Hi everyone,

I know the original call was for those with advanced degrees, but I may have a different perspective.

After graduating high school, I studied epidemiology at USC on scholarship before transferring to Berkeley to study English Lit. However, I decided college wasn’t worth the expense and promptly dropped out.

I set out to learn on my own terms, and it’s been remarkably fulfilling. These past few years have taken me on film sets, concert stages, classrooms, and a 2-month excursion through the mountains of Japan. I’m currently preparing for peer-review a scientific paper on consciousness, which I modeled with Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, e.g. Big Bang.

With the internet democratizing information, learning is no longer the purview of academics in ivory towers. It’s now accessible to everyone. The Industrial Age metric of inputs and outputs is being supplanted by a continuous learning model of an Information Age. The future is increasingly customizable, and education is no different (we’ll figure it out as we go along).

My friends value their degrees, but an increasing number express doubts about the academic-industrial complex. Not denigrating the hard work of anyone in academia, but to quote a favorite movie, “You dropped 150 grand on an education you could’ve got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.” Good Will Hunting

Eric S.

On Saturday, September 12, 2020, Cole Butler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi all,

I found this brief documentary on Joe Rogan really fascinating, and thought I'd share here. I was aware of some of his past history, but seeing it all summarized and laid out from his beginnings in construction and martial arts to being "the most powerful podcast interviewer in the world" was really interesting to watch.

It sparks off a lot of ideas in my head about the power of technology in this digital age. Specifically, how the ability to transfer information online globally is such a new phenomenon that the traditional methods of sharing interesting information are quickly becoming dully outdated. This affords the opportunity to develop individual identity through online branding and content creation. Joe Rogan is really one of, if not the, pioneer of generating revenue through idea exchange online. 

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on the implications of this for the modern academic space? My university is facing a $292 million budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year, resulting in severe budget cuts, salary reductions, and more. And they claim that they're "not sure they implications that this has on students' decisions moving forward". What I'm seeing at the student level is a widespread unrest with the notion of paying the tuition required to fund the universities, when clearly the institutions themselves may not be an integral aspect to the process of education. Further, several courses deemed required may pose no actual utility to the student's desired goals, resulting in payment for unnescessary information and a painstaking, and potentially harmful, student experience. Does this catalyze a shift toward a world in which information exchange is distributed online, and the high cost of tuition to sustain universities as centralized locations for information exchange becomes unnecessary? Why not quantify learned information differently (e.g., online credits from multiple platforms, online certificates/degrees), and use that as a basis for evaluation of job readiness/fitness? I believe we are already seeing the beginnings of this shift, and I'm interested to see where this all leads us. It certainly has me seriously reconsidering the idea of investing tens of thousands of dollars of borrowed money into a formal graduate education, or relying on stipends and grant funding to barely scrape by in a MS/PhD program for 6 years...

I know several (most?) of you on this list have graduate degrees, and some of you are specialists in education, so I'd be quite interested to hear your thoughts on this.

My best,

Cole Butler
Faculty Specialist
Project Coordinator: Treating Parents with ADHD and their Children (TPAC)
University of Maryland
2103W, Cole Field House | College Park, MD 20742
tel 301.405.6163
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