I find it telling that for all the films about or taking place in college, very few of them seem to focus on the actual point of being there - i.e. completing the course curriculum. Granted most of those stories have a “coming of age” component to them, and college tends to be where people “come of age” in our society.
But to your point, it’s not really clear to me why we need to spend potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars or take on crushing debt so young people can spend 4 years living in a country club “finding themselves” and learning life lessons and whatnot (and oh yeah, maybe get a degree in accounting or English lit or whatever).
I don’t agree, but this is a great example of where college inflation comes from - once you’re in a profession you have all sorts of incentives (prestige, wages) to put up barriers to other people entering it. Of course nurses are going to insist that you need a four-year degree to be a nurse, barbers are going to insist that you need a burdensome licensing process to be a barber, etc.
College is one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was like finding a little door in your house you didn’t know existed and finding an entire universe on the other side. It did make me well - rounded, it did teach me how to think critically, and those were things I valued far more than checking off a box. Until that point my brain was just untapped potential. I would have no idea what I was really capable of if it weren’t for college. And as an added bonus, it brought me my husband. (And in case you wondered, my major was Spanish, but I took courses in just about anything that interested me. Courses I remember with fondness to this day, twenty years later.)
To be sure, it’s not for everyone. And the quality of an education can vary dramatically depending on the school you choose. But I can’t help but think we wouldn’t be in this mess if more people were exposed to new ideas and taught how to think critically.
Yep. Learning to learn, learning to think, getting exposed to new ideas and new disciplines and new ways of thinking and learning, finding out how much there is that you don’t know… and all in the company of fellow students who are on the same journey (or on their own, similar hourneys), interacting with and being guided by men and women who are experts in their fields. What’s not to love? I’m thankful I had that opportunity, and I wish more people valued it.
Maybe that’s because it’s not really a system. There are many different types of higher education institutoins in this country, with different (and evolving) purposes and missions and serving different populations (some relatively homogenous, some very hetergeneous).
We could have K-12 education do the job of teaching people how to think, how to think critically and independently, and how to expose themselves to new ideas. Schools do much the opposite too much of the time. Sometimes it’s intentional but mostly it’s just continuing to follow a system that was never much concerned with those things. No matter how well intentioned the educators are the students pick up a clear message, “You don’t have the capacity to learn by yourself, you can only learn by going to school and doing what you are told.”
It’s been so long since I first heard that following that I don’t recall who said it, and I can only paraphrase, “Children are born with a thirst and desire to learn that doesn’t go away until they start going to school”.
@Tripolar. Agree with your first paragraph. We could and should have such a system for everyone; not just the chosen few who attend rigrous private for-profit schools.
But as to this:
Perhaps true as far as it goes, but waay too cynical IMO. Another formulation that applies to a hefty chunk of the populace is:
Children are born with a thirst and desire to learn that doesn’t go away until their parents train them out of it by neglect, by ignorance, or by design. Which starts real early and the damage is mostly done before their first day of school.
I agree with TriPolar on this. And I feel your post shows why colleges serve a valid purpose.
You say you guess you could have become a competent librarian if a library had hired you and given you the training you needed. But you also acknowledge that you tend to only learn things if they interest you and leave if you’re not interested.
So why would a library want to hire and train you? It’s not their purpose to give you training. Training you is only a means to an end for them; they want you to work for them as a librarian. They have no interest in hiring somebody, paying them, going through the process of training that person in the skills they need to do the job, and then having the person lose interest and go off to look for another job. They see that as a waste of their resources. And most businesses are going to feel the same way; they want employees, not trainees, on the payroll.
So a lot of businesses look at a college education as a screening process. They see a person with a degree as somebody who has shown they can apply themselves, follow a program that was designed by other people, learn what they need to know to get through the program, and complete the program. The specific knowledge you acquired may have no relevance to the job you’re applying for but a degree shows you know how to learn things and finish a project. And that makes you a better prospect for employment.
being subject to a curriculum that requires less and less of the traditional thought-provoking liberal arts every year, sometimes at “prestigious universities” where topics such as religious studies or classical languages aren’t even offered as electives
*checking off boxes in nonsense courses that purport to teach people who have never read an entire book on their own how to write (impossible)
*taking bullshit classes that teach how to regurgitate the latest gender/racewar nonsense, seminars on Family Guy, etc
*choosing between 400 person lectures where the instructor doesn’t know your name or small classes taught by grad students whose knowledge advantage is limited to speed-reading and forgetting 80 more books than you have and don’t have any actual experience in the field
I love the idea of a well-rounded education, and I thoroughly enjoyed and learned from some of the best classes I took in college, all of which were things I sought out myself and all of which were very traditional classes in which a true expert in the material who had experience with the lecture format stood in front of the class and spoke for 1 to 3 hours while we took notes. But I chose to pursue that, and most people won’t if they are just trying to check off the “need a degree for job” box as easily as possible. And even though I did it, I reiterate that its only benefit to me was in personal growth and it ha no relevance to my career. Right now fully two-thirds of high school graduates go to college in the U.S. Do we really think all of those people need to be forced to pay for that kind of personal growth in order to pursue a skilled career?
You don’t, I guess, but people generally follow the path of least resistance, which currently involves getting on the internet and frequenting places that only provide one point of view. Surely you’ve noticed how readily people reject even the idea of expertise these days? I recently read a post in which a woman announced that “researching” something thoroughly didn’t mean it had anything to do with science. (She said this as if it were a good thing.)
But I guess you could argue that not everybody in college is interested in learning to think critically. Maybe there’s just a certain kind of mind that results in taking that step, at some point. My problem is that I can’t really attain information very well unless it’s in a structured setting and I am forced to write it down and repeat it and explain it over and over. That process in so many different environments taught me how to think.
I was at the top of my class in high school and couldn’t critically think my way out of a paper bag. I was also racially, politically and culturally isolated. I attended one of the most diverse colleges in the country. It blew my mind.
(Oh, I’ll also add that one of my strengths as a learner is contextulizing information and drawing connections across disciplines. A liberal arts education really plays to that strength.)
That’s why I had to jump through the appropriate hoops. I didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. I’ve had a 30 year career, but there’s no way anyone could have known that would happen. Sometimes in life you gotta do things you don’t like.
I have had a few jobs that required a college degree of some sort, but did not give a flying flip what it was in. It could have been in Folklore or Theater. I have also had a couple of jobs where my starting pay was quite significantly higher than anyone hired along with me, because I had a college degree-- higher, even than people with four year’s experience in the field.
I pinned a few people in the military down, and also someone who worked in Human Resources, and asked them what was so attractive about a college degree.
What they said was this: 1) they want the WHOLE degree, not just a lot of credits. It lets them know you can finish something that requires long-term planning and staying on task long-term as well; also, 2) people who have completed a 4-year degree have accepted that sometimes something you want involves tasks that seem to lack relevancy, or are even a distraction, and moreover, often involve using peripheral skills that are not your strengths. People with 4-year degrees can do those tasks-- they studied a foreign language, even though their major was chemistry; they studied calculus even though their major was history, and so on.
Once someone said those things to me, it suddenly made sense. When I was in basic training, there was a different quality to people who had college degrees, as opposed to people who maybe had more credits than a graduate, but hadn’t planned well, and had not earned a degree. Also, you could guess by a lot of people’s attitudes towards just doing things we needed to do, and getting on to the next thing, whether they were going to make it in college. A lot of people in basic were there for college money, but you could see several of them not making it past the second semester, when it was time to take a general requirement class.
Well, based on this UCLA proposed schedule, pretty close - I’d call it ~7 semesters at least. I’d consider the writing, math, life science, chem and psych electives to be necessary to be a functioning professional nurse. Especially considering a some of those nurses go on to get master’s degrees (your nurse practitioners and whatnot who are increasingly doing primary care in smaller communities) and a few will get doctorates (either academic/research-oriented PhDs or more applied DNPs), so that stuff becomes foundational. The only thing you could argue are extraneous to being a nurse IMHO are the 20 units of Liberal Arts electives. Which I wouldn’t as a fan of broader educations , but some might.
Sounds like you went to college for exactly the right reason. You wanted to further your education for it’s own sake and you were willing and capable of working for it. It would be a good thing if more college students were motivated in that way, all too often college is supposed to be a golden ticket to financial success, or just what you do after high school.
There is a necessity for higher education but it doesn’t have to take the form of the traditional college, or worse as alluded to already, technical degrees with a some perfunctory elective classes to pretend that students are getting a well rounded education. There are now a lot of certification programs and two year degrees available outside of the traditional college route. Many of them have their own problems due to the economics and practicalities of running any kind of school but you interact with people with those degrees frequently, for instance most of the time you receive medical care. It’s also very easy for college students to get paid internships with many of them actually requiring their specific educational background, I think certainly there should be many more ways to introduce people to careers that would involve on the job training of that sort, especially if a high school graduate took a load of AP classes that already demonstrates their basic knowledge and skill level.
And as well, colleges should be more malleable in order to allow a continuing education for people who need more flexibility in the process, but still want to learn, to improve themselves, to gain knowledge for it’s own sake.
I agree with you. College should not be the only path to a living wage. I just wish people would stop acting so stupid. It’s probably wishful thinking that college would change that.
This is an ideal but I think it’s a just-so story. In my experience, some of the worst people to deal with in real-world professional scenarios are people who achieved academic success through hard work rather than natural talent. They could not handle any situation involving compromise, sales, following dumb instructions from people they considered less educated than them, etc. It’s not just a matter of “nerds lacking people skills,” in fact it was rarely that - more, it was that academia sets up an artificial environment where someone tells you exactly what you need to do (read this book, complete this lab activity, keep plugging away at this calculus concept until you understand it) and you can guarantee yourself a 100% success rate as long as you work hard enough. Accepting situations such as “it’s considered outstanding performance to get 1 new client signed for every 10 you present to and if you get that up to 1 out of 6 you’re the best salesperson in history” is extremely difficult for these people because it involves internalizing the notion that there are some things that you will fail at no matter how smart and hard-working you are.
2/3 of people entering the workforce have a degree that says they expect to always be shown what they need to do to succeed, and to succeed at it, and that they are in a class that is above doing certain low-level tasks. That’s too many and its negatives are inherently tied to what you list as a benefit of degree credentialing.
Something has gone seriously off the rails since I went to college. I graduated HS in 1954 and won no scholarship. A year at Penn cost $700 (about $7000 in today’s money) but neither I nor my parents had $700. But I was fortunate to get a job as a lab tech that gave me half tuition plus a salary and for three years I worked full-time (at least in theory) and took classes part-time (9 credits each regular term and 3 during each summer term) on track to graduate in five years. I graduated with a degree, a vocation, and no debt.
Penn state would have been cheaper (something $300-400) but I could not have lived at home.
This is no longer possible. Nowadays Penn costs about 8 times as much (pushing $60,000) and I am not sure they even permit commuters. And Penn state would have been equally out of sight. Why has the real cost multiplied by a factor of 8? Yeah, faculty salaries are probably better (but not by a factor of 8 or even 2). And yes, financial aid is more generous. But still.
As for critical thinking, yes colleges generally teach it. The right wing calls is left wing indoctrination. And if high schools tried to teach it, they would be accused of radicalism.
, but some might.