"Nothing" was required of you as far as the core, and you were "given 85 credits" just for 'life experience and previous learning', but you maintain it wasn't "dumbed down" or "freely available"? This seems contradictory to me.
Stillaboo, I hold five different FAA certificates with a host of privileges and ratings. None of those were given to me. ACE recognizes those certificates and ratings as being worth a given value in academic credit. ERAU recognizes that having me go back to school to duplicate the training already received (and then some) would be pointless. I was granted credit for the certification that was already part of the program.
More importantly, ERAU recognizes that the education received to date would make anything they or any other academic body has to offer, pale by comparison. Their scroll is written in ink. Mine in blood.
It is SO boreing to only have aviation to talk about, but, if you have a degree in it, you really don't have much else that you're very knowledgeable on, do you?
How sarcastically fresh. Condension based on privileged learning.
I read shakespeare, not because of a degree, but because I like it. I have trained in and taught martial arts for almost twenty years...not because it was an elective credit, but because it became a way of life. I read zen, the art of war, book of five rings, and practiced them. Not because it was a class project; because it has been my life.
I have studied agriculture, engineering, peace, war, and politics. I have studied mathematics, grammar, philosophy, and theology. Not one day of study was conducted in a classroom, and none of it by virtue of a school. I have travelled foriegn lands, lived in the jungle, in the desert, on the street, and in the bush. I have volunteered my time and my life, and fought for it. I spent two years learning humility and looking inside myself sharing and learning about God.
I learned at every step that for every single tidbit of knowlege, I find I have been twice as ignorant, knowing nothing. Perhaps I have nothing to talk about, and perhaps your great education entitles you to a higher station for your advanced learning (and a degree to prove it), but I rather doubt it.
Perhaps you're right; I have nothing to talk about as I'm not really knowledgeable about anything else, right?
Are you sure there was 'no give'? How do you know? Did you attend the non-distance learning program for comparison? I realize this is just your opinion, but what is your basis for comparison, high school?
High school is an adequate comparison, yes. But how do I know there was no give? I know that some of the work was beyond me. There was no bending to alter the standards for me. There was no adjusting of curriculum, nor quarter on my behalf. Were I not able to complete the full measure of what was assigned, then the grade was meted accordingly. No give at all.
Precisely as it should be.
Then again, having grown up on the campus, or associated with the campus, of a major university for certain years, I would know nothing about other levels of learning or education.
First you say that an Embry Riddle Distance Learning degree (and therefore, the education that it stands for) is just as good as a 'real' Embry Riddle education, and then you asign a value to it akin to a paper airplane.
Had I a degree from a vaunted institution of ivy and snobbery, I would no more value that degree than one obtained in residency or by distance at Embry, Parks, UND, or any other label name. Is it the program I see as being of no worth? Not hardly. It's the degree. What has the degree to teach me, but to waste my time? It's a motion, nothing more. Hoops, to be jumped through.
An aviation degree is nothing more than a piece of paper that certifies that I know what I already knew. Those who have such a degree hold it high, clutched in a proud hand to tell the world of their elevated status. Look at me, I hold a degree; it makes me somehow better. Forget the pride. I don't need it, nor do I wear it or the transcripts as some badge of accomplishment or honor. It's nothing more than convention turned savagely on a life in order to waste two years in pursuit of crumbling paper; a miserable trade for a scrap of parchament.
I don't know of any University that allows it's 'distance learning' program graduates to graduate with the same degree as those that attended the school in person,
And you have the ignorant gall to call me uneducated. Every school and university, including most major universities today which offer distance learning, offer the
EXACT same degree by distance as earned in residency. The degree bears no difference, the efficacy is the same. The value is the same. The degree is the same. Forget your haughy pride; you know not whence you speak. You are an idiot, and know it not.
If this is how you see your degree, then I am inclined to think even less of it than you do.
View it as you will. It matters not a whit to me. It's not the specific degree, but the concept of a degree in general. As though spending four years, or eight years or more prostrate to the higher mind, bowing and scraping the dust for the mite of recognition, means an element of a thing to me. Not at all. Your degee means nothing to me, my training and education means nothing to me. A degree does not equate learning, or education; it equates to completion of a curricula, and nothing more.
An education is something that can never be taken away from you. Never devalue your own education.
Quite correct. Never forget that education begins after the degree; the confirrance of that degree is nothing more than a formality, like the Phd given to the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. When we leave this world, all we take is our education; it's not necessarily found in college, and it has nothing to do with a degree.
