Isaac Newton, Pieces of Eight, and Project Win-Win
There’s a vein of skepticism running through this Chronicle article on “Project Win-Win” that reveals a lot about the flaws in our system of higher education credentialing. The Project is designed to track down students who have earned enough (or almost enough) credits to merit a college degree but don’t have a degree and award them a degree.
There are more people like this than you might think. But the author, Jennifer Gonzalez, questions the value of the effort:
Putting more degrees into people’s hands certainly contributes to the tally of Americans who hold them, although it does little to increase the nation’s educational capital.
I think this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of “educational capital.” That widely-used phrase has non-
