Iamdch
May 13, 2020, 1:05pm
24
Camasite:
From my point of view, students go to college for basically three inter-related reasons:
To earn specific job qualifications (RN, teaching certificate, accounting degree/CPA exam, etc.
To earn a pedigree. Some fields like finance, consulting, teaching at an Ivy League school basically require an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent pedigree to even get in the door. You can be a brilliant finance wizard or brilliant History PhD from Eastern Washington University but you aren't likely to get an interview at Goldman Sachs or Harvard. Likewise that law degree from UNLV isn't likely to land you a clerkship on the Supreme Court.
To actually learn things. There are some students who just want to study physics or archaeology or ancient Greek. To make a living at it you probably need to enter academia.
For jobs that require certifications (such as teaching or nursing) I doubt an elite Ivy education is of much use. And much of those jobs can’t be done online anyway as they require lots of on-the-job practice. I can tell you from experience that an Ivy league degree doesn’t carry much cachet if you are sitting in an interview for a teaching job and all the administrators and teachers on the hiring committee all attended the local state schools.
For jobs that require an elite pedigree, I’m not sure an open-application online Ivy degree is going to serve the purpose. If Harvard enrolls 100,000 freshman who can fog a mirror then what elite sorting purpose does Harvard serve? And if they only admit 2,000 online students per year to their online academy then I"m not sure how it scales.
And for STEM jobs like engineering, life sciences, medicine, chemistry, etc. Online learning is of limited utility. You still need expensive labs. To cite a current example. How does one do virology research without expensive gene sequencing equipment, secure bio-containment facilities, electron microscopes and so forth. Some basic coursework could, of course, be done online. But certainly not all of it in STEM fields. Do you want a neurosurgeon who has only read about the procedure online?
What I found most helpful in college could not be found online – it was the interpersonal relationships and mentoring experiences. I was able to work with graduate students and professors in a psychobiology lab and able to cultivate relationships which led to my getting into graduate school and prepared me for my current career.