Texplainer: How Can I Get a $10,000 Degree?
Hey, Texplainer: I hear Texas has a $10,000 degree. How can I get one?
Early this month, Texas A&M University-San Antonio President Maria Ferrier and Alamo Colleges Chancellor Bruce Leslie announced that they had devised a bachelor’s degree that costs roughly $9,700.
The news was met with understandable enthusiasm. “Texas A&M-San Antonio answers the $10,000 question,” declared Thomas Lindsay, director of the higher education center at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that gained notoriety in the higher ed world in recent years for pushing a set of controversial reforms.
The ...
Comments (11)
Thomas J. Garza via Texas Tribune on Facebook
...or by those willing to settle for online or distance instruction and never learning to interact with experienced, qualified faculty.
Andrew Wang via Texas Tribune on Facebook
As always...if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
There are so many caveats to this $10,000 degree it might as well be considered unattainable for Texans.
Carolyn Moon via Texas Tribune on Facebook
It's essentially bogus
Kim Kuntz Turner via Texas Tribune on Facebook
My son was 14 when he started his junior year. Asking 14 & 15 year old children to determine a very specific degree plan is absurd!
T D
I will sell you two degrees for half that amount.
Alice Taylor
A $10K college degree is a laudable goal, but according to this article it isn't obtainable. By the time I read through the article I realized that this degree is obtainable for only a very few kids who just happen to go to the right high school and by the end of the article I found that the 10K didn't include books, which was a part of the challenge given by Gov. Perry.
Even with a heavy reliance on on-line classes (which simply aren't a way to get a quality education, all things being equal, otherwise we'd all be going to Harvard) the 10K BA degree won't be obtainable for the average student. Every year it will get harder and harder to reach that goal, especially with the drastic cuts in public education promoted by Gov. Perry. The first academic classes that are cut in public high schools are those programs which aren't mandated by the government and those are the advanced classes, not the special ed classes. I'm an AP teacher and I'm the only teacher who teaches a full class in my subject in my entire region. There's a reason AP classes aren't offered in every high school and that is budget.
Budget considerations also are important when distance classes are developed, whether it's in high school or college. What I've found out as a teacher who has taken on-line classes and has observed on-line classes from the other side, is that on-line is not a cheaper delivery system at all. Infrastructure costs are simply different, not less, and the number of students a teacher can handle online is not any greater than what can be taught in a classroom, so there's no savings there.
I'm a great advocate of the benefits of technology in education, but I also think that a dose of realism is needed when it comes to what advantages distance learning can offer over traditional modes of delivery.
Nancy Scala
We here at Excelsior College announced our $10K degree back in January! Check out more details here -> http://www.excelsior.edu/10k-degree
gypsy314 ne
Our Kids would have plenty of money if the illegal aliens were gone from our schools and system.
This is Texans tax money that a few decided the illegal aliens needed it more then our children. Let me tell you these days our children have programs being cut because of Texas tax payer money giving aid to folks breaking our laws and draining our system schools funds and welfare.
I hope this next election we punish the few and we start enforce our laws to removing illegal aliens from our systems. I know Texas would have billions more nation wide hundreds of billions!
The crime would go down and many life's saved. I wish America would send the other country's were the illegal aliens are from a bill for the cost on Americans. But good thing is everything will come out in the wash and right now we need a good wash.
Anyone BUT the Fraud Obama and democrats!
Hunter Ellinger
The reason that the "$10,000 bachelor's degree" rhetoric is dishonest is that it deliberately confuses an economic fact (what the total cost of providing education is) and a policy decision (how much of that cost is to be paid by student tuition/fees). The total cost for the bachelor's degree in the article is probably between $40,000 and $50,000 once you take into account the tax subsidies to the school district, community college, and state university.
Not that these subsidies are a bad idea. Public higher education much more than pays for itself by enabling its recipients to become more productive. But if the State of Texas still provided the level of support that it did for the baby-boom generation, the four-year tuition/fee/books cost to the students would be well below $10,000, The current price is a direct result of the legislative decision to greatly reduce state higher-education funds.
This doesn't mean that colleges should be exempt from pressure to reduce their costs (although I think that right now we should be most concerned about increasing their effectiveness), but this is really a separate issue.
John Ebersole
You can get a $10,000 degree with no tricks nor gimmicks from Excelsior College. While not for everyone, our approach combines tutorial support with FREE open course ware from the world's leading universities, and the completion of a series of assessments that provide the needed credit. Easy to access, low cost, high quality and rigorous, this degree, a bachelors in liberal studies, will soon be joined by a BS in business and another in electrical engineering. Excelsior, created by the Regents of the State of New York, is regionally accredited, non-profit and dedicated to the degree completion needs of the adult learner. In case I didn't mention earlier, our $10,000 degrees are "GUARANTEED" not to grow in cost for five years.
John Ebersole
President
Excelsior College
Dormand Long
I am not sure that we could entice a Google, an IDEO, or any of the hundreds of pharmaceutical companies now paying outlandish taxes in New Jersey to relocate or to establish a major research and development branch in Texas by telling them that we have a large workforce educated with $10,000 college degrees.
These might satisfy a big box retailer or a fast food chain, but for any of those companies that are continually selected as the best places to work and as the best corporate citizens, they look at the functional literacy of the people rather than their degrees.
One of my most interesting friends, who is always enjoyable to talk with, holds a degree in microbiology from Texas A & M University. He advises me that he did not write one single research paper in college, although he did take AP English from one of the nation's foremost teachers in high school. The great waste of talent is that my good friend has worked as a waiter for the past decade.
In manufacturing, the term "yield" refers to the portion of raw materials that are actually purchased at their highest and best use by customers. Thus carbon sold as industrial diamonds has a far higher "yield" than that sold as carbon paper.
In Texas, we are obtaining a markedly inferior "yield" on our human capital resources than is being obtained in other areas of the world. In South Korea, which has 93% broadband penetration in homes, students graduate with far greater mastery of subjects than do Texans.
As a result, many global markets are now being dominated with consumer durables from South Korea, due to their superiority in impartial reviewers such as Consumer Reports, which typically gives top marks in functionality and reliability to South Korean products.
As one example of the competiveness of US products, the Sunday NYTimes consumer column The Haggler by David Segal relates the experience of one consumer, whose challenges are corroborated by Google, which shows 1,530,000 hits to a query of the product name + problems:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/your-money/a-whirlpool-microwave-and-a-customer-service-problem.html?_r=1&
Those who formulate public policy in Texas would serve the state's population far more effectively by focusing on the quality of education and "yield" as opposed to the simplistic obtaining of a college degree. There is a massive difference between obtaining the highly marketable functional literacy as opposed to going through the motions to earn a college degree, as proved by our huge number of college degree holding and student loan encumbered Texans working in jobs shoulder-to-shoulder with high school graduates.
This enormous waste of human capital resources is best summarized in the white paper "The College Payoff Illusion" by the Director of Research of The Hudson Institute, Edwin Rubinstein:
http://rs.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2147
We are getting an intolerable "yield" in our most valuable asset, our human capital resources in Texas. Taxpayers/voters in Texas should hold their elected public policy makers accountable for improving the "yield" on our future leaders by providing them the tools to earn a solid education, not
just a college degree.