I think the headline is wrong. It’s not that educators are alarmed because educators don’t offer a college degree in a few months. These are scam programs run by and taken by scammers.
And it’s pretty easy to see how this will burn the students who thought that they had saved a couple of years. If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them? … Or maybe you’ll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?
Of course it’s partly the student’s fault, but it’s much more that money making scam artists who created the scams fault. It’s easy to prey on young people who think they have a quick path to cash, and it should be a crime to do so.
Even when they say it’s optional, it’s never actually optional. They are always enabling it in the background and just preventing you from seeing that.
But even if they actually did use an opt-in system properly, they would still only do that for like 6 months, and then in the next update you’d be forced to use it. And who can stop them? There is no alternative.