I figured it had to do with the trend in high cost, newly build buildings, auditoriums, common areas and recreational centres combined with the fact the every year the state government cuts funding.
Universities have always had those costs. As far as I can tell, the cost of construction of a given building has actually dropped in real terms.
Really? Always? So they have always competed for state of the art buildings and top end recreation centers. This is why so many colleges had them in the early 90s and didn’t need to build them (or rebuild them) in the 2000s. Call PBS, they got it wrong.
I heard on TV news they got TARP money. It is not about a shortfall. It is greed.
It’s about the shortfall. All the staff of the California state universities are taking 8% pay cuts through furloughs. A friend of ours who is a professor at UCLA is being pressured to retire with a buyout package. Another friend who is a teacher at the elementary school across the street has had so many students added to her 3rd grade class there is barely room for the desks. An article in the paper today said parent teacher conferences, usually normal about now, have been canceled, and it is almost impossible to get a meeting with a teacher unless there is a problem. This is not laziness (unless the teachers have suddenly got lazy) it is stress. Plus, every teacher in the high school my kids went to who didn’t have tenure yet got laid off.
That’s the so-called fat. The blame for this is clear, by the way. It is the minority of Republicans who just said no to California kids.
It’s not semantics. I am fully qualified as a translator according to the Spanish government (5º EOI), but not according to the people who hire translators. Therefore, I can’t work as a translator, in spite of being qualified for it, unless I get a paper that those people will recognize.
The ironic part is that most of them never ask to see any proof that you did get the multicolored diploma.
How many colleges actually offer, much less require, classes in Outlook?
I don’t know, that EVERY college doesn’t give classes in Outlook is perfect proof that school doesn’t prepare you for using the single most commonly used software in an office environment, in the world.
Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that you would scoff at teaching people to use the most common office tool? Simply because schools don’t teach it?
I’ve worked in IT for 25 years. I’ve worked for companies like Wells Fargo, Pillsbury, United Health Group. I’ve never used Outlook. I’ve worked for Groupwise shops and Notes shops and - back in the day - cc:Mail shops and currently a GMail shop.
Which is why they don’t teach it.
We are currently teaching 20,000 people to use GMail. Its one hour worth of training - not exactly college level material.
Now, when I went to business school they did make me take a course on MS Office. But frankly, they didn’t even bother to teach pivot tables or VLOOKUP or any of the other stuff that’s hard to pick up on your own. Any idiot that can get into college should be able to figure out how to underline in Word on their own.
Now, I don’t agree with msmith that you need a college degree to work in business. I’ve had management level jobs in Fortune 500s without a degree (I now have a degree, but have chosen not to pursue any job that involves managing people - I manage projects) and did for 20 years. My husband has a senior management job at a Fortune 100 without one. BUT the two of us both were lucky to be in the right place at the right time (IT related or web related work in the late 80s), both of us are fairly bright, charismatic people. There are firms that place a LOT of value on the degree (Google) - and firms that place the value on experience. But its way easier to get those first jobs that have corporate responsibility with the degree, and its way easier to see the promotions come through with an MBA. And you certainly don’t need that Sociology/Psychology double major.
And yet every temp agency in the country tests your capability in Microsoft Office regardless of whether or not you went to college or whether or not your resume is filled with technological positions that are above and beyond the complexity of anything in Office besides Access and Excel.
Yes, it’s obviously easier to get those jobs with a degree. But that’s a reflection on the market as much as it is on actual job requirements. There is a reality that many of those jobs DO require the degree and the degree makes it helpful, but that’s for people who are going for jobs where they know what they are seeking, not for your average liberal arts job seeker that is sending resumes to every company they can think of.
Just because your company doesn’t use Outlook doesn’t mean it’s not commonly used. Also, if you didn’t learn Outlook then the Microsoft Office course you were provided didn’t adequately teach you how to use Microsoft Office.
Then again, that’s a constant source of income for me. Making folders and setting rules in Outlook will cost you an hour, even though it takes me a couple of minutes, because if I have to come to your office, I’m charging an hour minimum. Because I know how to use these programs without a college degree.
That being said, it’s time to go get an easy $ 50 by setting up a Blackberry.
I think we are talking at different levels - I’m not even at msmiths “Marsh and Mclennan $500 an hour consultant” or “making it to partner at Accenture” level of discussion - but I’m talking far beyond someone who cares what a temp services tests for competency on.
(By the way, I do program and project management and manage the vendor relationship for the Microsoft product line for a company that - if it were incorporated in the U.S. - would be in the Fortune 200. Things like upgrading 40,000 PCs to Windows 7 - that’s my problem right now. Office 2010, another one of my problems. Another one of my team’s problems right now is a Blackberry Enterprise Server for GMail - but that belongs to another PM on my team - I don’t usually do mobile). We do similar jobs - except my scope is a lot larger and I moved out of technical and into managing technical projects about five years ago. Before that I did systems engineering and architecture. I still do some engineering, architecture and a lot of IT strategy, but not at a “which knobs to turn” level any more. I’m well aware Outlook is commonly used, in fact did an analysis recently on Microsoft’s market share in that very area (well, actually it was Google’s, but you can’t talk about GMail market share without knowing Microsoft’s - I’m just saying that commonly used does not translate to ‘everyone needs to know how to use it.’)
I know you know what you’re talking about, that’s clear from everything you’ve posted so far. But I think you’re talking a little bit past what I am talking about. As you said, different levels.
Y’all are referring to high level professions. That isn’t what I am talking about. I am specifically talking about the type of jobs that temps do all the time, that you don’t need a degree for. Specifically ones where they hire someone without a degree as a temp, but when they want to fill the position permanently they often try to find someone with a degree. My argument is that the level of competence is generally comparable.
And I am not drawing from experience as to what is expected of a temp, I am drawing from experience as to what is expected from people I have worked with as a temp or in IT. A lot of the people simply do not know how to do their own jobs very well. I have seen it time and again, people baffled by the every day processes they deal with.
Your Fortune 200 Operating System rollout is a position where I can see needing a degree for. Likely, a lot of the techs underneath you who are going to be going to the desk and listening to people bitch about losing work because Windows 7 glitched out on the broadcast you did over the weekend, don’t require as much training.
And I am not saying that you are working in some kind of silly little environment where you don’t use Outlook, my point is that even though there are cases, even Fortune 200 cases, where Outlook is not used, that doesn’t make it not one of the most commonly used pieces of software in your average office. Also, when I talk about not being able to use Outlook I mean simple shit like redirect rules, and exporting to a PST. I don’t mean fancier stuff.
I didn’t go to school, and I was lazy in my career path as an IT professional. I could have gone a route that would have had me climbing up to a position like yours or at the very least where I’d work directly with you, but I decided that it wasn’t for me.
I think you guys are coming at this a little bit like you think I am denigrating schooling in general. I’m not, I just think that a lot of people who are utilizing schooling don’t necessarily need it. Lets call them Cornflower Blue Collar jobs. Where they are White Collar jobs that are filled by blue collar sorts of folks. There should be a lot more opportunities to go straight trade school for office jobs and not waste people’s time with majoring in beer and taking the ‘Post-Modern Philosophy in Gossip Girl’ class.
I know you’re a real professional, and I believe you are awesome, and I believe that your education helped you become that, and you worked hard for that. But you are not the type of person I am talking about and neither is msmith.
Basically my argument is that someone just entering the workforce should have at least had a basic office skills class that covered Outlook, Powerpoint, Word and Excel as well as other basics. Understanding what a Firewall is, understanding what VPN means, the basic concept behind TCP/IP. How to program a copier. Obviously, my view is going to be skewed by my relationship to IT, but I do see a lot of people that find their basic day to day operations incredibly baffling. It’s sort of like, I know how plumbing works, I can redo the plumbing if I really had to, but I hire a professional because he’s going to do a very good job doing it. I don’t expect people to know how to do my job in IT, but I do expect a certain level of basic competency that I find lacking.
How many colleges, exactly? Where did PBS get it wrong?
Yep, and if you are happy doing tech support or temp admin work, right now you don’t need a degree. That’s changing quickly though - at least for the desktop techs we work with. We get enough applicants with degrees that we can use it as a gate.
When I started in IT, I didn’t need a degree at all to get almost to where I got (and I’m not sure that the degree helped in that last little push - helped, yeah, I’m sure it helped, necessary - I think I’d have gotten the last promotion without it). But today, it would take an exceptional person to be offered those opportunities without a degree. When I started, I worked with all types of folks who had been amateur programmers and developed their skills not in college, but hacking on an Apple II+. Now those sorts of jobs at an entry level pretty much need a degree. There are still a lot of old dinosaurs my age and older who didn’t get a degree - the older sys admins I work with don’t have them - the younger ones all do.
As there are fewer jobs in the U.S. that pay well, the competition for those jobs will increase. One way to gate those jobs is ‘requiring’ a degree. Is it necessary to be competent in the job? Very often not. But few people will get hired without it. Those that do will have managed to get ‘commensurate experience.’ Or know someone.
Therefore, the demand for “degrees” that are affordable will continue to exist. The expensive liberal arts degrees from low end colleges - I don’t see the market being able to support them.
Long term, many people - maybe most people - want to make enough money to be able to live a middle class lifestyle and support a family. That’s hard to do on a temp admin sort of salary or doing tech support. And those jobs are going to need college. Or be highly skilled trade jobs (I keep trying to talk my kids into being plumbers.)
Not at all, because I learned it on the job. I was hired because they wanted an counseling intern, so they were more than happy to teach me what I needed to know.
I am more referring specifically to people who are going for office administrative sorts of jobs. You should probably know Outlook before you get a job, but because it’s not expected, it’s ok for them to train you. But then again you were an intern, so that’s kind of what internships are about.
Dangerosa I actually kind of hate doing IT, I am trying to get away from it, but in the meanwhile it’s always a good fall back position. I’m doing some writing work on a Sci Fi property that has a potential to actually turn into something, IE, the person who is spearheading it actually has mad connects. If that takes off and I get a writing credit, then that’ll help my writing career. So that’s where I am focusing. In terms of other fallbacks, I’m a licensed massage therapist and I’m working on doing Drupal theming work. So I’m trying to get some all around skills so I can do lots of different kinds of jobs. I think the Drupal Open-Source model for bringing up contractors through the internal system is an interesting one to watch. We’ll see how many other fields turn to similar models.
The old rule of thumb, was that your college education should not cost more than your first years salary after you graduate.
I did it, it worked for me, and I still would not pay more than that.
If people would hold to the guideline, then we would not have so many people in debt, so many people messed up, so many people who are college educated working at minimum wage.
It just does not make any sense to pay more than that.
PBS aired “Declining By Degrees.”(instant watch on Netflix FWIW) Granted it was made in 2005, but it was about that period (According to the show anyway) in which the “arms race” between colleges kicked into gear. I know for a fact ours did (Mizzou, though they started with a NIIICE rec center, then a nice biochem building all the while constantly raising tuition about 7-10 percent every year. No locked in rates for us.
Sure it does. It makes sense to spend up to the amount that the degree will increase your future earnings, which would generally be a much larger figure than your first year’s salary.
The problem is estimating your future earnings with and without the degree.
ETA: Thanks, Epimetheus. I’ll have to look into that.
Very true, and there are so many factors involved it’s easy to see why people end up making decisions that ultimately don’t benefit them in the long run. For background, I’ve been a counselor and an advisor at both a community college and a four-year university.
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It’s a decision most people make right out of high school, based on the person they think they’ll want to be in the future. Some of them pick majors and career paths they’re completely unsuited for, which can end up extending their time in college as they try to figure out something else to do.
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They make their decisions based on the best-case scenario in their chosen field, rather than the typical-case scenario for the job they want, where they intend to live.
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A lot of people who would honestly be better off earning an associate’s at a community college or entering the workforce go to college because it’s what they’ve been told they should do, and either they or their parents won’t hear of them doing anything else.
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They’re fixated on a college because of its reputation, so they’ll pay a premium to attend it even if they would get better value somewhere else.
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Some people use college as a refuge. They automatically go for more classes if they can’t get a job even if it won’t help them, they spin their wheels taking classes they don’t need because they feel like it’s a safe bet in an economic downturn, or they refuse to enter the work world.