Excelsior College announces “Bachelor’s Degree for Under $10,000” program

Excelsior College, formerly known as Regents College, is a fully accredited New York state private institution that grants degrees based on exam scores and portfolio evaluation.  As such, it is a natural fit to students who want to study using free online resources and who cannot afford to attend college (or more precisely, who can’t afford to pay back the loans they’d have to get).  I’ve been mentioning them on this blog, and have been following them since touting a Tutorial Manifesto back in 1995.  There are a couple of other established state degree-by-examination institutions as well, including Thomas Edison State College and Charter Oak State College.

A vice president at Excelsior e-mailed me to point my attention to Excelsior’s new “10K Degree Program.”  If I were a high school junior or senior, I’d definitely give it a serious look.  My favorite argument for such degrees, quite apart from the arguments about cost and the abundant free college-level content online, is that one-on-one education by the tutorial method is more pedagogically sound than the lecture, text, and exam method used at many universities.  The advantages are similar to the substantial advantages of homeschooling—only at the college level.  Such a system, expanded and found in all 50 states and around the world, is a key component of my notion of how higher education might be revitalized in light of the Internet revolution.

Whenever I think about Mozilla’s Open Badges project, I can’t help but think that Excelsior’s program is a bird in hand.  I’ll be surprised if the badges idea ever goes anywhere, mainly for the following argument: a badge is a credential; to have any appreciable practical use, a credential has to have credibility; credibility can be conferred only by careful evaluation by experts of examinations or work; and experts don’t work for free.  This requires something similar to an accredited degree-by-examination program–like Excelsior’s.  To be sure, there is a need for a cheap, widely-accepted, credible credentialing process that is beyond traditional degrees.  But that is already available, it seems.  The market just needs to be expanded and, perhaps, updated.

The Open Badges program promises “a simple framework that’s open to all.”  But they sometimes write as if Open Badges is mainly about letting people define their own badges, which they then claim on their own say-so.  “What’s wrong with that?” my fellow free knowledge advocates say.  Well, it’s great to trust others when it comes to letting them participate in a wiki or a software project.  That’s a little risky, but it often works.  It is a completely different kettle of fish to trust others uncritically when they make claims about their own qualifications.  That’s just naive–just look at the false claims people already make about their skills on their resumes.

Insofar as Open Badges wants badges conferred by objective third parties, based on real quantifiable achievements–MIT might be one of them–then we’re back to talking about things like accreditation and solid credential-granting bodies.  But as long as the open badges system has reliable checks in place that establish that badges can’t be claimed when they haven’t been earned, I’ll be a supporter of open badges, too.  But I think that the more anarchistic free culture types aren’t going to like such a result, and, as happened with Wikipedia, their influence is bound to spoil the Open Badges project.  We’ll see.

Excelsior, at least, has already solved the credibility problem.  They may not be an Ivy League institution, but an Excelsior degree is a real and valuable degree–and a very inexpensive one, too. 

(I have no relationship whatsoever to Excelsior and am commenting only out of a long-standing personal interest in distance and alternative education.)


by

Posted

in

Comments

Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

7 responses to “Excelsior College announces “Bachelor’s Degree for Under $10,000” program”

  1. I’m suspicious of a degree that hinges on an exam. A skill-based degree is one matter, but the degree seems to be from their liberal arts college. And surely exams are not a good way to learn the liberal arts.

    1. First, Excelsior awards grades not just based on exams, but portfolio evaluation and other items, I believe. Excelsior exams are not, in any event, billed as a “way to learn the liberal arts.” They are a way to gauge what has been learned. What is a degree supposed to mean, anyway? It’s supposed to mean that you actually possess a certain fund of knowledge or skill. What is the best guarantee that a person has such knowledge or skill? By actually demonstrating it, not by having gone through a number of courses which are supposed to imparted such knowledge or skill.

  2. Hi, Larry. You’re right — any badge is only as good as:

    a) the credibility of the institution or community that issued it. (A badge from NASA might mean something, whereas a badge from your friend Steve may not.)

    b) the assessment criteria and/or work behind it. NASA is invested in ensuring that people who earn a badge bearing its name are credible, and genuinely possess those skills.

    There are a number of ways to ensure this, from online testing, to project-based or portfolio-based assessment, to peer assessment, or the same myriad range of assessment tools available to traditional institutions.

    Mozilla’s approach is to make the badges software open to all, and treat badges as an open protocol. This openness certainly means some badges will be of mixed quality. But so what? Those badges that are good will gain traction, and those that aren’t… won’t.

    Email is an open protocol, too. But the fact someone can send you a lousy email isn’t a reason to close the protocol. You gauge the quality of an email based on the sender, and on its content.

    Badges will work the same way. Who issued it? And what did you do to earn it?

    1. Matt, the fate of Open Badges as a whole turns not just on the credibility of individual badge awarders, but also on the reputation of the project as a whole. If enough badges are awarded and/or claimed on frivolous or non-credible grounds, the badge from NASA will suffer. NASA might continue to award credentials, and stop calling them “badges.”

  3. As a private, nonprofit college Excelsior provides multiple means for our students to complete degree requirements including transfer credit, our own online courses and our ACE-evaluated credit-by-examination program. The exams are equivalent to end-of-course finals and they measure the learning/knowledge a student has gained by whatever means. Independent learners essentially teach themselves and examinations are credible, recognized means to demonstrate that what they learned is what is expected of a college graduate. The $10K program gives the self-disciplined independent learner a path to achieve his/her goal of earning a degree.

    1. Thanks for weighing in. I’ve corrected “state” to “private” above. I was under the distinct impression that it was a state institution, but clearly I was wrong.

  4. […] ovine nature of researchers, youth often love to smash idols, and new “education 2.0,” degree-by-examination, badge, and other schemes might make such nonconformist idol-smashing a better career option.  I […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *