Colleges greed has ruined education for non-degree seeking students.

I'm in Florida. Trying to find a school for non-degree seeking education, as I am already in a career, and am simply looking to further my education in certain fields to accomplish personal goals around education. While growing up, my learning was not particularly classroom oriented. I was in computer science and started at a young age, so by the time I got to college, most of it felt rather useless to me. I took time studying all the necessary math courses I needed to excel in my career and it was not long after dropping out, that I found myself excelling in my field.

In my free time, I'd read philosophy and psychology. My house-hold situation and experience with education growing up was not the best when I was a child, and because so, I'm motivated today, to want to try to impact the lives of my own kids and my community. Now, I am trying to return to school only for a few classes regarding personal passions and business/political goals. I want to be able to take Moral Psychology , Educational Psychology, Cross-Cultural Psychology, childhood development, and a statistics course. I do not care for many of the prerequisites; Intro to psych, Math courses, English courses, Humanities courses, etc. As much of this material is already under my belt through self-education. I chose a cheaper route to education, as I view the price of education to be unfair and not worth its costs...

Back in the day, probably 8 years or so ago, I used to be able to go to my local community college and pay $40 for an unaccredited, ungraded audit. Meaning, I could sit in on lectures, but none of my work would be reviewed by professors, and I would not receive a credit for the course. Many students in colleges used to use course auditing to sit in on lectures for things they wanted to learn, but didn't need the actual credit for, the price of audits would be fair.

After calling around to all my state colleges and local community colleges, I find out that every college in the state is now charging the full price of the course, credited or not, for an audit. I'm told this has to do with the fact I'd be taking up a seat, even though there is a surplus in seats for these courses. In addition, I'd still have to take all the prerequisites, whether or not I'm a degree seeking student (which back in the day, this was not the case). I asked each college, "Why would I pay full price to audit, when I can just receive a credit for the same price? And still have to take all the requirements for the course?" After discussing with the Academic advisors, I conclude, that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever anyone should be taking course auditing over credited courses. There's absolutely no benefit anymore, because colleges seem to want to milk as much money out of anyone seeking education as possible. And alternative education, is no longer an option.

If you're required to take prerequisites, even in an audit, it means, you can't save money just auditing to sit in on the lectures of the courses that you want. If you're paying the same price, but getting more value out of receiving a credit and having a professor grade your work, why not just pay for the credited course? It seems to me that colleges have some sort of mandate through the state to offer course auditing, but have no regulations on what is acceptable in pricing and required of students to audit. This seems very greedy, and intentionally unfair to persuade individuals from auditing in the first place... Am I the only one who has an issue with this and thinks this is absolutely crazy? What can be done about this? Do I have alternatives?

Submitted November 17, 2022 at 03:36PM by OddlyDoddly https://ift.tt/Jn9Ua1H