If I could change this around, I think nowadays right under our noses, 2 major issues are now currently being dealt with;
#1. The high cost of college.
#2. Having a “useless” degree that doesnt lead to a career.
What I’m seeing from young people today is they are more careful than ever in making their college choices. Long gone are the days when they would pick a college based on where the friends were going. Now its based on financial aid and what programs are offered. And the degrees picked - they are more careful than ever in picking those that have the best chances of a later career.
And when they do get to college they, and their parents, are making better choices. No longer do they accept the crazy roommate who wants to party all night. Now parents demand quiet, quality housing where the emphasis is on study - not partying. They dont take different classes to try out different areas. Now its get out in 4 years with minimal debt. Greek societies are up because of the chances for networking. Political causes and demonstrations like the 60’s? Not if there is a chance their name will be Googled and found as being part of anything radical.
The students at the University of Colorado got the 4/20 event, where all these people came to smoke weed on campus, kicked off because some employers were not hiring them for the reputation their school being the stoner school.
So what I’m seeing is 5-10 years from now is this crop of college graduates move up the problems others had with high debt and useless degrees will be ending on their own.
What I so wish is they would allow young people to demonstrate what they can do. What some of these kids do is really amazing. If an engineering firm would only walk around a robotics convention and see the 18 year olds who make these amazing machines that do anything imagined. Go to a steampunk event and see what these people come up with. I just dont think resumes give a complete picture.
I concur. I also think that some variables were overlooked, such as people with higher paying jobs are getting diplomas, not the other way around, employers paying for educations, while unemployed don’t go to college, etc…
College degrees are necessary to enter most job/professional tracks. Yes, you can make a good go at it by going into the skilled trades. But besides the fact that they seem to be very sensitive to the vagaries of the economy (particularly construction-type work), they are also physically taxing in a way that being an “office jockey” isn’t. Good luck being an HVAC technician if you’ve got an injured back. And good luck setting up your own hair salon when there are five other salons within a two mile radius of you. It seems to me that hair salons have a failure rate comparable to restaurants.
But college degrees are no longer sufficient to be competitive. Bachelor’s degrees in specific fields, prolonged internships, and at least two years of graduate work are becoming the norm for entry-level workers being hired by my agency. They are working alongside “old timers” who were hired back when any college degree got you in the door. One of my veteran coworkers majored in history back in the 1971, and he was hired as an “environmental scientist” shortly afterwards. That just wouldn’t happen today.
Years ago, a job applicant with an PhD wouldn’t be considered for part-time positions because they would be seen as “over qualified”. But a program that I work closely with just hired a Ph.D to review grant applications. I was told that four other Ph.D’s interviewed for the position. In my program, we have an unpaid intern with two Master’s degrees and another part-timer with one. With just one exception, all the 20-somethings on my floor are either interns and part-timers. They’re all extremely qualified, especially compared to the rest of us. They have fresh skills and knowledge, so I try to lean on them when I can. But I just hope they are patient and adaptable, and that they can wait for some of the old-timers to retire…and that when the old-timers retire, their positions don’t disappear.
It’s not the kids doing amazing shit you have to worry about. They tend to find jobs in startups and companies like Google that look for bright kids working on cutting edge technology.
It’s the sort middling kids that have the hardest time. The ones who are bright enough, but not particularly extraordinary.
And those are exactly the kids who have to step up their game. Being “American” used to trump a whole lot of being average. But this is less and less true.
No, it’s the functional definition of a college degree alone not being sufficient. A college degree today is what a high school diploma was thirty, forty years ago. Do you think a high school diploma is not “worth it” as well?
So two masters degrees puts that person what 6 or 7 years out of high school and probably 150,000+ in debt. All of that to get a job that pays ZERO.
And this makes sense?
From a financial point of view this person would be ahead to have left high school grabbed a piece of cardboard, written a will work for food sign and found a freeway off ramp.
Of course it doesn’t make sense. It’s incredibly unfair that this young woman has to work for free in order to just get her foot in the door.
But for all we know, a full-time position with the agency will open up tomorrow and she will be a shoe-in for it. Having her college degree will then be worth it, right?
Well, no, we can’t say anything like this. Perhaps she went to college for free, as I did, and she went to graduate school for free, as I did as well. Perhaps she’s being supported by a loving boyfriend, husband, or parents. We can speculate that she’d be better off as a mechanic or hair stylist. But money isn’t everything.
There are plenty of people who went to trade school who are sitting at home, watching 8 hours of daytime television because they can’t find a job. At least this intern is developing contacts and skills and positioning herself to take advantage of any openings that come up.
That said, I think her situation is pretty crummy. It’s hard for me not to wish some old timers would just retire already so that the doors can open a bit wider for those coming out of school.
It’s pretty normal for people to do an internship after getting their masters. I think unpaid internships are pretty lame, but the plus side is at this level they typically lead to higher level positions in more prestigious organizations. When that person does get hired on, they won’t be starting at entry level. If you compare this person five years from now to someone who took a different path, that’s when you will see the results of their choices pay off.
I refused to do unpaid internships during my degree, and it wasn’t the smartest choice. I would have even better off working for free for a prestigious organization than getting paid a bit by a relatively unknown organization.
You see Rick, you’re missing the point. It’s not about “numbers” or financial responsibility. Its about being average. One is better off being dead than average - why even consider the consequences of doing something less than appropriately respectable career-wise; hanging around with all the other losers who at best will only ever make middle management or worse have to live a life doing a trade - perish the very thought. Next thing you know you’ll start questioning whether a career and social status is the most important thing in life - crazy talk.
The education business does not have an incentive to create a National Recommended Reading List. How many mediocre teachers could be replaced by excellent books at least for students who would be in the top 10% anyway. How many of them are slowed down by having to move in lock step with out educational tradition.
The trouble with finding good books on your own is not knowing enough to recognize a good book.
For electronics:
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (2006) by Stan Gibilisco
Colleges could not do that electronic simulation 20 years ago. But transistors still work the same way.
So what is going to happen as more kids in the top 10% conclude they don’t need the schools? Will corporations reject them if they are smarter than the people with degrees?
One issue not in the statistics is you have kids in college whose parents own companies and who cares if they just get a degree in english lit. They have a guaranteed job with their parents company.
One young man told me this was the way in his fraternity. Almost every guy was a business, law, or engineering major except for a couple, like this young man, who had jobs waiting for them. In his case his major was journalism but his parents could get him a job where they worked - government service. Another kid in the same boat was a history major.
Honestly, that doesn’t always work out well. Either nepotism doesn’t come through (a government service job Dad won’t have the only say, and a recent expose on nepotism in government jobs may make Junior impossible to hire) or Dad sells the business to fund his retirement and the new owners aren’t impressed with Junior.
Sometimes it works great - I have a friend who spend a number of years with a nice salary working for the family foundation - but the family has a foundation - while looking for a “real” job (which he now has). But I’ve seen a number of times where it hasn’t - a buyout offer too good to pass up for Dad.
It works out even worse for all the other people that work there, seeing the best jobs go to family members. Its why I’ve always avoided working for family owned businesses.
My point was that when looking at statistics, things like this can throw the numbers off because it might look like the art major got a great job right away in some company, only to find the real reason later on.
To be honest nepotism is how my father got his job. Although his own hard work was what kept him on.
Interesting points. When I was a child, I was taught that public service career paths were heavily exam-oriented. E.g. the government would put out a cattle call for people interested in becoming a Housing Inspector, everyone who was interested showed up in a big auditorium, everyone took the City of Podunk Housing Inspector Battery 4th Edition, Revised, and they took the X highest scorers (where X = number of positions open). When I grew up, I found it wasn’t like that at all. I applied for a public-service position and the entire thing was a traditional interview with behavioral questions, “what if” scenarios, do you have any questions for us, etc… Not a test in sight.
There’s now a concept of Skills-Based Hiring that is getting another look, but it looks to be pretty much dead in the water for anything but low-skill, entry-level positions. In some areas you can get a job stacking boxes by passing a literacy test without needing to show any particular prior coursework, GPA, etc. Will the day ever come where I can take a test on managerial skills and get hired by Macy’s as their Regional Manager for Northern Alabama? Nowadays, that sort of position is based almost entirely on degrees, experience on paper, and who you know.
We just opened up my HS senior’s financial aid letter for 14/15, yay for an academic scholarship small yet renewable… while the total tuition bill is about the price of good used car, 20k, the thought of financing even at federal rates of 3.86, seems ludicrous to pay thousands more in interest, which compounds over time loan by loan.
We will try to stave off all loans keep the subsidized loan in the student’s name, creative budgeting, uni payment plan, get a job and upromise?
Let schools become a place where you can go to learn things you don’t already know, be trained in theories and skills, and practice them. Do you like the cachet of attending classes in a 300 year old building that your great-grandfather took classes in? Sure, pay through the nose for Harvard. Do you think that MIT instructors are just that damn smart and that going there will make you as smart as them? Go to MIT.
Separate the process of awarding of degrees to government-run or nonprofit boards that will assess anyone. If you can learn the material elsewhere - at a less prestigious school, on grandma’s lap, at informal community gatherings, at your own school you set up, fine. Can’t afford tuition at a traditional school? Learn on your own like Lincoln did by candlelight. When you’re ready, go to the State of New York Board of Educational Assessments and have your skills, knowledge, and achievements evaluated.
“Wow, you wrote all these papers, and got at least 80% on all these exams? That’s worth a BS in Chemistry. Write some more in-depth papers and do some original research and try for the MS, if you’re up to it. If you are having trouble, we have graduate classes at NYU that you could take. Go all the way to PhD and maybe we’ll hire you as as an assessor here.”
If the “these hallowed halls” experience is so essential to a “degree” that you can’t see yourself giving out a real degree to someone who didn’t physically sit through Freshman Comp and submit the weekly assignments one-by-one, then fine, create “equivalency” degrees where you can be formally assessed to be at the same general educational level as a typical graduate of Podunk State even though you didn’t actually attend Podunk State, or you didn’t finish. In other words, figure out what a Podunk State graduate knows and can do and then see who else can also do it. If you can do what a Podunk State grad can do, why should you be treated less than people who actually went?
I think a big part of the argument against competency education is that it lowers standards - that the only way to really get educated is to go to lectures, etc. That’s an indication that you are using insufficient assessments. Beef them up. Make the tests harder, add more essay requirements, etc.