I Can’t Afford a Bachelor’s Degree, So I’m Making My Own

Meeting people is the most important part of college. The vast majority of graduates find jobs through their personal networks. If finding a job isn't your top priority, students who expand their circles grow intellectually as they exchange ideas with people who have different perspectives.

Having said that, I've thought about putting together a do-it-yourself comp-sci degree that involves attending local Meetup events. One of the great things about this field is that, in most cities, there are active communities surrounding what it is you want to learn. So it's possible to capture the personal networking experience of college without the tuition.

For example, it's determined that students from the "Intro to Calculus for Programmers" course need to meet certain qualifications to pass. If they finish the course on their own, with no help from an instructor, then they only need pay an Instructor to oversee an "I know my stuff" exit process. If a student needs instruction, then the student can pay for the bits that they need. Instructors can become highly leveraged, experts in the parts where people really need help, charge more for their expertise, and students pay less because they need less overall instructor time.

That may be a little unclear. I've got a couple beers in me.

That's because of accreditation. Bachelors degrees are valuable, in large part, because they're a common currency: employers know when they see a potential hire has bachelor's degree, he/she at least spent four years learning at a high level and fulfilled some level of competency in his/her chosen major.

Right now, there's no way for employers to make similar judgments about people who have obtained their education entirely online, so it's really hard to get a serious job in, say, software development, with just a few Coursera courses on your resumé. In that case, you'd need to build up a portfolio of OSS projects, etc. Whereas a newly-minted bachelor's in CS will get your foot in the door somewhere, even without that extra work to back it up.

One approach to accreditation/evaluation are domain-specific exams, like the Boards in medicine or the Bar in law. But just passing an exam doesn't necessarily communicate the same thing as a degree, and thus doesn't really solve the problem. There are also, no doubt, disciplines not well suited to this form of accreditation. This approach (Alyxandria) seems more focused on accrediting courses (which solves the same problem) and does it by peer-reviewing those courses, which I think is a very interesting, credible, and scalable approach.

Right now, LinkedIn might be the closest competitor out there to this. They offer a form of peer-review for one's skills with their endorsement feature. Another company that was trying to tackle this problem is Accredible[1], but it seems they've now pivoted to include many more features than peer accreditation — perhaps at its expense.

It'll be really cool to see how this problem is solved in the long run. I think "accrediting" individuals, rather than institutions or classes that individuals can then take, will be the winning strategy, as education becomes increasingly unbundled. That is, if articles, YouTube videos, etc. are to be considered legitimate tools of learning in the future, as college classes are today, then accreditation of individuals will be the only sensible approach.

[1]: http://www.accredible.com

However, the reason I never started it is because the value of a degree exists mostly inside other peoples' heads. Unless you can change what's in there, it doesn't matter what the piece of paper says.

And you'll face an uphill battle in changing it. Most people are not like Hacker News readers. They don't automatically assume that new ideas are interesting ideas; they tend to be risk averse instead. And so organizations that have built up a reputation over hundreds of years (like Harvard or Oxford) are at a significant advantage compared to even colleges that are decades old. Without a significant marketing campaign and a first class that goes on to be very accomplished, it'll be very hard to get people to take a new accrediting agency seriously.

Good luck.

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