Michael Medved had a very interesting guest on his show who wanted to do away with our current system of education and diplomas, and go to a centrally run set of qualifications tests.
If you want to become an Electrical Engineer you would go and take the test. If you passed you would be deemed qualified and given credentials. Whether you learned the material at Harvard, Slippery Rock, Community College, from books or the internet or wherever would be irrelevant. All that is necessary is that you demonstrate mastery of it.
Of course the blood of everyone in academia starts to run cold upon hearing talk like this.
I think it’s more like this over in the UK and Europe.
An excellent idea. It has also been suggested that students be taught by people who have retired from certain professions...let engineering students be taught by retired engineers, and so forth...
Engineering already has a system of tests like this - the PE exams. Tho, WRT your example, EE graduates probably take the PE exams at a lower rate than all other engineering disciplines because the computer/electronics parts of the field aren’t addressed on the PE exams. We really need to change and update the PE exams to address the huge areas of the EE field that aren’t simply about power generation and transmission.
The state bar exams don’t care where you went to school - they shouldn’t even require that you did go to law school, but they do require that now.
In the university, you have senior professors conduct lectures to a hundred or more students, with whom they have little or no individual contact. It is but a short step to instead use video lectures by the top experts in the US, supplemented by an FR-style online discussion on the points raised in the lecture.
The real existential threat to worthless academia would be repeal of the EEOC laws. It used to be that companies could hire smart people right out of high school, who would work, be trained on the job, and supplement their training by taking classes on evenings, weekends, or take correspondence courses. The demand for a college degree was just a response the "equal opportunity" laws declaring it illegal to have companies use hiring tests to try to ensure they were hiring somebody with an adequate ability to read, write, and do math.
I don’t think we are ever going to have a real alternative to a 4yr college degree. However I would like to see a tuition restructuring.
If you are going for an EE degree then courses that specifically apply to that degree would cost full tuition.
However, communist indoctrinated liberal arts courses not relevant to an EE degreee should cost one half or one third of tuition credit rates.
Hopefully this plan would bring down the salary of community-organizing professors to that of the Head Start nannies that they are.
Leftists would take over and dumb down the content of the professional qualification tests. Suddenly, white engineers would have to be self hating socialists in order to pass the tests.