Accreditation vs. Outcomes

Matt McFarland writes

Accreditors evaluate schools on factors such as their mission, finances, staff, quality of classes, student-teacher interactions and enforcement of a code of conduct. The process can take several years. It’s a way for schools to justify their worth and also find areas for improvement. 

Horn’s group wants to shift the focus to actual outcomes. Did the student master the course work? Did they find a job, or receive a salary boost? Are they satisfied with the program?

The larger context of the article claims that the classical education system is like bundled cable TV, while new bookcamp-like code academies are Netflix. I am uneasy about this analogy, because I don't think colleges and bootcamps actually deliver the same service, but I can see the logic.

Regarding the accreditation excerpt above, my suspicion is that if colleges were suddenly evaluated based on third-party tested outcomes, the number of admitted students would plummet relative to their current levels, and recruitment competition would become extreme.

The Publisher's Nightmare

Simon Oxenham writes

On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.

Quartz has a piece on this as well. I had never encountered this website, likely because I have always had pretty complete access through UCSB, then ETH, and now Waterloo. Some of the publishers mentioned in the article are large, profitable institutions, but not so large and profitable that they can fight this battle on foreign soil with impunity. I will predict that this database is not going anywhere.