Education is a farce.

Great Debates
81

Acco40 and doggus have a point. Not specifically about education being a farce, but about false pretenses. I was told, during my 4 years in high school, approximately 5 gazillion times that if one didn’t go to college, one would be trapped in a degrading and humilating, and probably dangerous job, and never earn more than 12 cents an hour. The express purpose for going to college was to get a job that pay well.

After the build up I got from them, I would be a little annoyed about doing some second assistant project coordinator job, too.

I’m not saying I agree with the people who posit that college is a racket, merely that I can understand how a recent grad might…fell gyped.

Fixing this would, I think, involve having high school teachers (who have a job that requires a college degree, and whose colleagues all have degress) by a little more informed about what the working world is like.

82

I think that the reason many employers require a college degree for low level jobs is that they want to get people who are capable of moving up the ladder. They’ll be spending some time and money teaching you all kinds of useful skills. They want someone who can be promoted to a variety of positions. They don’t want someone with a narrow skill set because that would limit their options. They want college graduates because graduates have proven that they can learn a variety of different skills and also have the staying power to perservere through the learning process.

More and more, it is becoming standard practice to go from job to job every few years picking up new skills and experiences. The days of people spending 40 years at the same company are largely things of the past, but they are not that far in the past. Universities have not completely made the transition to the new way of life, but they are changing.

I went to college full time from 1980-1997, all undergraduate, 11 different institutions. So, I saw a lot of change. Now there is a much higher incidence of instructors who are from the business world rather than pure academics. There is much more flexibility in degree programs and more willingness to allow students to design their own degree. Each class now requires much more reading and hopmework than they have since the 50’s. When my father got his degree, each 3 credit english lit. course entailed reading 15-18 novels and assorted short stories. In 1980, when I started full time, my english course only required 6 novels. The school policy said that a maximum of 7 could be required. The last class I took in 1997 required 12 novels and a fairly heavy helping of other reading. The degree I finally recieves is called, Language, Culture, and Technology. It’s an English degree. I learned html and javascript as part of the core requirements. Other classes teaching applicable skills were encouraged. Still, I was told the degree was more a prep course for the masters program in publications design than it was a prep for the real world.

Having a college degree DOES help you get a job. No one so far has disputed that. If it doesn’t help you perform the job you got, that’s not unusual. However, it should help you with things like cummunicating well and understanding the ethical implications of various choices you will have to make. If you do these things well, then you have a good chance of moving up the ladder to a job with more responsibility. Each additional step toward greater responsibility will require learning more skills and also more tough decisions that may or may not be based entirely on job knowledge. You’ll learn more and more about people. You may eventually be in the postion to hire someone. You’ll have to think very hard about what kind of person you want in that position. Eventually you may even learn to understand exactly what it was you learned in college.

83

That’s not a typo?!

If not, it has to be close to a record.

Why did you stop? And what are you doing now? If you are not self-employed or independently wealthy, what did prospective employers say about your education history?

84

Hey, that’s my line!!! (Kind of an inside joke)

But seriously, I’m living with the consequences. I accept it. But that’s not gonna stop me from calling it out. Also, I wasn’t aware of too many marketing internships that paid, let alone paid well. I had to pay my way for some time.

I’d like to see where I wrote the second half of that.

Well, this “flaw” is being propagated at the high school level then. It has been sufficiently pummelled into the mindset of most high school students.
Someone earlier wrote that no one has argued that college won’t help you get a job. Well, who’s got it, then? Is it a flaw, or isn’t it?

IMHO, colleges love this situation. They accept more and more students who are searching not for knowledge, but for career aspirations. Who is kidding who? These same students are being ill-prepared for the working world. They may have learned critical thinking skills, but as has been said earlier, this looks tacky written on a resume. Employers hire based on experience and job skill knowledge. Call me crazy, but this is what I wish college stressed at least a little more. Or, maybe what I’m trying to say… WHAT STUDENTS SHOULD BE DEMANDING FROM THE COLLEGES.

Pound for pound, proven experience and solid job skills beat crossword-puzzle-trivia-knowledge + critical thinking skills anyday in the eyes of hiring managers. I know because I’ve been beaten out by more experienced applicants in jobs I’ve applied for. What if my critical thinking skills happened to be superior to those more qualified applicants? I never had a chance to prove it!

85

Don’t forget geneworking!

-Ben

86

What, exactly, do students think they know about the job market and about what skills are required to start a career?

How do you know with any certainty why you were rejected from a particular position?

87

They don’t. That’s the point! That’s what they possibly could be addressed in high school and the first year of college, and then taught those very skills from there on.

and as for:

My situation is a little unique. I interviewed for the job I currently have approximately 10 months ago. It turns out I was turned away in favor of a more-experienced candidate. Well, he screwed up bad. 90 days later I get a phone call and a job offer. After a couple months here, I found out how it played out: I was rejected for my lack of experience compared to the other candidate, who may I add did not have a college degree.

88

Dinsdale - I worked for a while doing various contract jobs. Then I worked 3 years as a tech writer. Now I’m the IT manager for a new manufacturing company. So, my income went from 30k to 45k to 60k fairly quickly. I DO credit my education for this. But, I mostly do network administration, database design, and database porgramming now, none of which I learned in college. I get stock options and have some promises that as the company starts actually selling products, my income will increase even more. The CEO says I can retire in 5 years. I will be 40. Then I can wirte the great american novel. :slight_smile:

If this doesn’t work, at least I will have management experience which will set me on the road to many many opportunities.

I would never have been given this opportunity without a college degree. The officers of the company are all Ph.D.'s and set great value on diplomas. Actually the only employee we have without a degree is our accounting assistant/receptionist. Even the technicians who mostly go through rote procedures have degrees. We will have a need for some clean room techs who will probably not have degrees, but at this early stage we’re hiring all college graduates because everyone must wear multiple hats and train themselves to do many new tasks that no one here currently knows how to perform. There are many dangerous chemicals do deal with and lots of high voltage machinery. We must have employees we can trust to be careful without being afraid. This means they have to read the warnings and understand them. Although many high school grads could probably handle this, we don’t have time to be giving batteries of tests to high school graduates to make sure their comprehension skill are up to the task. Most college grads can handle it, especially the ones with science lab classes under their belts. That is who we are hiring so far. And I say it’s for good reason.

89

Dinsdale - Just in case I wasn’t clear. No it was not a typo. I graduated with 322 credits. (well, not all of them would count as credits because they were too old, but they still counted as prerequisites so the classes showed up on the transcript.) As far as I know, it’s the record. The summer before my last year I got a phone call from the Dean of student saying that he was sorry to tell me that officially I was not allowed to register for another year after 300 credits. Because no one in the administration had ever heard of it happening, they had no procedure to follow so he was handling it himself. He ended up giving me one more year to graduate. Oh, well, I knew it couldn’t last forever.

90

Folks, it’s clear that Acco40 will not be changing his mind. He’s convinced that he was swindled, and is obviously unwilling to consider any other views.

I don’t see any point in pounding my head into a wall.

91

*Originally posted by Acco40 *

I think this has some merit, but it depends on how its worded. Did your high school counselor actually say that if you went to college, you would receive training for a specific career? Mind you, there may be a disconnect between what’s actually being said and what’s being implied.

Personally, any good counselor would not state that a liberal arts education will train one for a specific career. What it does do is “get your foot in the door”, so to speak in the working world. I think it’s here where the disconnect occurs - go to college to get training/experience in the working world. It just seems like “go to college to get training/experience for the work world” is being pounded into everyone’s head because nowdays you need to have some college education before many employers will take a chance on you.

And businesses also benefit as well. The US economy is no longer geared to the manufacturing of goods, but rather towards services, transportation, communications, etc - a post-industrial economy. It NEEDS an educated work force (one with some post-secondary education). It saves businesses money because they don’t have to spend money to develop an educated workforce necessary in today’s economy. The cost is born (mostly) by the student. Where they can best allocate there resources is by hiring those who have the basics (college education) and can then train them to what they want. It’s narrows the potential labor pool and helps keep costs down.

The trick, of course, is getting your foot in the door - the hard part, to be sure. But it’s not necessarily all the fault of colleges. Businesses are just as complicit in the “get a college degree to get a job” as well.

Depends on the college. If you went to a school that didn’t have internship programs, then you probably didn’t get the necessary experience you wanted. There are a lot of colleges/univerisities that offer degree programs with internships as an integral part of their programs. And I think in part that colleges are trying to meet student demands by have more internship programs as part of their degree requirements. Granted, there’s room for improvement, but it takes time.

92

I have a hard time suppressing the urge to dismiss this thread as self-indulgent whingeing. Why? Well, I’ve spent the past few years working with the developing world, a term covering countries ranging from ‘2nd tier’ or poorer European standards of living (perhaps equivalent for the American reader to some of our poorer states) to absolute poverty. And this in the private sector. I’ve also dealt, working for a Swiss corp., with the typical Western European apprentice system.

To this date I prefer the American educational system for its flexability, its ability to give folks a second chance etc.

An issue with the “doing” training that the OP and his supporters want, in the place of liberal arts training (which is hardly mandatory, at least when I went to college more than a decade ago) is inflexibility. While US schools are likely to do better than what I have seen abroad, ‘vocational’ training for all but relativetly technical subjects tends to suffer from instant obselesence in dynamic markets.

I rather imagine from what I have seen from both of you that were you to have studied in the manner that you claim you desire/prefer now, you would presently be whingeing on about how your education was too rigid. etc. ad nauseum. I’ll be bold and call this “immature grass is always greener but I’ve not yet learned the world requires some time invested whingeing.” Perhaps I’ve misjudged but I suspect not.

93

Are you saying you could have gotten your job without a college degree (with just a HS diploma), or are you saying that you could have gotten your job if you just skipped college and lied about it on your resume?

A “great job with a great company”?

94

Colleges love this? Where do you get this information? Colleges don’t “love” this. They admit students because students come to them wanting an education. The colleges may not entirely agree with the students’ ideas about what a college education is all about. I believe many colleges see their role as broadening that very notion. Of course, students are welcome to read the damn catalog, talk to employers, speak with students, request employment figures, and apply elsewhere if they aren’t satisfied. Even the most glossed-over and misleading brochure (more on that aspect later) isn’t going to fool a serious career-minded applicant who does some research. It almost seems as though you’re suggesting that colleges would be more “honest” if they rejected every naive or narrow-minded or career-minded applicant on the basis of “poor fit with the institutional mission.” Does one have a test for that? How does one measure one’s career-mindedness, or one’s potential to change one’s views about the value of liberal and general education?

Over the last 30 years, students have been increasingly career-minded and motivated by future financial gain, rather than the more intrinsic reasons for getting an education. That’s well-documented. Faculty have expressed some dismay over that trend, but it’s there. It’s also well-documented that colleges have responded in numerous ways. More applied courses. More business programs. More internships. More classes that combine real-world application with theory. BUT–they aren’t going to turn tradition entirely on its ear. Nor should they.

Higher Education should not be at the whim of the market. If it did, 3,000 colleges would have started “day trading” majors two years ago, which would now be serving its alums and continuing students quite poorly. Some skills are both timeless and universally applicable. If your employer does not agree, I’d be worried about the long-term prospects for that company, frankly.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe that your personal experience is enough to negate the research I’ve seen–including surveys done of nationwide employers. You got some good points, and you’re not entirely off-mark. But you’re grossly overstating things, and I don’t believe you are well-enough informed about the philosophy of liberal education, the mission of colleges, or the link between education and careers to speak credibly.

95

Okay, I’m a fan of being as educated as possible, but let me offer some drawbacks of our current “everyone should go to university” mindset:

  • It leaves some people with the impression that they are educated, and therefore takes the place of life-long learning. I know a LOT of people like that.

  • It is supposed to give you critical thinking skills. I would submit that it’s possible that the people that gain critical thinking skills in college would probably gain them anyway. And those that don’t use their degrees as a shield to protect them from having to think any more.

  • Not everyone is smart enough, or cares enough about abstract matters to be good college students. They would be better served getting a good start on a trade. Instead, they struggle through four years barely getting by, then they get out in the world and use their degrees to get jobs they really can’t handle, and eventually quit and start all over again except this time they have a mountain of debt and are 10 years older. I have two friends who graduated law school, passed the bar, and then worked as lawyers for a grand total of a year or two before quitting and going to work in a company as a junior assistant or remaining unemployed.

  • Having lots of people in college who really don’t belong there bloats classes, drives up costs, and lowers the curve. This makes it harder for the really exceptional students to get a first-class education.

  • Colleges are starting to water down their curriculums to handle the lower average IQ of the student body. This has been going on for some time especially in the state colleges.

  • As more and more people get degrees, the value of having one decreases. Nowadays, there are plenty of degreed positions out there that earn less, and sometimes MUCH less than many trades.

  • The financial costs are significant. Most people just think in terms of student loans, but there are also the lost wages and seniority to consider. If two people are 18 years old, and one immediately apprentices for a trade while the other goes to college, and both of them live the same lifestyle for those four years, the person with the trade could easily have $50,000 in the bank, while the college student could be $50,000 in debt. And when the college student starts in the workforce at the bottom, the tradesman is now a journeyman with some seniority, and probably earning a lot more than the starting salary of the college kid. Even if the salaries cross after five more years and the college kid starts earning more than the tradesman, it’s not clear at all that he’ll end his life financially more well off. He has to earn a LOT more later on, especially if the tradesman took that $100,000 difference between them and invested it wisely. In fact, he may never catch up.

The bottom line is that it’s important to be educated, but college is only one way to do that. Most new college grads think they know it all, but let me tell you - if all you know about the world is what you learned in college, you’ll be ignorant. Nothing takes the place of life-long learning.

I have about an equal number of friends with degrees and without. And I can’t tell the difference between them in terms of how well rounded they are. By the time you are 30, how much you know about the world will have a lot more to do with your attitude towards learning and a lot less with what you formally studied in class.

I think we may have confused a correlation with causation. In the past, we saw that college-educated people tend to be better citizens, have a stronger desire to continue learning etc. So we drew the conclusion that college would make you that way. But perhaps it’s just the case that people who tend to go to college were exactly the kind of people who would be educated anyway. Now that we’re talking everyone into going, we may find out that we’re just cranking out a bunch of uneducated people with degrees, who think they know a lot more than they do.

96

I’m sorry but when I hear someone has a ‘liberal arts’ education, I usually think they a) wanted to be a teacher or professor of some sort, or b) had no idea what they wanted to do and took the easiest classes they could find. At my university (which had schools for engineering, business, and liberal arts) liberal arts students didn’t get much in terms of academic respect. They did have a lot more fun than the engineers, however. At least until graduation.

Lets face it, if you want a serious job in the business world, major in finance, economics or accounting. If you want to be an engineer, study engineering. When you go to interview at a big company like GE or Hewlett Packard, what can you offer them as a philosophy or English major? What position does a liberal arts major apply for? Finance? Product development? These positions require specific business or technical knowledge.

The problem is not that the schools don’t prepare students for the working world. My schools definitely offered those services to anyone who wanted them. The problem is that many people use college as an expensive 4+ year retreat where they go to ‘find themselves’. At $25,000+ a year, that gets a little expensive. Especially if that person graduates at 22 or 23 and still has no idea what they want to do in life.

I would rather have my (hypothetical) kid take a year off, work as a roofer or truckdriver or something, and then come to me and say “I want to go to college because I want to study architecture or transportation engineering”. I think you really get a lot more out of college if you have a goal going in (other than just graduate).

97

Here in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, we have a little program called “Education Pays”. They’ve gone so far as to put “Welcome to Kentucky–Where Education Pays” on the signs where you come into the state. (This always prompts me to reply, “As opposed to Indiana, where education is a sure road to nowhere.”)

This bugs me for exactly the reason mentioned in the OP–they’re trying to equate education with employment. Like most in this thread, I agree that we shouldn’t be changing college itself, but instead changing the way we sell it.

There are people in my med school class who bitch and moan about “all those humanities classes” they had to take back in college. One person on my team–one of the brightest guys in my class, medicine-wise–once told me that he couldn’t remember the last time he picked up a non-medical book and just read it.

I asked this person, “So if you’re so down on the humanities, why did you go to the small liberal arts college you went to?” He said it was because they had a good reputation. I asked him why he thought they had such a good reputation? Perhaps because they turn out well-rounded students? Perhaps because they require a broad scope of classes?

Too many pre-med people gear their entire undergraduate existence to getting into medical school. They don’t take classes because they’re interesting, but because they wonder how good they’ll look on their application. They major in Biology or Chemistry, because that’s what pre-med people do. (I know one girl who majored in Chemical Engineering because 100% of UK’s ChemE graduates who applied to medical school got in. On later examination, there had only been two.)

I took the opposite route. I majored in math (admittedly with a minor in biology). I took a class nearly every semester that had nothing to do with my major or minor (acting, fiction workshop, Civil War Memoirs, etc.) I admit that if I had been more of a hard science major, I might have been a better medical student, but I think my approach has made me a better person than I could have been, and will make me at least as good if not a better doctor.

A college degree is, to me, a sign of intellectual curiosity. Someone who didn’t go to college or who didn’t graduate (without extenuating circumstances) is probably less interested in learning new things than someone who did. If I’m hiring someone, I want someone who 1.) is not a mindless one-trick pony, and 2.) is interested in making learning a ongoing process.

Dr. J

98

Education is its own reward. Don’t know what you want to do out of high school? Turned off by the idea of college? Well, join the Army or Navy (if you ask me, join the Marines). Or take an entry level position somewhere. Eventually you will either 1. Become a lifer in the service with a good pension (nothing wrong with that) or 2. Be content to work as a store manager for some corporate chain (nothing wrong with that) or 3. Eventually become motivated to continue your education. Now there are exceptions. Some have entrepreneurial gifts or artistic gifts or mechanical gifts and don’t need higher education. But education is its own reward and if you think that you’re going to be like Abraham Lincoln and do it all on your own at the library, don’t hold your breath.

99

My liberal arts education paid off, but not necessarily in the way that I expected it to. Maybe those who are dissatisfied with the results of theirs haven’t thought enough about what they learned.

I teach English to Korean students at a Korean university. The only skills from my college years that directly prepared me for this probably came from writing classes: a pretty good understanding of grammar and punctuation, the ability to organize ideas, etc. Sure, I knew a lot of that before I went to college, but I got better at it in college. My MA is in Cultural Criticism–all that “useless” theoretical stuff like literary criticism, philosophy, cultural anthropology. I don’t use a lot of that in my teaching now.

Or do I? I’ve been living in Asia for 10 years now, and it has been great, but not always easy. It is a very different world from the one I grew up in, with different rules and constraints. Sometimes it is frustrating and difficult. I think the understanding of culture that I got from “wasting” all those years in intellectual trivia has made it far easier for me to adapt. It has made it easier for me to identify and, to some degree, understand the monolithic cultural phenomena that shape societies. The literary and religious traditions, the effects of these things on the work ethic and sense of morality of a society–knowing a little about these things helps me to know a little about people, both individuals and societies. How they think, why they are the way they are. And, of course, about myself as well. How I think, why I am the way I am. When seen from a larger historical and cultural perspective, things make more sense.

My education made me more, well, philosophical about things. I find it very rewarding, and I do not regret my education. I’m not getting rich, but I make a living, and I like my life. I like the understanding of the world that I got from my liberal arts education. But as has been said, education doesn’t stop at graduation. Think a little about the underlying messages in some of that trivial literature. Maybe there is something to learn there.

100

Well, this thread has pretty much come full-circle for me. I still feel the same, but now I have more perspective on my feelings.

I’m glad I went to college because, truly I learned a lot and did some growing up. I’m still not certain this wouldn’t have happened had I not gone to college… but I’ll never know.

I see now that it is my own fault. I should have had a plan going into college on my career goals and whatnot. I shouldn’t have settled for the “quickest way out”. My goals were at 18, and still are at 23, unclear.

Though I do feel mislead by counselors and teachers who said, in so many words, “just go to college… no one ever knows what they’ll like… just go, you’ll find out later…”. It is this sort of direction which lead me down the path I took… and, partially why I still don’t know what I want to do career-wise.
I know many other people who suffered the same fate, who didn’t want to “throw their lives away” by not attending college.
It’s the tale of life, but I wish I knew then what I know now.