I actually almost got caught up in all this. So close to the point I thought I was flying to another state right before classes began (this was like a week ago) at a for profit college to pay the money and enroll for TWO YEARS.
In emails I sent between the instructors and the college's business faculty (there were two different ones one was a boss; one was lower) both the business ladies were making promises and acting like everything was good to go, to get the 'sale'. The instructor actually threw me a hint, that not everything was as it should be (wasn't guaranteed credit for certification), and I still don't know why he did but boy am I thankful. These are perfect examples of why education should not be driven by $$$, education is a resource that will keep the economy going, and that means the nation afloat, you DON'T mess that up!
And what I mean by this is, it's not only catching the people at McDonalds that perhaps wouldn't have went to MIT and contributed to society a great deal, it's also serving as a way to 'save money' for those that might not have to, and sucking them in and dumbing them down. On a further note, most community college programs/classes are worthless too. For example I took an English I class at a community college and actually learned quite a bit, I lucked out and the instructor (who was 9 months pregnant) took her job seriously. Then I took English II right after it, as well as some other courses, and all instructors for these new courses were worse quality-wise than my highschool instructors. And no, I don't mean they didn't communicate as well or weren't as smart as other teachers, I meant they completely had no motivation or incentive to make a good course and teach kids. Instead they sent us home early almost every class after the first class period, with no real lecture, mostly class discussion about things ranging from the BP oil disaster to Celebrity Gossip, things you could learn by hanging out in a barbershop or similar. In total, 60% of my grade for that English II class was determined by my major projects, which were all video projects (for an English class), the criteria restricted my fellow students and I from using more than 10 words per slide (in an ENGLISH CLASS!!!!!), and the teachers example video (the only way we knew what to do- there was no handout) had no words at all except for titles and her name, etc.
Anyway, the three 'major' video projects were 1:
Top 10 List of Your Favorite Things and Why (So people did like, Top 10 Places to Take a Date, showed pictures of the top ten places or video clips and briefly said why they thought they were awesome in a PowerPoint) <--- IN AN ENGLISH PROJECT PEOPLE.
2: Video Project on 'Racial Stereotyping', this one actually is an English II topic as I understand it, however the project requirements required all footage, from news clips etc, and no words besides the separate PowerPoint.
3: The last project was the real laugh, even though it had a paper due with it, ONLY TWO PAGES!!!!!!! Double spaced, I might add, and the format we're required to use makes the header, name, title, etc take up 1/3rd of the first page. That's 1.66 pages for a final paper in English II (this isn't a developmental class, this supposedly transfers to the major colleges around the area counting as all you really need for English for most degrees). Anyway the video topic (LOL) was to create a sales pitch for a reality show. Yes, something you'd expect in film class. I began to wonder if the instructor wished she had become a film instructor instead of an English one. We were required to make a poster for our reality show idea, a 30-180 second commercial for our reality show idea, a PowerPoint for our reality show idea, and a short oral proposal for our reality show idea.
Besides the whole thing being biased towards VH1 MTV types of people, what really pissed me off was that I got a final grade of 82 by completely skipping most of the non-writing part of major projects, just doing the papers, and still left that class feeling like my writing skills had been obfuscated and diminished since my completion of English I. (this is because I had to use this idiotic instructors methods to 'write' a paper rather than the exceptional English I instructors format).
Similar experiences happened, but to a lesser degree, in other classes. In the other cases, it was more of the case that 'old business owners who had their businesses fail but also had PhD's came to community college to teach for incredible bucks but realized they didn't have to do anything but drink coffee and send us home so 99% of the class was happy to get free credits, and the instructors were happy they didn't have to do any grading and kept getting paid 30$ an hour while their businesses went down the drain in this recession'.
Disgusting, but I have to keep going to keep my traditional minded parents happy. I learn more every single day from places like
KhanA , teachertube.com, this forum, just reading random stuff on the internet, reading textbooks or other free video lecture sites, there's open courseware, etc. But you can't get those college degree pieces of paper for that. What's wrong with this picture?
Oh, and you want something REALLY REALLY haunting?
I don't know about most high schools, the one I went to was in a richy area and is one of the best in the area for public schools but the teachers and organization there were atleast ten times better than at the two different community COLLEGES I went to after.
To top it all off, you have to realize education today is at STAND STILL in development, we have SO MANY opportunities to make things better and more efficient (and this is for ALL colleges/schools, not just the scum) like the portable video phones, to make REAL WORLD math problems (see this video:
TED Blog | Math class needs a makeover: Dan Meyer on TED.com ) and real problems in other classes rather than the traditional, old way of 'learning' by 2d pictures and text alone. Another good point in that example is that students today are taught to 'look for the formula, copy paste, fill in, and be done. When a real problem in the real world presents itself, the students don't even REALIZE they could figure it out with what they learned in math class because they weren't taught to identify and formulate problems themselves. What this equates to is students can pass tests, but not immediately help solve real world problems like the energy crisis by working on say, I don't know, more efficient solar energy ideas BECAUSE THEY WERE TAUGHT TO MEMORIZE FORMULAS AND NOT CREATIVELY SOLVE STUFF.
I'm pissed as well as fearful, for what might happen to society. When you take into account that muslims are taking over the world, fast food is most young peoples primary food source these days in the US (cooked food is bad enough already!), and education is actually putting out shortcut-minded students who are to be honest, less capable on the whole than the generation before them, etc, THE FUTURE DOESN'T LOOK TOO GOOD FOR OUR CHILDREN, OR FUTURE CHILDREN. I know the damage has been done for me, and I've accepted a safe but modest path to contribute to society, my only plan and hope is to have a child that I can teach the right way at home, mostly, to actually contribute to the probably by then idiocracy movie (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) level society, in the form as a revolutionary genius.
I think people better start realizing that '1000 years in the future' might not be the space age, but rather more primitive than it is now and for maybe 100 more years, which is like a 'golden age' of technology in my opinion, in the eyes of future historians.
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