Miy krappy edukatshun

I've tried to write this about 10 times over the past year, but I always gave up mid-way through and never finished it.

I wanted to take a minute to write about my experience as a student at a community college (something I am not too proud of).

When I moved to Michigan I decided to finish my ever-elusive college degree. I wanted to get my degree in graphic design, but that's not an area that a lot of schools excel in. After some bumps in the road, I settled on starting completely over with my college education. I decided to go the cheap route for the first two years and enrolled myself at Lansing Community College.

I was taking basic classes with the idea that I would transfer to MSU and get a degree in something -- probably marketing or English.

I was chugging along and then we found out we were gonna have Henry. We also decided that it was important for me to stay at home with the baby (for personal and financial reasons). I figured that my idea of going to MSU wasn't going to work out.

Side note: I should probably explain that we try very hard not to interrupt Dustin's education by having him come home early and watch Henry so I can take classes. He's working extremely hard to get his PhD. Realistically, who is going to earn more money? Me with my Associate degree or Dustin with a PhD? It's obvious that putting my educational pursuits ahead of his would be stupid.

So I decided that I would change my plans and just get an Associate degree as quickly as possible. This led me on my current path of getting a Business Administration degree.

I'm about to start my last semester and I am so utterly disgusted with the quality of education that I received it's laughable.

Out of the 60+ credit hours that I've taken, probably 10 of them haven't disappointed me.

I'm taking a class right now that focuses on marketing for the internet. This should be a pretty interesting class given the explosion blogs, widgets, banner ads, social networking, etc., right? No. The class requires that I find one "tech" article every week and post it to a message board so that others can read the article. (Yea, right.) I'm also to give a small synopsis of the article. Then, every week I take an online quiz that consists of 5 questions from the textbook.

I am 11 weeks into the semester and I have yet to take a quiz that doesn't have at least 5 typo's on it. In fact, this past week one of the questions didn't even have the correct answer available as an option to choose. Students were emailing the instructor left and right to tell him that he'd screwed up again.

These classes are disorganized, littered with errors, and they show a complete lack of effort by the instructors.

If the instructors aren't giving out piddly amounts of homework, they're giving out massive amounts of busy-work. Unfortunately for me, this is usually the case. I bet I do twice as much homework as those students in traditional classroom settings. (I take mostly online classes.)

I'm getting the degree because I want a piece of paper.

It is what it is.

Thankfully for me, it doesn't matter about the quality of the education because I don't plan on using it. I'm going to be staying at home for the foreseeable future and, besides, my passion is for graphic design. Lucky for me I've been doing that as a hobby (and at my job at Cord) for awhile now. I'm self-taught, and I think my stuff looks fairly professional.

But back to my point: education at this level is a hot mess. I ran into the same problems when I took classes at Columbus State many years ago. The instructors there didn't seems to care, either (or at least that was my experience).

Though I find it hard to believe that I just happened to wind up with all the crappy classes and crappy instructors. 60+ credit hours is a lot of classes. When I took classes at Ohio University I did not run into this problem. Coincidence? Probably not.

So many students are choosing to go to a 2-year college to save money these days, and I think they're probably not getting a very good education for those two years. At least, I think they could be getting a MUCH BETTER education if they skipped the community college and headed straight to the 4-year institution.

I'm sure there are people who have gotten 2-year degrees that have had a good experience... I'm just saying that the classes I've taken have been a joke.

And after all this complaining, it looks like I'll be getting a second Associate degree in marketing because I'm only a few classes away from this second degree.