Plus a jab at the Regional Accreditors http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/business/program-offers-new-federal-aid-to-students.html?ref=education
Financial aid for MOOCs? I don't think so, not unless these MOOCs things get turned into for-credit courses that lead to degrees.
huh? I had to read it twice, I was sure it was from The NY Onion. Nope. Apparently, this is really someone's pilot program.
The funny thing is, if I'm not mistaken, the requirement for accreditation to receive financial aid and GI Bill funds was enacted because post-WW2 there were so many unaccredited schools willing to relieve the government of its money. So accreditation was a means for the government to basically shift its responsibility onto private accreditors to do the vetting for it. Now, the government wants to get into the business of establishing its own benchmarks and metrics to determine program quality and efficacy outside the scope of accreditation. To me, this sounds a lot like the USDOE wants to start dabbling in the accreditation business. Ironically, it is exactly the sort of thing that is being heralded by politicians who are ostensibly "pro-small government." That said, I don't think it is necessarily a terrible idea at its core. There are a lot of non-academic training programs that provide much more job marketability than a B.A. (or A.B. if you go to a fancy pants school) in Social Justice with a minor in Gender Studies. Coding boot camps are an excellent example. And I think that we, as a society, should not just shove kids into degree programs and turn the bachelors degree into the new high school diploma. In fact, I don't even think the old high school diploma should be the benchmark for minimum educational achievement to enter the job market. Personally, I'd love to see a place where starting in high school you begin training for a career rather than preparing for an equally non-vocational college experience. Of course, whenever we introduce federal funds to the mix things seem to get screwed up. So if coding boot camps are "good" right now I would give it less than five years before the market is dominated with corporate owned coding boot camps that (barely) meet the USDOE standards. Flash forward seven years and people are ranting and raving about how someone attended an outdated coding boot camp (maybe, BASIC Training?) and is mad that they didn't get hired by a Fortune 500 company. While I am most decidedly in favor of the government providing a subsidized education I believe it should come through directly funding public schools rather than dispensing funds to whomever shows up with a "$" marked sack. This is just going to create more problems.
