If anybody still doubted that online degrees were worthless, Starbucks is paying for a few of its baristas to get garbage online degrees. The degrees offered by the diploma mill the poor bastards have to attend are in ultra-respectable fields such as Global Leadership. What a great prospect: from a Starbucks barista straight to being a global leader.
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Clarissa's Blog 
I saw that getting shared around Facebook with huge praise and was deeply unimpressed; my first instinct was “Which MOOC-shareholding company bribed Starbucks to do this?”
It looks like my gut feeling was correct.
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Exactly, it isn’t even real education. I can never get optimistic enough to expect anything amazing from Facebook.
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Reblogged this on Nietzsche's hairs and commented:
This is why people are so confused about value.
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I saw this being praised too, and immediately said this was a bad idea. If they were paying for face-to-face education at a college of the person’s choice, it would be awesome. But to pay for an online degree at only one school? That undermines all other colleges and their practices. This is just a PR move.
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“If they were paying for face-to-face education at a college of the person’s choice, it would be awesome.”
– Exactly! It’s like telling the employees that they don’t deserve a real education.
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And people are so terrified of graduating with tons of loan debt that they will easily take this bait. I mean, I don’t blame them. My loan debt is crushing. But I don’t think they will be well served to do these online degrees. Instead, they should go to the local college that is inexpensive if they have to. There are still some around. But doing a fully online degree is not a good idea.
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“But I don’t think they will be well served to do these online degrees. Instead, they should go to the local college that is inexpensive if they have to. There are still some around.”
– There are some really good community colleges. And there is a possibility for transferring to a state college from the community college if one does well. The problem with this online degree is that these students will probably decide that all education is worthless after having that soul-crushing experience.
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Also lost in the publicity: a lot of local community colleges charge less/credit hour (including for online courses) than ASU Online.
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