Is a college degree substitute right for you?
If you intend to start your own business or work with loosely structured internet teams developing cutting edge products, or just want to be independent; you need more than a college diploma - so you can become more than a bureaucrat.
What you know, your integrity, and your accomplishments will be far more important than where you were taught. Individuals who develop their love of learning will create fluid organizations, that can pick and choose co-workers rather than employees.
If instead you desire to gain units for an approved school, to work for a large corporation or the government, want a job that requires regulatory approval or a state license - go to a bureaucratic school and pick up your degree.
"In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer
How To Create A College Degree Substitute
Do you want knowledge beyond a college degree but don't want to go to college?
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
You do not need a college to learn, not even Bastiat Free University. You don't need anyones permission or approval. "Man is free at the moment he wishes to be." - Voltaire
Replacing a college degree at the end of the bureaucratic age will not be an easy substitution. In fact you will work harder and learn more than most students at a state university.
That's good news. This will not be busy work, make work, or short term memorization. It will be study you select because it has direct value, for you.
The required work can be done faster, and it certainly will help you outperform most college graduates, in almost any discipline. But just because you will be better equipped and a more adaptable performer does not mean your substitute college degree will be accepted in mindless bureaucracies.
Happily mindless bureaucracies are dying along with the bureaucratic age. With a college degree substitute you are preparing yourself for a more discerning, individualistic age. We call those so equipped The Netcohort.
Two Steps To Your College Degree Substitute.
What Are The Benefits of A Substitute College Degree?
Self confidence, freedom, knowledge, adaptability, life long learning, and a host of other attributes you will acquire. What you sacrifice is a piece of paper that says so many years ago you complied with a bunch of silly regulations and you are now qualified to follow stupid orders without question.
What you gain is a website / blog that demonstrates your growth, within your field, with improved communications skills and a dazzling breadth of knowledge.
You can now start or grow your own company, work with compatriots at changing the world, or dedicate yourself to further learning.
Once you start your college degree substitute regime let us know. A bunch of folks who are dedicated to personal growth may get us to start re-issuing Bastiat Free University learning certificates or even unaccredited degrees.
After all, it will be easy to review your efforts; recognition of completion and a final assignment should be enough. Books, materials, mentor rewards, and review of your blog and learning documentation by BFU could cost less than a year in a traditional education institution, perhaps much less (use library books, etc.).
What is the downside to creating a college degree substitute?
As will be covered in the next section, put a link to your student blog in your resume and your cover letter. This should impress everyone except the educational establishment, corporate bureaucrats, and state licensing bureaus. They want proof that you will quietly comply to any authority. A formal college degree is needed to prove that.
Another option; take a look at the Netcohort Institute.
Or -- create a college degree substitute on your own.
How 'bouts some reading that goes deeper into the degree substitution idea?
There are others looking at viable options to formal education.
Why get a bureaucratic job and wait to get laid off? Explore your options.
Self University: The Price of Tuition Is the Desire to Learn : Your Degree Is a Life
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $24.95 (as of 10/10/2008)
List Price: $24.95
Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $16.61 (as of 10/10/2008)
List Price: $16.95
Success Without a College Degree: Dissolving the Roadblocks Between You and Success
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $21.95 (as of 10/10/2008)
List Price: $21.95
Success Without College: Why Your Child May Not Have to Go to College Right Now--and May Not Have to Go At All
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: (as of 10/10/2008)
List Price: $11.95
Training Yourself : The 21st Century Credential
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $4.95 (as of 10/10/2008)
List Price: $4.95
Do you need a college degree substitute?
NO
A new Higher Education Model
BFU is considering how to best implement the idea.
Lets put a bit more clay on to the sculpture.
* Find a mentor in the field you wish to enter; someone that won't mind asking and answering questions.
* Get your mentor to review each blog entry so you can improve it.
* Create multiple choice questions and/or review points on each chapter you have read and add those to your blog post.
* Correct the entry, then have your mentor acknowledge your work in the comments.
Pay your mentor well, but remind him he will profit not only by all the direct work he does with you, but by others being able to judge the excellence of his efforts to assist you. Negotiate everything you can think of upfront until you both are satisfied.
Ask your mentor to emphasize where you have failed to improve. This is not like archaic institutional schools where the goal was a high grade. If you are desiring to learn -- failure with insightful correction is a much better teacher than steady success. For that reason you should seek opportunity to exceed what you think is possible. Stretch yourself.
You will have done more thorough work and learning than in most college degree programs. Anyone wishing to verify your knowledge can read the blog you created. You will also be able to review your learning by referring to what you have written.
Show depth and flexibility by also blogging on books, seminars, and courses outside your immediate area of study. These will probably not need your mentor's acknowledgment.
This will not help you win a cubical in a warehouse like bureaucracy - but that is probably not what you wanted anyway. Any opportunities you discover will be with compatriots that want to work with people of determination and achievement. That can be a very good thing.
Diplomas are losing value as they become common and as bureaucracies shrink. A diploma is a dead document representing past compliance with inflexible regulations. Your blog can be a living document that displays your continued growth. You can do this even if you already have a degree.
If you wanted to start a company and change the world where would you look for fellow innovators; to those with an MBA degree and five years experience in a cube farm, or to those striving constantly for understanding and wisdom and then acting on what they learn?
So would I.
self teaching aids and personal freedom
It is your life.
Put the blog's URL net address on your resume.
Adapt the Bastiat Free University course directions if you want a bit more structure. To consider yourself a knowledgeable renaissance person in your field, keep learning.
The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $18.45 (as of 10/10/2008)
Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $22.45 (as of 10/10/2008)
Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 10/10/2008)
Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 10/10/2008)
Og Mandino's University of Success
A wonderful collection of the best works on subjects pertaining to acquiring a better life.
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $13.60 (as of 10/10/2008)
What are your ideas?
What you think is well worth considering.
A college degree substitute program is not really a frontal assault on dysfunctional common education -- it is more like a flanking maneuver. Consider brick and mortar colleges as fortresses within an educational Maginot Line. Your valuable input will help direct the action around these inflexible institutions.
Let's have your comments.
You may even want to let off a little steam at what you feel is a threatening and absurd idea.
Go ahead professor, you are the middle man and stumbling block we are talking about eliminating. Can you say "educational disintermediation?"
Just keep it clean.
Has this whetted your appetite for interesting educational adventures?
These lenses will carry on the theme while providing other options.-
BFU - get a college degree someplace else
-
Bastiat Free University is developing a place for you to learn. Starting before kindergarten, college degrees are marketed as a way to get a better job, more income, or a promotion. Bureaucrats selling meal tickets to future bureaucrats. But colle...
-
The Importance Of Education
-
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." - F. A. Hayek The supposed purpose of education, as marketed by the education industry, is career advancement, higher pay, and empowering a college gra...
-
Netcohort Institute - student powered peer to peer education
-
What can YOU do to change the world? Start Now - and keep improving your efforts. Technology empowered individuals are reinventing the world. Replace common ideas lingering from the past, by challenging them with your own audacious vision. Make...
-
Alternative Learning Systems & Experimental Education
-
Public schools perform much worse at edifying students than private or home schools. They are the wrong environment to facilitate learning. The excuse is public schools help students learn social skills - like how to follow orders. Primary and secon...
-
Renaissance Education - how to study and apply classical literature
-
Educational endeavors, as all social activities, move from extreme to extreme like a pendulum. At the start of the renaissance there was need to redevelop appreciation of science and math after the excesses of allegorical thought within the precedin...
BFU Weekly Journal
documenting creation of a renewing form of education
There will be updates here on this page and at the journal as we develop this degree substitute concept.
For now though we will be spending more time on Bastiat Free University and the Netcohort Institute.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byTo re-read, link, rate, lensroll, digg, research books on Amazon, contact the author, and e-mail this lens to your friends and associates:
"We hear fables about the past, we develop dreams of the future, but the work needs to be done today." - Allan R. Wallace
