Walden University now has a partnership with the University of Liverpool, where I did my MBA… Sent me an e-mail. These guys are probably the only game in town for mostly-online Ph.D. The real ones, not the “University of Desktop Publishing” style of degrees.
They give Liverpool Master’s graduates 20% off on tuition. Waive up to 56 credits (how did they get this number?). Streamlined admissions without ECE (credential bullshit) and TOEFL. I didn’t contact them, but guesstimating from their tuition page, even with the discount we’re talking about a 40K program. Plus all the coffee you have to drink to get though it bumps it to about $45K.
Doesn’t seem too far out from the norm for a doctorate. But wait a minute… Where is all this money going? Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics tells us colleges and universities have been doubling support staff while getting only 40% more enrollments – and hiking tuition at double the inflation rate. Nice – “The True Cause of College-Tuition Inflation?”
Then Sir Ken Robinson articulates brillantly on the death of creativity in education and more to the point of this post, the process of academic inflation – where by as time goes on you need higher degrees to achieve the same that could be done with a minor degree before. His talk is brillant, and throws a monkey-wrench into doing something like calculating the Net Present Value of a degree based on projected income – which also fails to factor in the fun that can be had in your early 20s, instead of spending your life locked in school until you get a PH.D at 27 and die of brain rot the following year.
