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<p>I find the sugggestion that formal education is required for someone to become an educated person to be completely absurd.</p>
<p>All that is bad with college, and I am probably missing some.</p>
<ol>
<li>Colleges are interested in enrolling students and getting money from the government, not in improving teaching quality or keeping students from failing or dropping out. You will see marketing campaigns that say “grow intellectually and become a better person” but most of times that is ********</li>
<li>Professors usually are paid to do research and not to teach</li>
<li>College is filled with people who simply do not belong in college. Again colleges are businesses and just want you to pay them money. Call college a “pure intellectual environment” all you want but I will disagree until I stop hearing the booming bass shaking my apartment every hour or so.</li>
<li>Colleges spend money on highly highly unnecessary projects that do not have anything to do with learning or teaching.</li>
<li>Colleges and students are at a conflict of interest because colleges want to make money, and students either want a job or to learn. Colleges provide neither efficiently</li>
<li>Tuition and services are outrageously out-priced. Colleges have set up factory systems that pump out students by the thousands and yet cost relatively little to maintain.</li>
<li>Textbooks, probably the worst scam of all at college.</li>
<li>Colleges do not hold monopolies anymore on the scarcity of information due to the internet. Almost anything you can learn at college can be learned on the internet.</li>
<li>Colleges do not provide guaranteed job prospects and some would argue do not even help with prospects</li>
</ol>
<p>I think it is time we define colleges’ purpose. I would like to start seeing certification and testing firms and schools that are paid to teach and are measured in quality based on their ability to graduate students who pass tests. Enough of making college about an extremely costly white collar training ground to see who can be the biggest suckup for four years.</p>
<p>Completely agree with MDMom. We’ve been so conditioned to think that college is the only way to be successful in the world. Tell that to the unemployed BA’s I know who are still paying off their college debt. The plumber I know, with no such debt, is busy working on their homes.</p>
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<p>Not sure about the world today, but I know my (private LAC) college back in the day required seniors to pass GREs with a certain score to get their diploma. It was always the ‘talk’ of the campus when someone didn’t pass it on the first attempt. This is a college that is on the list decade after decade of colleges producing the highest number of Phds.</p>
<p>Distressed, again, you sound like you aren’t in the ‘right’ place for you (if you are a student) and your points are generalizations. In general, though, if you are looking for careertechnical education there are colleges and unis that focus on this type of education, there are colleges where the profs do not do extensive research, textbooks as in printed and bound is a dying industry my S1’s books are less than half of what they were 3 years ago because profs are using digital media and on and on. If you are early in your college career hopefully you can find a ‘better place’ for yourself. Not all colleges and unis have the same mission statements.</p>
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<p>And the funny part is, those plumbers might be making just as much money as their college grad counterparts or even more.</p>
<p>mo3, I guess we cannot talk about college anymore if we can’t make generalizations hm? I’m not talking about community colleges that teach technical skills, nor the tip top schools that produce academics. I am talking about the gray area in between that produces the middle class. Looking at my previous posts and saying you’re an outlier is the easy way out of having a real discussion about college and its deficiencies. Again, I say we need to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of college. </p>
<p>Of course we can talk about it all we want and it will most likely come down to a petty argument. But the fact of the matter is the value of the college degree is declining, and I predict if Obama succeeds in enrolling half of the nation in colleges by so and so date there will be a sudden dramatic change that will have to happen to keep things afloat.</p>
<p>And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am happy to write the check to the plumber for whatever he charges so that I do not have to do what he does. If I were a plumber, I would have to specialize in new construction.</p>
<p>Ditto, MDMom. But then I wouldn’t want to work in a number of professions in the medical field either. The human body is full of all sorts of ewww. :)</p>
<p>I have a feeling my ‘thinky’ son might have a harder time with is potential college degree than my younger son who is very hands on and will likely opt for a trade school/technical training vs. college. Thus, the example I gave gives me some comfort as well as discomfort.</p>
<p>I remember thinking that my younger son had to go to college and with his lack of interest it was going to be a problem. Then I read an article in Business Week or Money or one of those publications about two years ago which argued the career path to steer your kids are jobs that cannot be outsourced or sent overseas. Plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, construction, etc. There will always be a need for these trades and the training is far less expensive than college where there might be a job after all that debt or not. With the economy at a standstill for the foreseeable future people will be holding onto their existing homes, cars, heating and cooling units, etc. Thus, the demand for these trades will be stable.</p>
<p>While I didn’t agree with the article at the time, I’m beginning to see how that could be an option for kids who are not remotely interested in college and might want to find a career they can do without paying back student loans for a good portion of their adult life.</p>
<p>Pugmadkate, let’s be civil and not nitpick.</p>
<p>Distressed, everything you have mentioned can be fixed with a different social attitude towards getting an education or the attitude of the institution’s administration. I want to point out your own attitude, not to be condescending or anything, but just to show the view that so many people hold about getting an education which may not even be your fault. When people see getting a degree instead of getting an education then it becomes just another obstacle, which is probably why you came up with at least half of those reasons. The other half I think are the fault of the institutions and society’s view on education.</p>
<p>I want to make sure to comment on your assertion that everything can be learned on the internet; you may be right in a sense that you can learn everything possible from the internet. You forget how many people are unwilling or even incapable (for a variety of reasons, not just lack of intelligence) of getting the amount of information that a trained person can give you in the same amount of time. Specifically upper level professors are generally very well trained in their fields, if not experts. You can point to MIT or Stanford’s video lectures all you want, and they are a fantastic supplement, but do not compare at all to being in the classroom.</p>
<p>You ask what the purpose of college is. I would say to review my first post and see why I keep on saying the same thing. You ask the same question I ask, yet I give an answer and an explanation. So far no one has told me why this is wrong, attacking the surface problems without addressing the underlying reasons behind them.</p>
<p>“MiamiDAP, you should care about these things because you are a member of a society.”</p>
<p>-You cannot care about something that you have no control. it usually leads to depression. If one cares enough about things under his control, he is busy person, who let others decide for themselves. We have to respect others’ goals, reasons…and stick to our own business. As far as member of a society goes, I work and pay taxes, does everybody?</p>
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<p>That is basically what college has become, another obstacle on the pathway to a career. Nothing is guaranteed by getting a college degree, it has become an expensive commodity that is costing the nation and putting young adults thousands of dollars into debt for a piece of paper. Stop pretending and let’s face it, at least half the kids enrolling at college go for the degree, not because they are passionately curious.</p>
<p>Check out this articile-
<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121623686919059307.html?mod=yhoofront[/url]”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121623686919059307.html?mod=yhoofront</a></p>
<p>“A degree, she says, “isn’t any big guarantee of employment, it’s a basic requirement, a step you have to take to even be considered for many professional jobs.””</p>
<p>“College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.”</p>
<p>You say my views are in err due to society’s conditioning, but I think you should look at your own views. Stop assuming their is something inherently valuable about going to college. It is like watching the movie Inception and saying it is a great movie. Inception wasn’t a good movie at all- but people said it was good just in case they were missing something. In any case, college has worked because it has separated social classes and has separated the motivated from the unmotivated. It is <em>not</em> because the information learned at college is a pair of wings that lets you see things no one else has seen before. </p>
<p>Here are some other articles that go in with what I was saying
[Rick</a> Wolff, “The Decline of Public Higher Education”](<a href=“http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2007/wolff170207.html]Rick”>http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2007/wolff170207.html)
[The</a> Continuing Decline in College Wages - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>I do not read any articles with various opinions. I went to college for many years, while working full time. I have several degrees. I went for degrees and I never felt that college is some kind of obstacle, it is a great fun, more so when employers are paying for it. I do not know about any kind of decline, college classes at state schools are extremely challenging, many kids do not survive in their chosen majors and change them. If there is a decline, it is in k-12 education, the level of which is shameful which is primary reason why lots of kids are not prepared for college, while every single kid deserves an opportunity especially that everybody is paying huge taxes for our public k-12. Even lots of top kids from private HS’s find themselves in position of either changing their majors or working with tutors to bring themselves up to college level.</p>
<p>^^ I have to agree with you. The drop out rate from college is still very high. It would be interesting to look at the graduation rate as a percentile in the 70s compared to today. More kids go to college these days, perhaps more as a percentage do not finish. I dunno. I’m one who firmly believes you go to college because you want to and you believe it will enrich you personally. It’s valuable to the kids that want it. What happens after college (and I feel this way about my kids) is up to the student. I don’t personally look at college as training for a job but then I came through an LAC. My employer funded my MBA and that was more directly related to my career path. I suspect that things are no different now than in the 70s. College improved my communication, sharpened my critical thinking skills, taught me how to ask questions, hone my decision making and exposed me to a diverse environment plus a multitude of things that are not literally job qualifications.</p>
<p>The undergraduate degree enriches and the graduate degree has more bearing on the trajectory of a specific career. Undergraduate college education rarely equals career with the exception of "career’’ degrees like engineering, nursing, pharmacy etc. and for the most part those degrees are mainstreamed in more and more colleges than they were decades ago when those programs were generally at the “tech” schools. Undergraduate college is aspirational. No one says you or anyone else “has” to do this.</p>
<p>College has always been “expensive.” Just as today, kids that couldn’t afford a four year sleepaway in decades past managed with 2 or 4 year commuter schools. Kids from affluent families had more choices. Yes I think the cost of education is teetering on the absurd and I’m writing checks to two colleges so it’s particularly painful but the cycle of time and the rules of economics will settle that down and my kids want to be in college.</p>
<p>Sorry, I will always believe that disenchanted kids are either in the wrong college, the wrong program or simply don’t “belong” in college at this point in their lives. If you aren’t getting something personal out of the experience then you need to change the experience. College is not something that is a perscribed experience measured and applied to all by state guidlines and delivered to the student like K-12 it is something you get from the college experience.</p>
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And yet these same people are willing/capable of absorbing information in a classroom? It seems to me that disinterest in learning will have effects in either scenario.</p>
<p>"And yet these same people are willing/capable of absorbing information in a classroom? It seems to me that disinterest in learning will have effects in either scenario. "</p>
<p>yeah.</p>
<p>When I was in college I took comp lit, learning renaissance epics, cause I figured I could do “the 20th century American Novel” on my own, after college, which I did. But I knew there was NO WAY I would make it through renaissance epics on my own.</p>
<p>Similarly, I got lots of admiration for kids who teach themselves calculus, but I don’t think I could have done that. </p>
<p>A good teacher is more than a reading list.</p>
<p>I am also not sure if kids who are not motivated to get the most out of college, are motivated to enter the best paying trades.</p>
<p>There are millions of unskilled HS grads with no college who work in Walmart or McDonalds or whereever, who do NOT seem to have the get up and go to seek training as a plumber, electrician, or welder. For some reason, people seem to assume that while those people lack whatever it takes, everyone majoring in English at a 5th tier college has what it akes to do so. Something doesnt jive.</p>
<p>Distressed, I appreciate your posts.</p>
<p>Just want to mention something that I have not seen come up here, and that is the fact that most internships seem to be offered only to college students. This was true in 1969, when I graduated from high school, and appears to be true today, with the exception of some gap year experiences that cost a lot of money.</p>
<p>If kids could graduate from high school and have access to internships without being in college, in a way that sort of replicates the old-fashioned apprenticeship, I think fewer would need to go to college.</p>
<p>I have actually noticed some colleges are offering majors (such as event management) that used to be learned on the job.</p>
<p>From the perspective of a young adult who wants to work, or an older adult trying to reenter the work force or transition mid-career to another field, I think that internships that are open to all would make a big difference.</p>
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This is the exact reason why the problems that involve such high magnitudes of people are so difficult to fix. You must first change people’s attitude in regards to the power they have. Of course your attitude is reasonable from an individual/personal perspective, but I think your view (and the view of the majority of people who are confronting such problems) is immoral since it’s a detrimental attitude for the people of a society to have and thus should be heavily criticized. I really wish you hadn’t made that last comment, because it is completely irrelevant to my criticism in the first place. You can’t say that you’re blameless just because others deserve more blame than you do, that just isn’t right.</p>
<p>If the root of the problem lies in grade school, then that is something that needs to be fixed by the society. That hardly changes my original point though, and in some ways isn’t very relevant unless you’re going to try and explain why kids must be feeling so lazy and unmotivated. If that’s the case, then yes I totally agree. If the problem can be fixed in high school, who knows if higher education is even needed at that point (to satisfy the points I make in my original posts).</p>
<p>Distressed, I urge you to step back for a moment and look at the big picture. Why is getting an education an obstacle, how did it come to be this way, and what do we do to make it better? You don’t address any of this, nevermind the even bigger picture of what such a view on education does for American society (global society is less affected because we have an even bigger problem, that is, obviously, that we can’t get an education to everyone who wants one). You attack my views on why education is so important, yet you have no reason for doing so. You have no basis to argue with, except your limited view from within a society with such problems. I’m saying there is a problem and I point out why, you say there is no problem and yet you don’t refute or even provide any alternative explanations. Because of that, I can’t take your arguments seriously at all.</p>
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Again with the nitpicking…
No, it is an entirely different situation in a classroom versus learning on your own accord. A good teacher may be able to inspire a student to work harder and might make the material more interesting or relevant. All subjects have relevance, unfortunately I can’t say that I’ve had too many teachers who can convey that effectively to students and it is always the hardest job to try and teach students who are uninterested or not as intellectually gifted. If society’s morals were rooted entirely in a free-for-all sort of environment, we would not be helping our young, elderly, sick, ■■■■■■■■, disabled, etc. Since we’re better creatures than that, we have a moral obligation to help everyone to see the relevance of studies like the ones offered at universities. So no, we can’t say ‘everyone, go learn as much as you can on your own [via the internet] and take this test, then you can be a nurse/engineer/scientist/project manager’. Why can’t we do that? Well, I explain the reason for that in my first posts.</p>
<p>Compmom I would just like to reiterate something that I mentioned before; most careers couldn’t give you the breadth of knowledge that a college education can, and because of the original points I’ve made (that ignorance is the underlying cause of a lot of hatred and dehumanization in global society) I would have to disagree with that proposition.</p>
<p>Again, no one has really provided any reasons for why my view is wrong, only why it wouldn’t/couldn’t/shouldn’t work. These aren’t relevant to WHY the view is wrong, they’re just highlighting all the little things that are standing in the way.</p>
<p>Ok hadsed, you stay in school and you fix the world. Lucky a fellow with absolutely no real practical experience can recognize and know how to sort out all the world’s ills. American politicians haven’t been able, nor have members of the World league or the U.N. They don’t always agree on the problem, let alone the solution. Fortunately you have the answers.
Hadsed, I ask you to step back for a moment and look at the big picture. Your book learning and experience so far is extremely limited, and although it will likely broaden, you aren’t there yet.</p>
<p>"You must first change people’s attitude in regards to the power they have. "</p>
<p>-I refuse to change to have power over others’ opinions. I will never ever do so and have raised my kids to appreciate and respect others and their opinions and not stick their noses into somebody else’s business. I hope that my grandchildren are being raised the same way. We are not in China or Cuba, thank goodness.</p>
<p>Younghoss… if you see something wrong about what I’ve said and you have some basis to refute or back up your claims, I’m all ears. As a young person, I’m disappointed that you must remind me how experienced in life you are. It really is tiresome…</p>
<p>MiamiDAP, you are forgetting that there are two types of opinions, the opinion of a person who is informed and educated on an issue or topic and the opinion of a person who is not. You’re not looking at the argument correctly. I haven’t seen in any of my posts the idea that we should control and censor ideas and opinions; in fact I’m very surprised to see my assertions spun in such an absurd fashion. The whole idea of this topic is to make sure that everyone knows the value of education (as opposed to a degree), why everyone should realize the value of it, suggestions on how to make it so.</p>
<p>To allow ignorance in a society where you have the power to stop it is simply immoral.</p>