Are Nano-Degrees Reshaping College Education?
So called ‘nano-degrees’, degrees that are quickly completed and highly specialized are being offered more frequently, but will they reshape higher education as we know it?
Forbes reports:
Nano-Degrees as a New Model to Integrate into Higher Education
Last year, AT&T and the online educational organization Udacity teamed up to offer a “nano-degree” that directly trains students for a job with AT&T. This move is in line with a new government report that suggests that more cooperation between universities and businesses is the key to economic success in the future. However, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is skeptical of nano-degrees. The degrees, he claims, are no substitute for a liberal arts degree.
Roth believes that the critical thinking skills and breadth of a liberal arts degree vastly outweigh any benefits from a nano-degree. While I am certainly in favor of liberal arts degrees, the idea that they make nano-degrees pointless seems absurd. While it’s true that the liberal arts give students more skills than the nano-degrees, the difference in the costs of the two degrees more than makes up for it.
The tuition at Wesleyan University for one year could pay for the nano-degree Udacity and AT&T are offering more than 20 times over, and the nano-degree takes less than a year to complete, rather than the typical four-year degree – if the degree is even completed in four years. The low cost of nano-degrees makes it easier to earn them, so it’s feasible to get more than one: If an employee is unsatisfied with her current job, she can cheaply and quickly get the training for a new one through a nano-degree.
Comments
I work overseas and have worked with engineers of many nationalities. What struck me most about Western European engineers was that they were excellent engineers by a mile. They knew their discipline exquisitely. I learned that they were identified early and put into accelerated education courses, to improve their development. It surely seemed to work: their knowledge was deep.
But they knew nothing outside of their discipline.
I attribute it to the difference between a populist approach to education (ala the US) vs. an elitist approach to education. Not to say one is better than the other: UK engineers brought a deeper technical competence but US engineers’ broader knowledge made them generally more creative problem-solvers.
After about 15 years of this, I had occasion to go back to the university. I discussed my observations with some of the foreign professors there, and they confirmed them; they too saw the difference in outcomes between the European vs. the US educational systems. It would be an interesting study to if it’s true of if it is merely bias and deference.
I suggest that the nano-degree is a citizen of that world.