Is WGU Legit? (2021) | Western Governors University Review: SELF-PACED vs TRADITIONAL

hey everybody it's josh here again and today we're going to talk about wgu and talk about some of the benefits and drawbacks of their competency-based learning model i'm going to talk about the legitimacy of the model and why it's good and hopefully change the minds of some of those people who don't really understand it simply put if you think like this person does i'm going to change your mind today i hope anyway we're also going to talk about the traditional education system quite a bit and i'm going to use some nice graphics to kind of explain why some people who go to wgu are able to finish within six months as opposed to four years from a brick and mortar school so if you're mad about people being able to graduate with a bachelor's in six months go ahead and smash the like button and let's get started just real quick before we actually get started i just want to say this is the first video that i'm making after i hit 1 000 subscribers i didn't think i would hit 1k this fast it's really crazy so i just want to say thank you for watching my videos and subscribing to my channel i really appreciate it so thanks before we talk about western governor's model let's talk about the traditional college in the actual traditional bachelor's degree a little bit so talking about the traditional college system like that is the normal brick and mortar college where you go inside and like sit down and learn having those is much better than having no college system at all but i think they could be improved on quite a bit so one of the main problems i have with traditional brick and mortar colleges is they kind of imply that all bachelor's degrees take like the same time to complete that as they all like you know conveniently fit the curriculum in like a four-year time span and it just doesn't really make sense in actuality this is this is not even close to being true like if you if you take a bachelor's degree in in history for example or in communications you'll look at like the little schedule that they provided and they'll fit everything in like a nice four-year time span and then you go from communications to looking at like a bachelor's in nuclear engineering and all that is fit in a nice convenient for your time span in reality like the rigor and difficulty of these two different fields of study they're not even close to being the same difficulty it's not it's not even close so like why are we cramming everything or why are we like forcing everything like stretching it out and forcing it to fit in the same four-year time slot it doesn't it just doesn't really make sense so let me let me be clear on something i'm not saying like nuclear engineering is more important than history or communications i'm just saying like the brain power and rigor and the time it takes to complete in general it's going to be much larger for you know nuclear engineering or any of the hard sciences versus something that is a little bit more like lofty and flexible like business for example so to solidify this idea of what i'm talking about a little bit better i'm going to use some illustrations here so if we look at this graphic here there's like a list of disciplines or a list of majors on the left and then next to the disciplines slash majors there's a kind of sine wave looking graph and the way i kind of design this is the more oscillations the more rigorously difficult this major is to get a four-year degree in so for example if we look at nuclear engineering and chemical engineering and electrical engineering there's they tend to have more oscillations because you have to overcome a lot of things like you have to change the way you think about about physics and life and everything and you have to go through you know differential calculus integral calculus multivariable calculus linear algebra you have to learn maybe like calculus based kinematics calculus based electromagnetism a lot of difficult things that take a while to wrap your head around and so they have more kind of oscillations they have quote like kind of more difficulty points and then the lower half these disciplines don't really have a lot of like really difficult rigorous things that you need to understand so they have less oscillations so basically if you look at this the more the graph goes up and down for that particular major the more difficult it tends to be again i just want to reiterate this isn't a graph showing like which degrees are more important because they're all you know arguably equally important i'm talking about like academic rigor and difficulty here that's all so looking at the number of oscillations per major i ask myself like why would any college do something like stretch out a communications or education degree to a four-year time span when it just isn't necessary it's very strange to me it's like forcing a weird opportunity cost onto the students who don't necessarily need to waste an extra two years to learn a specific discipline so we all know that person who originally had a chemical engineering major after the first quarter they decided it was like too hard so they switched their major to business and then they kind of like half-assedly do their schoolwork and then at the end of every quarter like two weeks before the quarter they just study like really hard and then they they end up passing their their final with like a 2.5 gpa or something and then they just do this for the rest of like their you know academic career and after four years they end up with their bachelor's degree and a 2.5 gpa or or whatever it may be if you think about it this isn't really that much different from attending wgu except for after you pass the class in wgu instead of screwing around for like 10 months or whatever before you have to study for your next final you just pass your class and then study hard and then pass the next class and then study hard and then pass the next class and the next class and you keep doing that and before you know it you already graduated after only like six months or whatever it may be so to kind of solidify our understanding of what i'm trying to talk about here let's go ahead and look at this graph again we're going to compare chemical engineering degree with a business degree if we count the difficulty or the number of oscillations in the chemical engineering degree it's about 60 oscillations over the course of four years or we can say like a difficulty of 60. if we count the business oscillations there's about 15 in a four-year period so we can say the business degree has a difficulty of 15. these are like rough numbers i didn't use anything to like i didn't use anything to like calculate these perfectly they're just general numbers okay if someone were to attack the curriculum for the business degree with the same level of academic prowess and effort that's required to graduate in chemical engineering who's to say that the graduation time for the business degree wouldn't be decreased from four years to one year or something similar simply put i'm saying if you don't mess around and you you try really hard and you put a lot of time and effort into attacking the business curriculum you'll finish really fast much faster than four years anyway so i'm curious like why is it that somebody who who took four years to finish a bachelor's degree is like more trusted than someone who took six months to finish it people are assuming like oh like it must have been like so easy they were able to finish it in six months but like that's not that's not really the case right either they they knew what they were doing or they just attacked the curriculum like really really hard and they were able to finish it in six months and going back to the graph here really quick you might have noticed this before but out of all the programs that wgu offers in my opinion computer science is probably the hardest one just because it has stuff that takes a while to digest like differential calculus integral calculus differential equations just all those like discrete mathematics a bunch of programming data structures and algorithms all that takes a while to kind of wrap your head around and if you notice you don't see a lot of posts about like i finished wgu computer science in six months like it was so fast like you just don't see that because it's not really possible to digest all of that stuff along with the the other things that are required for the degree in in like a six month time period the only way that you'll be able to do this is if you're already like a developer or you already have like a strong command of like the advanced mathematics so the reason why you see a lot of wgu posts of people graduating quickly is because they're kind of focusing on these these like quote unquote easier degrees down here with less like oscillations or less difficulty points what they're doing is they're they're picking these degrees and then they're trying really hard and they're compressing the the oscillation if you will into a shorter time period instead of stretching it out over four years that's all that's happening just to be transparent kind of hammer this idea home a little bit for from my bachelor's degree at wgu it took about five and a half months to do like the whole bachelor's degree with like all the certs and everything so right now i'm actually like working on another bachelor's degree from wgu i'm doing computer science and right now i'm working on calculus and just that class alone and i already studied calculus before by the way so just calculus alone is going to take me probably like two months to complete just that one class is going to take me two months whereas the whole bachelor's in it took me five and a half months that's like you know that's kind of the difference in like what i'm trying to talk about with like academic rigor and like difficulty and like all the oscillations and difficulty points here it people can can finish it fast because the the curriculum is more easy and they're trying really hard and being really disciplined about it that's why people can finish like a bachelor's in business or human resources or whatever in a really short amount of time because they're they're trying hard and the curriculum is not really that rigorous it's legitimate the curriculum is legitimate it's just it's just not that it's not that difficult to absorb versus like something that's like really hard like you know calculus based kinematics or calculus based thermodynamics or something like this so looking at this graph again the reason why wgu is actually so good is they remove this whole like four limit time constraint thing and put that in the hands of the students so the students if they don't want to spend four years on getting a degree they don't want to spend like four years worth of tuition they don't have to they can you know organize their life and attack their curriculum much harder and finish in like half the time or a quarter of the time or you know whatever they can do that's where wgu is like really really awesome now that i think about it and i'm looking at this i feel it's like almost i i don't know if i if i'm allowed to say scam but it's kind of like scammy to force somebody to spend like four years studying like a communications degree or or a you know some some kind of degree like this when it could potentially be finished like way faster i feel it's like a little a little bit shady to like lock someone in for four years because people can just like bang out their work and just be like sitting around for like the rest of the quarter it's just kind of strange to me so wg good job on you know removing that time constraint i understand there's like a lot of disciplines where you can't usually do this like nursing for example nursing you know demands like a lot of respect because you're you're dealing with like human lives and there's like an obvious time constraint with nursing because you have to do like uh clinicals you have to get like a certain number of clinical hours and like you have to go to the hospital and like be supervised and be supervised and like take care of actual humans and stuff like this so there's a lot of degrees where you can't really like fast track it like distance learn it very easily like nuclear engineering i think you need to have like a lab where you freaking play with like plutonium and stuff i'm just kidding but i think there's like a lab where you have to like do stuff and like go and like use all expensive equipment but um it just depends in general for like the degrees where you can kind of do it from a distance there's no real need to to force and like stretch it out to the last four years but that's just my that's just my opinion anyway but i think it's i think it's a good opinion so if you're one of those people who are mad that someone completed their bachelor's degree in six months what you're actually mad about is one or all of the following three things you may be mad that the degree they chose was too easy for some reason you might not have liked that you're mad because the person had pre-existing knowledge good time management skills and a lot of drive and discipline that allowed them to complete in six months maybe you don't like that for some reason i don't know or maybe you're mad because you spent 80k in four years only to graduate the bachelor's degree in history and you feel others should be subject to the same opportunity and monetary cost as you were i don't want to get like too inflammatory here but none of these scenarios like really make sense and if you look at what's actually happening the degrees that people are choosing and then the aggression that they're attacking them with like a wg it makes sense that they would graduate fast and it also like on the flip side it doesn't make sense to stretch something out that could be completed in like two years or less it doesn't make sense to stretch that out to four years and require the person to pay for that like four-year block of time that that doesn't make sense you just gotta like think about it logically like please we aren't talking about someone going from zero to like a bachelor's in thermodynamics in six months because that's not i don't want to say it's not possible but it's really not probable we're talking about like average people going from like some like you know maybe they have some work experience because it's a lot of like working adults in wgu so we're taking like an average person and then they're they're completing like a you know it management degree in like in like a year or something like that it's not it's not that unheard of and it's not that weird and i don't think the degree should be devalued um just because they they completed about like a four-year degree in one year it's weird to call a four-year degree by the way it doesn't make sense to quantify a bachelor's degree in years because if you if you look at this graph this is this is like accurate in the sense that like there's a large discrepancy in the the difficulty of some disciplines that is like an objective truth so it people shouldn't be looked on looked down upon for like you know you know compressing the time that it takes to to finish a degree i i hope this makes sense because it makes sense to me um in my head and i i hope that this kind of visualization like if you if you were like of the mindset before of like oh you should take four years i hope that you can like open your mind a little bit and and kind of kind of realize i guess what's happening having said all that there are some negative things about wgu like if you're like a freshly freshly graduated high school and you're kind of looking for like college experience where you you hang out with your friends and you live in the dorms like go to the cafe and like these events and like parties and stuff like you know obviously you don't really get any of that at wgu maybe you'll get like a slack channel or something and like maybe like a mentor to talk to sometimes but pretty much that whole like college experience is like it's like out of the window also like there is kind of like a little bit of a network at wg it's it's weak obviously because it's like an online school but they're they're trying to they're they're trying to build one i guess like kind of a support system to like kind of help you look for jobs and stuff afterwards but it's not it's it doesn't really compare to like an actual like state school like a really you know obviously like an ivy league school where you have like an awesome network the network is like also lacking a little bit also if you need like a lot of personal like inter-human contact and interpersonal relationships and stuff that's kind of hard to get at wgu again like you'll get a slack channel and like a mentor but you don't really i didn't like make any friends i guess from my classmates there is what i'm trying to say so there's just like less like interpersonal like relationships and you know you don't you're it's a lot of just like you and some coffee and like your laptop most of the time so those are those are the things if you're really looking for that kind of experience like wgu it's probably not it's probably not the best school for you to go to but since we're on the pandemic wg is like it's a pretty it's a pretty good choice to be honest so if you don't really care about missing out on the social aspects and you just want to get your degree out of the way without spending like four years or tens of thousands of dollars wg is probably the best choice for that assuming they have the degree that you want to do that's pretty much all i wanted to say i i feel like this video might like irritate some people so if you're one of those people who are mad please say something in the comments and we can talk about it i'm really interested to have like a dialogue with you um so yeah if you enjoyed this content please consider liking and subscribing and thanks again for the thousand subscribers it's really freaking nuts it was so fast um but yeah i will see you next time thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Josh Madakor

Views: 35,723

Keywords: western governors university, wgu, online university, is wgu, is wgu legit, is wgu a good school, is wgu degree worth it, is wgu accredited, is water degree worth it, western governors university review, online degree, online education, wgu review, is western governors university worth it, is western governors university legit, graduate fast, is wgu legitimate, is western governors university legitimate, online bachelor's degree, cheap online bachelor degree programs

Id: E2MwRWxDBkA

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021