***Why Take a Course that Doesn't Offer Credit?

I'm not really in touch with the general school-attending public anymore. My kids are no longer in school; I retired from university teaching and am living in Florida among the old folks. So, sometimes I forget why students go to school.nnThis isn't entirely fair. I have always had difficulty with why students attend school. In fact, when I taught undergraduates at Yale and Northwestern, I used to spend the first class of every semester asking exactly that question. I would ask my students why they were there and then wait for a response. I got blank looks at first, then questions about the question, and finally exasperated comments like "Are you just going to sit there until we answer this question?" Sit there I did.nnEventually they talked. They said the class fit in well with their schedule, or that it was required for their major, or that it looked easy, or that they heard I only gave A's. Sometimes they talked about why they were in college. They said that it got them out of their parents' homes, or that their sex life was picking up, or that it was like attending a party. Job preparation and deciding what to do with one's life or the horrors of the alternative - work - were also mentioned.nnLearning was never mentioned once in all the years that I asked that question. Ideas were never mentioned. Thinking was never mentioned in a course in cognitive science. Maybe Yale and Northwestern students aren't representative of students in general. Who knows? What I do know is the real answer to why they were there: Credentials.nn"I graduated from Yale" works very well throughout life. Employers know that they will need to teach their new hires from Yale because at Yale they won't have learned very much that is directly relevant to their jobs, but they don't mind. They don't expect anyone to have learned anything relevant at Yale. They just like it that they went there.nnThis odd state of affairs is well known to both students and faculty. In fact, there is a tacit agreement between students and faculty at any top research university. The faculty agrees not to object too loudly when the students clearly don't seem to know much and the students agree to not complain too much when the faculty teaches courses that clearly have no relevance to their future lives.nnI am writing this days after the launch of Trump University, for which I have been designing job skills courses geared to the real world according to the methodology of learning by doing. I was outraged, as I usually am, by the press and their response to this new venture. What was the press's concern? The courses offer no credit and don't lead to a degree. What could possibly be their value then?nnHere are some courses that do offer credit and lead to a degree at Yale (nothing against Yale here - I loved being at Yale):n

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• ART 120a, Introductory Sculpture.n
• ARCG 349b, Archaeology of the African Diaspora.n
• ASTR 420a, Computational Methods for Astrophysics.n
• CPSC 150a, Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda.n
• EP&E 417a, Totalitarianism and the Problem of Political Evil.n
• WGSS 295a, Women and Gender in a Transnational Context.n

nI do not mean to imply by this list (just a few courses selected at random - nothing unusual here) that one learns nothing at Yale or that any of these courses might be a waste of time. In fact, taking them might be an enthralling and life-changing event. What I am suggesting is that these courses may not serve members of the general public as well as the more pragmatic courses offered by Trump University.nnThese Yale courses do lead to credentials. Any Yale graduate is likely to have taken these courses or similar ones on his way to attaining his Yale degree. Yale allows students to take such courses because no one cares what they have learned. Students in the real world, those who cannot go to Yale, cannot afford that luxury.