Every now and then, someone tries to start a new college. That’s hard to do, and one thing that makes it more difficult than necessary is the way government regulates higher education.
A case in point is the CreatEd Institute (CI), located in Black Mountain, N.C. It opened two years ago and is far from your usual college. In her article about CI for the Martin Center, Shannon Watkins explains,
To the founders of the institute, education is more than just gaining knowledge and career training: it is about developing the whole person by helping students grow spiritually, intellectually, and professionally.
Much of the curriculum centers on the Great Books, and students take each class in sequence, rather than the norm of taking four or five classes at a time. Instructors employ the Socratic method in class to maximally engage students with the material.
Another unique aspect of CI is that students learn practical skills for life after college. They’re apprentices to a professional in a field or occupation they want to enter.
The target market for CI consists mainly of students from a Christian or homeschool background.
The school is up and running, but now the state of North Carolina is poking around. Currently, CI may not offer “degrees” but only “certificates of completion” under state law. If it wants to offer degrees, there are conditions: “. . . readiness to provide student support services, student housing, adequate library resources, financial stability, curriculum design, program effectiveness and assessment, faculty qualifications, and business practices.”
Imagine what state officials will deem necessary to meet its standards on those matters. What’s good enough for the students is surely not going to be good enough for them. For instance, on the “faculty qualifications” point, the regulators are unhappy that CI doesn’t have enough Ph.D. holders. If you don’t have a doctorate, how can you possibly know enough to teach undergrads?
I am inclined to think that CI will be better off if it just keeps offering “certificates of completion” that may in time come to be seen as evidence of true accomplishment. Getting drawn into the government’s quagmire of rules and standards will be too burdensome.
Watkins sums up:
Yet, even with the hurdles it still needs to surmount, the CreatEd Institute is a good reminder that a college education can — and perhaps should — come in all shapes and sizes. As its educational philosophy emphasizes, becoming an educated person is more than a rite of passage to a piece of paper and a job — it’s about learning how to think deeply about transcendent truths and incorporating those truths into how one lives one’s life.
Good luck.