Accelerated online degrees and the meaning of higher education

I have spent the past eighteen years working in American higher education, and my total time working at colleges and universities is more than two decades. I also spent some fifteen years as a university student, both undergraduate and graduate, in one form or another. So the fate, form, and fortunes of this industry, sector, space, call it what you will, are of some personal and professional importance to me.

That’s why my ears perked up a few days ago when I heard about someone who had earned an MBA in two and a half months at an online university. Here are the quoted words of that individual:

People should do what works for them. If people think they need four years, if that’s what you think you need to understand information, then that’s wonderful. There are some people who don’t need that long.

This is from a Washington Post article on the rise of a new trend in American higher education: “Students Are Speeding Through Their Online Degrees in Weeks, Alarming Educators” (The Washington Post, April 19, 2026). Also see the subheadline: “Some online colleges allow students to take unlimited courses on their own time, leading to quick degrees and worries about devaluing credentials.”

Here’s more from the article:

The phenomenon—sometimes referred to as degree hacking, college speed runs or hyper-accelerated degrees—has spawned a cottage industry of influencers making videos about how quickly they earned their degrees and encouraging others to follow suit.

I think some helpful context on all this was preemptively provided by the great Jane Jacobs in her final book, 2004’s Dark Age Ahead, where she devoted a chapter to the rise of an American educational regime in which education is redefined as the earning and awarding of credentials for practical economic purposes, as distinct from a deeper endeavor devoted to intellectual formation, horizon expansion, and such. The chapter is titled “Credentialing Versus Educating.” Here’s a key passage:

Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities. This is not in the interest of employers in the long run. But in the short run, it is beneficial for corporations’ departments of human resources, the current name for personnel departments. People with the task of selecting job applicants want them to have desirable qualities such as persistence, ambition, and ability to cooperate and conform, to be a “team player.” At a minimum, achieving a four-year university or college degree, no matter in what subject, seems to promise these traits.

Note the devolution between the situation as Jacobs observed and critiqued it two decades ago and what’s going on now. Today, a “four-year degree,” or even a master’s degree, can be gained in a few weeks. So even the qualities of persistence and the like that Jacobs identified as the base denominator of a degree’s perceived value by employers under the logic of credentialing are gone. Now it’s just the credential itself—the sheer “piece of paper”—that matters.

On a very real level, one can’t blame people for taking advantage of this “opportunity.” As Jacobs noted, beyond the perceived benefit of a college degree for employers, for individual people it “can also be a passport out of an underclass, or a safety strap to prevent its holder from sinking into an underclass.” The individual quoted above from the WaPo article got a promotion to a position with a higher salary because of her new degree. In a culture where individual and collective economic conditions have become bizarre and difficult, this is not a small thing. On this point, I recommend reading literary critic J. Peder Zane’s 2005 essay/op-ed “Lack of Curiosity Is Curious,” in which he reflected briefly and cogently on the way twenty-first social and economic conditions in America have quashed intellectual curiosity and horizon expansion in favor of chasing a degree for its pure economic value. “In this frightening new world,” he wrote, “students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use.”

Still, I can’t help but balk. “People should do what works for them,” the individual said. “If people think they need four years, if that’s what you think you need to understand information, then that’s wonderful. There are some people who don’t need that long.” Which leads one—or at least leads me—to ask:

Is understanding information the right and proper purpose of a “higher” education?

At least in the current cultural context, the individual isn’t necessarily mistaken in her assumption. The Post also quotes the president of a University of Maine campus that has several thousand students enrolled in its online “YourPace” program, which “is designed to help older, nontraditional students rapidly obtain an affordable degree they may need for a raise, promotion or new job.” That president says, “They literally just need a certificate. . . . The students demonstrate how much they can learn as quickly as they can. They take as long or as short as they need to get there.”

Reading and reflecting on all this, I’m drawn to recall something Morris Berman once said in a comments thread at his blog Dark Ages America, which is named after his book of the same title. This was in 2013, and Berman was interacting with his readers around the topic of “dumbing down” in America. In response to something that one of his readers had said, he wrote:

I don’t teach anymore, but if I did, my opening lecture in every course would begin as follows:

Most people think that whatever is in their heads is the result of their own thinking. But this isn’t true. It is rather the result of the culture in which they live. Now although many of you might deny it publicly, you really believe that learning is a waste of time. If I could hand you all a diploma right now, you’d be out the door in 4 seconds. You know this and I know this. So my question is: if the idea that learning is a waste of time is not really your idea, who put it there? In other words, can you start to see yourselves as victims of this culture; and if you can, do you have any interest in fighting back? What would such resistance consist of? What role would the following admissions have, in this process:

  1. Jesus, I know nothing at all. I’m a dummy.
  2. They took my spirit away, my lust for life, and they got me to think this was cool.

During my last few semesters of teaching college, circa 2015 to 2017 (after which I entered administration, or crossed over to the dark side, or maybe both), I shared Berman’s words on the first day of each class with all of my freshman composition students. I also shared Zane’s “Lack of Curiosity is Curious.” And I invited my students to reflect on their claims and to share their thoughts on whether these descriptions of contemporary college students accurately described them or their peers. This inevitably led to many fruitful discussions. My students were quite thoughtful and candid. I hope such conversations are still going on in other college classrooms. Though it’s probably made harder in the current shimmering sea of remote and virtual environments, where many students never have living contact with an instructor as they blaze their way through entire degree programs in a matter of weeks.

‘Ghost Stories for the Dead’: An overlooked Thomas Ligotti classic

One of Thomas Ligotti’s best stories doesn’t appear in any of his books. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” was first published in 1982 in the second issue of author/editor Thomas Wiloch’s small press horror magazine Grimoire. It was republished a few years later in Crypt of Cthulhu and then at Thomas Ligotti Online in the late 1990s. After that, it basically disappeared.

I find this mystifying, because if I were to assemble a list of my eight or ten favorite Ligotti stories, this would be among them. “Ghost Stories for the Dead” is a dark and reflective piece, partly mournful and partly horrific, about the bliss of nonexistence as contrasted with the nightmarish agony of existence. Ligotti contrasts the torments and absurdities of embodied existence with a strange, almost beatific condition of post-existence, where identity, memory, and suffering fall away into a state of absolute negation. But in the end, the story suggests that even this annihilating escape may not be secure.

In January, Chiroptera Press, which has published several gorgeous editions of Ligotti’s work, announced that they’re planning to publish a new collection later this year to be titled Thomas Ligotti, Menagerie: Uncollected Early Stuff. One hopes that as details emerge about this welcome development, “Ghost Stories for the Dead” will be listed among the book’s contents.

For a fuller reflection on this story, see “The Best Thomas Ligotti Story You’ve Probably Never Read,” in my Living Dark newsletter. It includes a link to read the story itself, along with an accompanying reflection on Ligotti’s rise to mainstream literary notoriety after years as a cherished cult author, as well as a brief account of how my own authorial beginnings were bound up with Thomas Ligotti Online and my deep response to his work.

Reading on paper vs. screen: Why I prefer the page

In an age of ubiquitous glowing screens filled with endless, scrolling seas of text and images, I find myself increasingly drawn to reading on paper vs. screen, and I relish the relatively old-fashioned experience of solitary, disconnected, page-based reading. I find that I read better in this form, with greater enjoyment and understanding. I love to immerse myself in a book, journal, story, article, or essay (or poem, play, etc.) in the relatively peaceful, focused realm of the offline and the analog, where I can become deeply and totally absorbed in private communion with the author and his or her vision.

This may, I suppose, be a function of my upbringing in the pre-internet era, when all reading was done on paper. I didn’t acquire my first computer, an Apple IIe, until I was 14 years old, and the idea of reading a book on that green-lit screen was unthinkable (though I did read a ton of words on it while playing text-based fantasy games like Wizardry). The internet didn’t enter my world until I was in my mid-twenties, when the World Wide Web became publicly available, and by that time my set point as a reader was essentially established.

Though it took me some time to recognize the differences between online and page-based reading, I eventually came to understand that my preference for reading on paper vs. screen is rooted in something deeper: I crave text that is static and set, not fluid and reflowing. I want to read words that are carefully laid out on stable pages instead of ones that shimmer and shift like quicksilver, or like Proteus morphing under my hands into endlessly shifting shapes.

Such text, it turns out—the stable, set kind, I mean—forms an automatic aid to mapping and remembering what I have read. It provides something I can return to, reference, and use as a scaffolding for knowledge, memory, and appreciation. I can’t tell you how many important paragraphs and passages in my personal library of life-changing books I can still map in memory to their physical positioning on the page where I first encountered them and underlined or annotated them by hand. Additionally, text like this, deliberately laid out on pages with care for arrangement, appearance, and the coherence of these qualities with the actual content of the words, is much more amenable to that deep immersion. You can lose yourself in it.

For more on this theme, see my Living Dark essay, “Introducing the Living Dark Reader,” where I explore this approach to reading and the idea of curating a personal, slow-reading digital magazine.

We live in a demon-haunted world

Asmodeus, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal

It’s the day before Halloween as I type these words, and here’s a reading suggestion to celebrate or otherwise acknowledge, enjoy, or honor the special flavor, ambience, and purpose of the season if you’re so inclined: “Defining the Demonic” by Ed Simon, from The Public Domain Review, October 25, 2017.

The subhead explains:

Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult.

Actually, the essay is well worth reading any time of year if you’re someone who’s drawn to insightful renderings of the way esoteric matters from the past can deeply inform crucial aspects of the present, as in the following brilliant passages:

While it’s true that the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality itself….

[B]oth magic and reason have a motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is what is important….

With their words listed like demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work), dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-haunted world.

When the self is only a puppet

Those who have long inhabited, in their imaginations and fascinations, the crossover territory between religion and unitive spirituality on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other—in other words, people like me—will find much to fascinate in the following passage from Terence Gray, writing famously as Wei Wu Wei. The Ligottian vibes are especially strong in this articulation of the way the self is only a puppet:

[A] sentient being objectively is only a phantom, a dream-figure, nor is anything done via a psycho-somatic apparatus, as such, other than the production of illusory images and interpretations, for that also has only an apparent, imagined or dreamed, existence. All phenomenal “existence” is hypothetical…

“Our dreamed “selves,” autonomous in appearance, as in life, can be seen in awakened retrospect to be puppets totally devoid of volitional possibilities on their own. Nor is the dream in any degree dependent on them except as elements therein. They, who seem to think that they are living and acting autonomously, are being dreamed in their totality, they are being activated as completely and absolutely as puppets are activated by their puppeteer. Such is our apparent life, on this apparent earth, in this apparent universe.

—Wei Wu Wei, Open Secret (1965)

For comparison, here are two sections from Ligotti’s poem cycle I Have a Special Plan for This World that articulate perhaps the darkest possible angle from which an organism can intuit the nondual reality of things, including its own identity. It’s no accident that these appear next to each other, in succession, among the cycle’s thirteen numbered sections. I consider them to represent high points, veritable mountain peaks, both thematically and artistically, among Tom’s total body of work.