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Micro-Colleges are any form of concentrated post-secondary education oriented around the minimum entry point into a particular profession. With literally millions of people needing to shift careers every year, and the long drawn out cycles of traditional colleges being a poor solution for time-crunched rank-and-file displaced workers, we are seeing a massive new opportunity arising for short-term, pre-apprenticeship training.  Many Micro-Colleges will fall into the category we often refer to as vocational training, a term poorly suited for the professional craftsmen, artisans, and technicians they will be producing. Since status and credentialing are critical elements of every career choice, any training producing specialized experts will need to come with industry-recognized certifications and titles.

The Micro-College approach to training brewmasters would be an intense 2-4 month training program with a designated apprenticeship period learning on the job.

Since my coursework happened in the pre-computer era, most of the skills I needed after computers were introduced were primarily self-taught.

Perhaps the most valuable courses with long-term relevance were classes in writing, English, speech, art, design, and the special research projects that forced me to find my own answers and write a final report. The art helped me understand that engineering was a form of creative expression.

If the school were tied to an industry-specific apprenticeship program with a near-perfect handoff between academia and real-world work happening inside the industry, what would a super-lean engineering program like this look like?

It’s easy to imagine that as traditional colleges see their student base decline, many will begin to partner, merge, and purchase fledgling Micro-Colleges and begin incorporating these new areas of study into their own catalog of course offerings. 

Since existing colleges bring with them credit-granting accreditation, along with status, credibility, and the ability to offer student loans, in-house Micro-Colleges will likely become a rapidly growing part of campus life. Many colleges will find the Micro-College niche they take on to be the key differentiator between them and other schools.  Using the school-within-a-school approach, core Micro-College programs will become feeder mechanisms for additional types of credentialing.

In fact, I think you could argue (though Goldstein does not quite) that moral panics do more than demonize a group of people. They serve in part to create a group of people—to delimit or describe a particular identity and mark it as deviant.

Moral panics create identities in order to regulate them.

value-added measures all have a wide margin of error, and are quite sensitive to manipulation (such as teaching to the test).

the good teacher/bad teacher dichotomy is predicated on the idea that the bad teachers are already in place and must be driven out by the good teachers. The dream, from Beecher to today, seems to be that if only our schools could get rid of the career educators and install angels instead, the millennium would arrive.

long-term profession

more responsibilities

There are bad accountants, but we don't define "accountant" as an identity to be policed in order to solve our nation’s economic woes. There are bad doctors, but even at a time when medical malpractice suits are frequent, the idea of replacing doctors isn’t at the center health care reform.