🔥Hot Take🔥 Fully online Marine Biology degree programs set their students up for failure

Posted by the_mindful_microbe@reddit | marinebiology | View on Reddit | 6 comments

A lot of these degrees are targeted towards adults going back to school/people who cannot move locations for their degree.

I feel that these programs are preying on individuals who are interested in pivoting careers and looking to marine biology without disclosing that (1) a huge, arguably the biggest, factor in a marine biology degree is hands on experience (2) it is exceedingly hard to get a job in marine biology, even if you get an in-person degree from a great school. (3) to get a good job in marine biology, you generally have to go to grad school (4) no grad school will accept a student who did a fully online degree in marine biology if they have no other experience.

What do you guys think? Anyone who did a fully online degree and is successful in marine biology?

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stargatedalek2@reddit

As long as we are dropping hot takes about this...

This a field where people without degrees, or even with entry level degrees (from any source), are often devalued or ignored entirely. Despite historically a lot of the best marine biology work coming from self-taught naturalists, you won't even get your foot in the door without at least some self-important piece of paper.

That is what these online degrees are for, they are for entry, support level, or remote (IE data based) positions that frankly someone shouldn't have even needed a marine biology degree for in the first place.

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the_mindful_microbe@reddit (OP)

I can see why you have that perspective, however I strongly disagree.

Even people with a full time in-person BS in marine biology have so much trouble securing those types of positions because the market is absolutely saturated. This means that the online degrees are completely removed from the applicant pool all together.

As for your comment on how some of the best naturalist didn’t have degrees and are self taught, that is true. However, that was many years ago. We have so much more knowledge of science now than we did 50 years ago, and therefore the bar has been raised so much higher. 50 years ago/the first naturalists had much similar questions to answer. Absolutely still brilliant they did it and it is foundational work in marine sciences/life science, however research questions are way more complicated now. You can’t get by nowadays being uneducated/undereducated/self taught.

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stargatedalek2@reddit

People with degrees are not inherently more worthy of employment. Gonna shut that down immediately. Those with no degree can't even get retail positions sometimes because applicants with entirely unrelated degrees are considered "more worthy", that is an argument of economic oppression that should be discarded on principal. Someone should be hired for a position because they have the relevant understanding and foundational knowledge, degrees are intended to be a shorthand for that, but quite frankly are so generalized and bloated that they can mean nothing these days.

I wasn't talking about 50+ years ago. Even as recently as the 90's and 2000's a lot of the best field work, and even today a lot of the best comparative zoology, is being done by hobby trained naturalists and not degree holding scientists.

My experience is primarily with paleontology, so maybe marine biology isn't as bad, but I mean it very seriously when I say degrees are next to meaningless in terms of resulting in good research in some fields. And that increased base of knowledge is part of the reason. It's a bloated training regimen that tests your willingness to submit to institutional authority more than your ability to understand the science, and teaches you in such broad-strokes as to become inane and impractical.

The problem is so bad that it's common wisdom in paleontology to hire a hobby trained artist to provide information on accurately reconstructing extinct animals instead of a paleontologist, because most paleontologists are better thought of as geologists who identify bones from rocks, and sometimes know how bones fit together, and understand nothing about comparative zoology. The paleontologists who actually do what you'd picture a paleontologist doing, learned so from on-site experience or personal hobby research outside of their degrees.

No one managing data input should need a marine biology degree. No one working as a research assistant should need a marine biology degree. No one working as a fisheries consultant should need a marine biology degree. All of these are specialized tasks that require knowledge in a very particular task, broad training does nothing to ensure performance.

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the_mindful_microbe@reddit (OP)

That’s like saying you can be an engineer with no training on how to be an engineer. If you are a research assistant working on marine biology research (not sure about paleontology, I know nothing about that field), you do absolutely need the biological knowledge that a degree readily provides to preform in that space, no doubt. You need knowledge of the methods used, organism you are working on, and how to do statistical analysis, there is no exception to that. All of these concepts are quite nuanced and complicated.

Sure, you could try to learn it all yourself self, however Google does not have all the answer and are most of the time they are very general answers that could be biologically incorrect if taken in the wrong way.

And even 25-30 years ago was completely different in terms of the job market and standards for researchers in the field.

I am not claiming that some degrees are “more worthy” than others, I never said that. What I was trying to convey was when you have more knowledge and experience, you can preform your role much easier and more reliably. No PI in biology wants to hold the research assistants hand through every step. If you are hired as a research assistant, you absolutely need prior training on how to use the instruments, all of the biological knowledge surrounding why we use that specific instrumentation, ecological context, etc.

Sure, you can get an expedited online degree in marine biology (biology), but you will lack the practical skills it takes to have a job that pays enough to live off of. Plain and simple.