In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.
I have a programmer friend that took welding and car repair classes at the community college. He just wanted to learn.
If you are a parent, let your children know about these extension college courses if they are interested!
It gets more complicated in the US because of unions. In many places, you can’t become a plumber or electrician without an apprenticeship, which is controlled by the trade unions. Therefore, community colleges might offer classes on plumbing or electrical, but there’s no equivalent to a certification program, because it’s not possible to become a professional just by going to school.
This source [0] says “non-dentists cannot set up or buy dental practices as an individual or partnership but they are permitted to be shareholders of a limited company which owns the practice” and “the majority of directors of that limited company cannot be non-dentists”.
[0]: https://www.plutopartners.co.uk/post/who-can-own-a-dental-bu...
That said, this isn't what most people are talking about when they are talking about starting a business.
Socially, I’d say that it is respected and regarded as a sign of dedication to ones interests.
Where do you need a degree to open a business?
So getting these qualifications are required for reskilling.
Daycare center, hairstyling and financial advisor are others that require qualifications / lic
People aren't learning these professions at folk high school are they?
So you really need education that leads to recognised qualifications.
Reality is most people wanting to retrain are going to do it as a single person business as a plumber, hair dresser or similar.
I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.
Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.
In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"
Now to the legalities. The Age Discrimination Act mandates any institution receiving federal funding from preventing someone from being able to participate[0]. So like a physical disability, if you only make stairs because "99% of people can walk" but cannot accommodate for someone in a wheelchair, you would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Same thing with making a website accessible to the blind. By making your courses only available during business hours, you essentially are telling working adults "we are preventing you from participating in mandatory courses because you cannot be at work during the class." Work, mind you, that will pay their bills, support their family, and keep them out of absurd debt bondage upon graduation.
When you make class at 8AM for 1.5 hours, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, you are discriminating against working adults. It doesn't matter if the discrimination is intentional. Your very allowance of not offering a course wholly online without a mandatory attended lecture or just a night class is pure evidence that you do not want non-traditional students. How can an college believe that someone who works full time can make that work? Night classes are at least an accommodation and can work.
What I've found is technical colleges, since they're catered toward people going back to school, they do a much better job all around. Also since they are city funded and not a state run university through tax payers, they can hire real employees. So when I ask an administrative question that is very important, I don't get "uh I'm not sure, let me ask a staff member since I'm only a student employee! Can you hold for 10 minutes?"
Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.
Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.
Lower division is problem sets.
Upper division is problem sets + project.
Graduate is project + research paper.For example, in my home country an undergraduate degree in engineering is normally 5 years where
- first 2 years are very standard undergraduate courses (your lower division)
- last 3rd and 4th years are the upper division you describe
- 5th year is a graduation project that can be 50 to 100 pages long (almost a thesis) + upper division courses and maybe a research paper (depends if you had a scholarship of sorts)
So when a person goes to do a master in this country, the experience is almost one of a PhD, while the PhD experience is very intense.
Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)
As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.
I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.
However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...
I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.
Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.
(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)
Farmers especially respect education a great deal because the states pay professionals to go out and tell them how to make as much money as possible.
'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].
I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260691793...
I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.
As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy