Fake College Degrees

If you go to college and earn your degree, it's a real degree, right? It comes with all the merits and responsibilities and experiences that one would expect when earning a degree, or does it?

Before you read on: CAUTION. My opinion might make some angry and it is quite one-sided.

Online degrees are now becoming the new trend. Just as leg warmers were made famous by Jennifer Beale in FlashDance, so now are online schools becoming popular. But not because of a celebrity, but because of their easily accessible degrees to the average person. Their appeal is quite obvious. Earn your degree without ever leaving your home or stepping foot onto a college campus and instantly get a job in a field where workers are needed. As a philosophy major, I find no appeal to something that would further my social akwardness.

One of the points of being a scholar in any field is interaction. Interaction with other students, professors, and people in general. As part of the philosophical process, students and scholars interact, have dialogues, arguments, and discuss opinions, ideas and hypothesize about what could or could not happen in certain situations. I could go on and on about this, but any rational human being can clearly see that this lack of interaction is a dangerous thing. How on earth does one learn and expand without others?

I decided to do a random search, to see if I could find an online program for nursing degrees online. Thinking to myself that this would not be possible because nurses have to work with people face to face and they they would need field experience before getting their degree. But, alas, I was wrong. Online schools such as Kaplan University School of Nursing, Drexel University and Walden University, and a few others, all offer online nursing degrees. No classrooms to step into, no people to talk with face to face, no people to practice drawing blood from, just a computer. No offense, I don't want a nurse that went to an online school for his or her degree. So, if you are a nurse reading this and you have an online degree, please just walk away from me before I ask you to leave.

Also, I really don't feel as though someone who has gotten an online degree has put in as much work as someone who actually went to college. So why do they get the same piece of paper as me? I won't go on about this anymore, but let's be honest here: raise your hand if you got an online degree. If you are raising your hand right now, good for you. You got a degree. I earned mine.