image: https://media.edutopia.org
According to the website of the Association of American College & Universities George Kuh is the Founding Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois, and the Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus at Indiana University.
In his recent article he strongly advocated for the relevancy of higher education.
I read the short article once and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I re-read it a second time and I had a single word crashing my head: certification.
The article focuses on certification, on compliance, not on learning and on the opportunities offered nowadays by the plethora of free courses available. A college degree does not imply automatically a mastery of any subject, it just confirms that the owner of the degree passed all requested test. On the same line, a badge from an online course provider confirms only that the owner passed the test, not that they mastered the topic. I do agree that learning is a long process, a process that requires constant application, regular refreshing and update: you never finish learning and you are the only one in charge of it, the only one deciding what, how and when to learn something. Ah, you are far better at that than anybody in an official body creating a standard course.
PS: you can read more here on Learning Vs. Getting a Piece of Paper