Ruth Institute Blog

Previously, I posted about how college is for suckers.  You can get plenty of education on your own if you want to be educated.  A person who really wants to learn can get an education anywhere.

But what about feedback?  If a person attempts to educate himself instead of going to college, won’t he lack for feedback in his writing or his thinking?

Not necessarily.

Feedback is essential for good learning.  But you don’t need to pay the insane price of a university education to get top flight feedback.  You see, nowadays, college professors have the opportunity to outsource their grading of papers to Asia.  I’m not kidding.

The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.

“We tend to drop the ball when it comes to giving rich feedback, and in the end this hurts the student,” says Chandru Rajam, who has been a business professor at several universities. “I just thought, “‘There’s got to be a better way.’” He helped found the privately held EduMetry five years ago and remains on its management staff.

Two thoughts occur to me from reading this article.  First, if there was anything, anything that could lower the esteem in which I hold the academic world, this is it.  I thought it was impossible for me to respect academe less.  I guess I was wrong.

The second thing is that I see no reason why a prospective autodidact could not use this or a similar service on his own.

Hey, it has to be massively cheaper than college.  Plus, students would not even have to worry about suffering through endless Leftist indoctrination instead of instruction.  A win for everybody!

Freed from debt, self taught students could live rich, educated lives without having to set foot in a college.  No more former students unable to marry because they’re so burdened by debt!