Degrees don’t mean anything. We need reputation metrics.

Many argue that college education is hyped beyond the sum of its parts. College degrees are apparently essential to get comfortable, well-paying and successful jobs. Most modern cultures continue to promote the belief that a prestigious college degree is indicative of a person’s intelligence and ability. A lot of this is due to the education framework, a major part of which is developed around ranking students, grading them in subjects, providing them with degrees and awards on the basis of their academic performance.

While this might all look innate on the surface, the fundamental problem lies in the way this methodology affects individuals who have not been successful in completing their college education.

Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/284148

Skills matter more than degrees

The modern educational system favours students who inherently show promise and are expected to do well in exam scenarios. There is a slight discrimination done on the basis of grades and performance in tests. The journey of college education ends with a grand convocation, where degrees and honors are awarded to students on the basis of their past performances. But it is entirely possible that if these students are exposed to similar learning opportunities, tests, teachers and expectations, all students might perform equally.

With tech and innovation revolutionizing the education industry, there are more channels of learning now, than there were only about 2 decades ago.

• However, learners are graded on the basis of templated scoring schemes.
• They are awarded certificates at the end of the course based on the grades scored throughout the learning track.
• These metrics again do not quantify the skills learned by the students in the duration of the course. It is possible that students miss out on the actual learning process in the race of completing courses and gaining credentials to support their resume.

Source:http://republic3-0.com/college-worth-it/

Once the learners have to transition from the educational world to the professional setup, they observe differences in how their skill-set is perceived. Although there criterion to land fulfilling jobs is to have a degree in a respectable course from a reputed college, surviving competition in the professional world requires an application of learnings to real-world problems. The professional setup places more importance on how knowledge can be applied to real situations, instead of earning credits for taking tests and theoretical assignments.

Reputation metrics need to be given higher importance

Instead of degrees, peer evaluated metrics would help learners get a better sense of their learning track. In the online-learning scenario, peer-graded assignments and tests could enable accelerated learning for theoretical concepts. People with similar learning interests and opportunities can share knowledge and enable their peers to learn both theory as well as practical applications seamlessly, and better than in a classroom learning setup. It would be even better if online courses could have the students graded and evaluated on their performance in the course by the actual course coordinators and teachers. This would boost attentiveness in courses, and could place higher stress on the actual learning track instead of earning credentials, certificates or degrees.

While educational norms are being reformed with the aid of technology, better curriculums and advanced infrastructure, there might be a need to evaluate teachers and coaches on their expertise, teaching methods and knowledge of the subject. The evaluation of teachers needs to be based on the contribution they make to the their students’ learning tracks. While this is a value-added process, it might be perceived as a controversial education reform policy. The achievements of students can be tagged to the teachers they have been trained by. Putting a meaningful teacher evaluation metric in place would enable improving the quality of education being provided to the learners.

Additionally, metrics like popularity of courses among the students, without constraints like availability of job opportunities after completion of the course would help them reflect on how professional world requirements need to be aligned with the learning opportunities. It isn’t fair to stifle interests in subjects only because of inadequate job opportunities. This would make it necessary to design a course so that the learnings can be applied in a real-world problem.

While the number of learners’ is increasing, it becomes necessary to keep improving the educational norms and conventions. It is important, now more than ever, that we are evaluated on social parameters of education and not subjected to stringent rules and requirements of highly respectable degrees, certificates and credentials.