<p>I had a compsci teacher who initially wanted to major in math at Berkeley but instead majored in english because he hated the problem sets. The people from my school who hired him don’t even know he has a degree in english. It’s really hard to categorize english/psychology/philosophy/etc. majors because they get such a wide variety of people who are interested in them. They are an easy outlet into law and medical school, and a lot of athletes, musicians, actors, and celebrities who go back to school end up majoring in them either to have a backup career or just to say they have a diploma. There are tons of careers, besides just writing or teaching, where a degree in one of those areas of study will serve a person well.</p>
<p>The purpose of college is to make money and support your family, obviously.</p>
<p>Honestly, that is all it comes down to.</p>
<p>“It’s probably not all that great a job if the competition is comprised of people with only high school diplomas. Having such a job would probably be a disappointment for a person who defines success in terms of their career.”</p>
<p>It was a hypothetical scenario. Anyone can apply for a job. You’re missing the point.</p>
<p>“Most history majors don’t have the explicit goal of becoming a teacher. They major in history because they like it, even though they realize the job prospects aren’t going to be as good as they might be for other majors.”</p>
<p>Couldn’t they get a better education of let’s say, European history, by going to Europe and reading textbooks?</p>
<p>I’d like to revise “skill” to “skill set.”</p>
<p>ETA: Well, what do you think the point of college is? … And what do you think the point of an education is?</p>
<p>curtis(3.1% acceptance rate) and julliard(6.2%) are more selective than stanford.</p>
<p>Not Julliard. Stanford’s acceptance rate is 5.7%.</p>
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<p>But I don’t think people choose those majors because of the career prospects. </p>
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<p>Not everyone has or wants children.
More importantly, you can make money and support a family without a four-year degree from a prestigious university, so why do people without clear career goals choose to attend academic institutions instead of trade schools?</p>
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<p>To learn stuff, including some practical skills in addition to art or academic subjects.</p>
<p>And of course it’s possible to get an education without college, but if you’re going to go to college you may as well try and get an education out of it. I don’t think there are very many people on here entertaining the option of not going to college at all, but from the way people talk I think some of them should. </p>
<p>I live in a first-world country in the twenty-first century. It’s unlikely I will ever be homeless or starving. By some accident of chance I was born with enough privilege to think beyond immediate practical concerns, so that’s what I intend to do.</p>
<p>(For the record, I definitely think it’s possible to choose a practical major for practical reasons and still end up with an education. But not if you go through college believing the only things that matter are grades and your future job, and ironically this website tends to encourage that kind of anti-intellectualism.)</p>
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<p>Only if they were self-motivated enough to figure out how to do that (designing their own education, not traveling to Europe), and most people aren’t. I mean, I’ve lived in the United States all my life and I don’t know very much about American history.
I think class discussions are beneficial. I also think it’s nice to hear lectures from scholars and have your work assessed by someone who hopefully knows what they’re talking about. Self-studying has drawbacks. </p>
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<p>For me it’s a way of transcending myself. I want to try and understand the world instead of just wandering around on its surface for what I hope will be the better part of a century. </p>
<p>More depressingly, it’s a way of overcoming the despair I feel when I think about my own death. I want to achieve a kind of immortality by contributing something to human knowledge (or being an educator and enabling others to contribute to human knowledge), and in order to do that I’ll need to spend a few years studying what’s already been done. </p>
<p>More cynically, it’s a distraction.</p>
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<p>Every person I know majors in something they like with the hope of finding some use for it. Like with the European history major, they majored in it because they like it. Some might want to dedicate their life to it. They don’t care about the money, but they do care about finding some way to sustain themselves.</p>
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<p>One, because college grads make more money, and two, they expect to figure it out in college.</p>
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<p>And what’s the point of learning stuff?</p>
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<p>Day to day life yields more life experience than sitting in a classroom musing about the works of Plato.</p>
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<p>I don’t mean to jump in the discussion…BUT this comment isn’t fair. Education doesn’t equal classroom. Especially NOT in college. With the plethora of opportunities to learn outside the classroom, your comment isn’t actually correct.</p>
<p>And you can only learn outside on a college campus while paying 40k a year?</p>
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<p>I don’t have a problem with this mentality, but it’s quite a lot different from the idea that the sole purpose of college is to get a job and the sole purpose of high school is to get into college. </p>
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<p>The same as the point of an education, but also:</p>
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<li>It’s fun. </li>
<li>You’re not as easy to fool or take advantage of. (This is one of those stock reasons people always pull out when asked what the point of learning is, and it’s pretty debatable if you ask me, but I think it has some merit.)</li>
<li>You’re helping with the preservation and transmission of knowledge for future generations. </li>
<li>Knowledge can help with eradicating prejudice.</li>
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<p>IMO, the intuitions we gain about reality by walking the streets can only be enhanced by formal academic study. I think formal education (or even just reading) can teach you things about the world that “real life” can’t, and vice versa. </p>
<p>You can’t intuit history or science or mathematics from nothing, and a theoretical person who understands the world would surely have knowledge of those subjects. It took thousands of years and thousands of brilliant minds for us to develop the body of knowledge we have today. </p>
<p>And I agree with the comment that college involves (or should involve) more than just classroom study.</p>
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<p>College doesn’t need to be that expensive, and in fact it isn’t for most people.</p>
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<p>But the MAIN purpose of college is to get a job.</p>
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<li>That’s easily debatable. Some people hate school and just go to get into college and to get a job.</li>
<li>Plenty of college educated people are swindled. </li>
<li>Only if you’re in academia.</li>
<li>I’ll argue that interacting with black people eliminates prejudice more than studying about them in a classroom.</li>
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<p>Missing the point, but okay. UT Austin costs 20k a year in state. Most people go to state flagships.</p>
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<p>You have to have a job to have money to live, so there’s a sense in which it’s logically impossible for anything other than practical concerns to come first. </p>
<p>(Requisite half-assed analogy:<br>
But saying that the main purpose of college is to get a job is like that saying that the main purpose of eating is to keep from starving. It’s true, but people who aren’t starving usually prefer to find other reasons that are less limiting and narrow-minded. Food can bring about emotions, evoke past memories, symbolize cultures. It can be misused, overused, commercialized. Some people are elitist about it. I’ll stop now.)</p>
<p>So yeah, everyone is ultimately going to use their degree to get a better job than they would have gotten otherwise, but I think it’s harmful and unnecessary to focus too much on this while you’re actually in the process of getting the degree. And that’s the mentality I saw at the beginning of the thread. (It looks as though the OP has supportive parents and will end up at an excellent university someday, but his* primary concern at the moment is what he can do to be the top-ranked person in a group of people who probably aren’t all that impressive to begin with.)</p>
<p>*Random guess. </p>
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<p>Sometimes when these people go to college it’s because they feel they have to and not because they have a desired career that requires it. </p>
<p>Even so, I think everyone likes to learn about something in some context.
(I mean, there are several high-paying career fields…why did they pick the one they’re going into? That’s a starting point. Do they have hobbies or read books?)
High school is unnecessarily boring and uninspiring at times, and I think some people allow that to push them away from learning too early. (Though the argument that learning is valuable because some people find it fun isn’t dependent on everyone finding it fun.)</p>
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<p>Sure, but is it less likely?
(I actually don’t know. I suppose you could even argue that college-educated people are more gullible because they can be more ivory-towerish and detached from the “real world.”)</p>
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<p>In a way you’re helping to preserve knowledge every time you learn something, if you outlive your teacher.<br>
I think people transmit knowledge quite often, especially to their children. </p>
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<p>Sure, and this is probably one of the reasons that colleges try really hard to make themselves diverse.</p>
<p>I think education can make us aware of prejudices and biases we didn’t know we had. When I was younger I was sometimes surprised at the perspectives (on religion or politics or whatever) I saw in books I read. I lived in a homogeneous area, so I didn’t experience “diversity” in real life and I didn’t quite realize the vast extent to which other people’s worldviews could differ from mine. </p>
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<p>Not even that. But I’m missing the point again.</p>
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<p>I’m pretty sure 99.99% of the time, people eat because they’re hungry.</p>
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<p>Learning sure. Learning in a structured, stressful environment? Not so much.</p>
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<p>It depends more on the person. Some are just more trusting than others.</p>
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<p>There’s a difference between teaching your kid to read and teaching your kid graduate level mathematics. Only those in academia do the latter.</p>
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<p>Maybe flagship was the wrong word. Most people go to public state unis.</p>
<p>(If people only cared about hunger/nutrition, they’d eat more healthful food and certainly not as much of it. Have you seen most Americans? We don’t know what hunger is.)</p>
<p>But I digress, because I suck at analogies.
The point is that treating education as job training seems very basic to me, and when it’s possible to relegate it to the background I think we should. Most people on here are privileged enough to do things just for the sake of doing them (on some level), so I don’t think there’s any reason for obsessing over jobs and our own lives (which will likely turn out fine) when we could be trying to understand the world. </p>
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<p>What makes it stressful?</p>
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<p>Yea, most people I see are pretty fit. Could be because the most public places I go to are the trails around Austin though.</p>
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<p>Essays, tests, not enough time yada yada yada.</p>
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<p>You must not go to Wal-Mart very often.</p>
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<p>I feel like a lot of this stuff could be changed fairly easily, and I think at least some of the stress comes from people being too focused on grades and getting ahead.</p>
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<p>Idk, but all the fat people must be in Mississippi or something. I don’t see 2/3 of people being overweight at my local grocery store.</p>
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<p>How so?</p>
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<p>Well, essays probably won’t.
College classes seem to be better than high school classes as far as stressful assignments because there aren’t as many of them. But they count more toward your grade.
Some high schools and LACs use narrative evaluations instead of letter grades, but I’m not sure how well that works or if it decreases stress.</p>
<p>“The valdectorian for the 2013 class is going to CSUS. He only got into Davis out of the UCs and he’s Mexican. It’s the whole picture, not just the grades.”</p>
<p>Sweet. Does this make the count two valedictorians from the Sacramento area going to CSUS now? Gosh, talking to people at competitive high schools (including my own) turns a lot of people off (plus parents and teachers) with my CSUS attendance–oh and I’ve only applied to two schools so I’m in the same situation :P.</p>
<p>But like another person in this thread said, past valedictorians at my school have been talked about because they ONLY attended UC Berkeley, not some Ivy League etc, but I’ve never seen anything “below” Berkeley out of five years of graduates.</p>
<p>Here’s how you become valedictorian (given you can get straight A’s, because it’s more about scheduling that makes the difference in the top 10): Starting as early as possible, get a senior to advise you on how to abuse the system, because that’s the only way to get valedictorian in a competitive system… In short, repeat weighted classes if you can (such as theather), replace all unweighted classes with something like TA or leadership, don’t do zero period, and abuse easy community college courses if they give you a GPA boost–or even better, an excuse to leave campus early and avoid unweighted classes. Find ways to skip out of unweighted classes such as PE (medical excuse), and use placement exams to skip your way through prerequisites to classes that actually give you weighted credit–self-study your way to the top of AP Languages and you have more fodder for your GPA boost.</p>
<p>I’m with halcyon here. The real plebs in this thread are the ones who believe that the crux of education is to get to college and get a job. If you get a job that pays well but isn’t your true passion – congratulations. You have now become a carbon copy that lives for nothing more than a paycheck. People who prioritize grades and monetary success over passion, ECs, and personality are the true failures in life IMHO.</p>
<p>On a side note, anyone else looking forward to seeing some of the prominent carbon-copy elitists on this forum posting the colleges they were rejected from in a few months?</p>