred 18 year-olds formed a group online, moved to the same city, found an apartment complex owner would rent to them exclusively, and took OpenCourseware courses for a couple of years? Would this be a sufficient substitute for a $100K degree? Perhaps the hire-a-processor model proposed in the article could supplement freely-available courses.
* To some degree, it did for me. I'm the son of a janitor and a high school librarian. We lived in a small, blue collar town. Four years in a dorm were quite transformative.