The *business* Of "higher" Education: Questions Of Value

Q: And why in the heck should DL cost MORE? Should it not cost less? What happenned to the video courses that were supposed to radically change the way Americans learned on their time? Hardly any "higher" educational facility uses these. Videotape one instructor, make copies, send out. Must not be cost-effective. And being "RA" is no guarantee that an institution is any better than _not_ being accredited. The accreditation process is very expensive, anal-retentive in its directives, requires unneccesary textbooks which are astronomically over-priced, and promulgates the publish or perish attitude.

A:I see from Chapter 24 of Bears' Guide, 13th edition, that we have Texas Tech University High School, the State of Nebraska's Independent Study High School, the Bloomington, Minnesota Internet High School, the North Carolina Vance-Granville non-resident high school, the Moab, Utah Electronic High School, the Florida non-resident Citizens' High School, California's non-resident Newport Pacific High School, Pennsylvania's DL Keystone High School,Georgia's non-resident James Madison High School -- and that's just for starters. If "publish or perish" is not applied to nontraditional education, then that education becomes a lesson in autoeroticism, rather than autodydactism. I can certainly relate to what you've described, I dropped out of Northeastern University in 1983 during my first quarter and joined the Army (though I was stupid enough to take the $2000 bonus and go Infantry). The good news is that you've probably already earned some college credit for your military education (and many DL programs will accept those who didn't finish HS, especially veterans). Take a look at the CLEP exams at; (http://www.collegeboard.org/clep/html/indx.001.html), you can probably knock out a bunch of credits that way. The good thing is that you can take the CLEP exams and have the results sent to you only. You can then decide whether to send the results to a school. Given your background, I would recommend Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey (http://www.tesc.edu). It is state-run and regionally accredited, so there will be no problem with acceptance of your degree. They accept unlimited transfer, CLEP, and portfolio credit (for the ultimate guide to portfolio credit, check out Steve Levicoff's homepage at http://members.tripod.com/~levicoff/). TESC also offers majors in almost anything you could imagine.

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