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<p>Our local paper would more likely publish the bio of someone going into the armed forces than going to Harvard. Announcements on going to college are usually supplied by parents. I don’t know that we send anyone to Harvard in my town.</p>
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<p>A person need not denigrate college to want the best for their children, even if it doesn’t include college.</p>
<p>To answer your question: yes, some do look down on college.</p>
<p>Some are also highly educated and support the choices of their kids to do what they wish.</p>
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<p>But would you recommend that a student not consider any post-graduation possibilities until the day of graduation?</p>
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<p>Which is not what I was recommending.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure that it matters. Skilled or unskilled, the job is still seen as shamefully having to work with your hands. I don’t know that there are many high schools - certainly not any of the top-ranked archetypes such as Phillips Exeter or Bronx Science - who would proudly tout their mission of producing America’s cadre of future plumbers. {Perhaps that’s part of the problem - schools such as Exeter or Bronx Science perhaps shouldn’t be top-ranked.} </p>
<p>I suspect one main part of the problem is that school teachers are authority figures who themselves are college graduates. I believe you must hold a college degree to teach at most high schools- even the shop classes. Certainly principals and superintendants are college graduates. And the only way that teachers, principals, and superintendants can establish themselves as classroom authority figures is to convince students (and their parents) that they - and their concomitant college degrees - are worth emulating. On the other hand, you don’t have high school classes being taught by the school plumber, however skilled he may be. Nor is the plumber viewed as an authority figure. </p>
<p>Perhaps that needs to change.</p>
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<p>That’s not the question on the table. The question is, given the choice between publishing a bio on a student who went to Harvard vs. one who went to a tech-oriented community college, who is more likely that your local paper would publish a bio upon?</p>
<p>Like I said, at my local newspapers - and surely plenty of others around the country - that’s not even a close call.</p>
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<p>No. But neither would I recommend that the prospects for a first job out of college drive the selection of a field of study one makes as a freshman or sophomore. I fully realize that this is profoundly counter-cultural. I wasn’t a hippie, so I guess I’m just a late developer as a counter-culturalist.</p>
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<p>No, but reading a lot of posts on CC leads me to believe that that is exactly the goal of a lot of students (and parents). There’s a current thread on one of the forums from a kid who’s being forced into a pre-med program by his parents even though the kid has no interest in medicine.</p>
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<p>That’s a function of parents sending in announcements to the newspaper.</p>
<p>Like I said, at my local newspapers - and surely plenty of others around the country - that’s not even a close call.</p>
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<p>Really? As much as they look down upon manual labor? </p>
<p>But in any case, I think this is rapidly becoming a digression that is irrelevant to most of us. After all, only a tiny fraction of students are home-schooled. The vast majority of students will be sent to some sort of traditional school. </p>
<p>What I would like to see is evidence of a teacher in a traditional school outright denigrate college by wielding it as a threat upon the incorrigible.</p>
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<p>I doubt that the extra word would have changed my response in any way.</p>
<p>But fine, have it your way. We can proceed as if that extra word had been deleted. Would that change anybody’s arguments?</p>
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<p>Some look up at manual labor and down on college degrees.</p>
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<p>Those values are seen in parents that send their kids to traditional schools too. Homeschool just makes it easier to transmit them. Some private schools too.</p>
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<p>Well, as the editor and publisher of two small-town, community newspapers, I do bring a certain degree of expertise to the question.</p>
<p>We celebrate the achievements of all of our graduates. The most recent stories (that I recall off the top of my head) about recent grads were about a girl who graduated from our local state directional and went off to London on an unpaid internship for a well-known media company; a graduating HS senior who was named most accomplished student in the law enforcement program at the vocational HS; and a girl who completed her chiropractic degree (after graduating from another state directional for undergrad).</p>
<p>Since we haven’t sent a kid to a top-anything college in the 10 years I’ve been doing this, I can’t tell you whether that in itself would rate a story. Probably not.</p>
<p>EDIT: Just thought of another - kid who was recruited to play golf at the local CC.</p>
<p>My post had nothing to do with choosing your major solely based on the career prospects. The amount of high school juniors posting on the business forum about whether finance, marketing, or MIS will lead them to making a 6 figure salary at 25 is ridiculous. As if someone can just choose one of those majors based on employment prospects and expect to be successful. </p>
<p>My point is that many liberal arts majors seem to not think about what job their degree will get them until it’s time to start applying for grad school, because they can’t find a job with their bachelors.</p>
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<p>In your world and my world, BCEagle. Apparently not in sakky’s world.</p>
<p>One reason I sacrifice to send my kids to schools other than the local public is that the ethos at that school is just that. I might not go so far to say that college degrees are looked down on - but kids who are focused on getting into a good college are not in the “popular” set in school. Therefore, a lot of kids who might otherwise be college material bow to the peer pressure and aim lower. Since many of the parents are themselves not college graduates, they don’t attempt to counteract that.</p>
<p>Surely, some parents, even those who did not go to college, want their kids to aim higher and work to make that happen. But they are not the majority.</p>
<p>I think that sometimes people who live in middle-class (or higher) suburban areas get drawn into the fallacy of thinking that the rest of the world shares their attitudes and values. T’ain’t so.</p>
<p>Wait annasdad…I’m shocked. So now your kids are in the group working to get into a “good college”? Don’t you mean “affordable”?</p>
<p>Yes, affordable, which correlates highly with good.</p>
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<p>But nobody who is simply going to a tech community college, right? </p>
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<p>Actually, I’m quite certain that my world is far more representative of the general world than yours. Like I said, when was the last time we elected a President who never went to college, but simply worked as a manual laborer for his whole life? Surely it has been many generations. Why is the mass media so pervaded by college graduates? Why are there so many high-school-themed movies and TV shows that tout the virtues of college, but so few that tout the virtues of manual labor (even skilled labor)? Why are the rankings of the (supposedly) “top” US high schools so inundated with schools that send a high proportion of their students to college, vs. manual labor? {Like I already said, perhaps that’s part of the problem - Bronx Science, Pacific Collegiate School, and Phillips Exeter should not be considered top high schools.} Why must school authority figures such as teachers and principals themselves necessarily be college graduates? </p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not saying that I necessarily support how the system is structured. Indeed, in some ways, I actually lament it. I’m simply describing how the system is.</p>
<p>i think that from now til november (in the “silly season” as president obama calls it) it’s very hard to take any ‘predictions’ very seriously because we’re in the thick of a presidential election and everything is hyper-politicized and apocalyptic. </p>
<p>i’m not listening to anyone over 40 right now. too over-the-top negative and gloomy!</p>
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<p>I suppose that you can modify your parameters to meet any view that you want to.</p>
<p>But there are a lot of religious parents in this country and not too long ago, college was a place to be avoided for various influences. I think that religious institutions have worked to meet the demands of parents interested more in a religious education for their children today than maybe ten to twenty years ago.</p>
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<p>And those very same parental values would then surely be implicitly contradicted every school day by the teachers and principals who are themselves college graduates. Any teacher who would imply that a college degree is something to be denigrated would be undermining his own authority in the classroom. </p>
<p>I can think of many former high school colleagues who enjoyed their high school days so much that they wanted to become teachers. Naturally, they then all had to get college degrees. Heck, even those who wanted to teach shop would have had to get degrees.</p>