Yes, upon reflection I realized that I may take some deserved heat for this. Here are some examples of careers (of people I know) that fit those bullet points
chef
entrepreneur
lab technician
legal secretary
musician
paralegal
I apologize if my post came across as insulting.
Sorry, I need to clarify. When I wrote “college grads” I meant all adults who graduated from college including the 40-something workers that are living almost paycheck-to-paycheck at their white collar job. The typical adult with a degree has very little savings to fund their retirement or handle an unexpected emergency (layoff, whatever).
The rest of your bullet points are not unique to college experience. For example, a “willingness to do things on basis of delayed gratification” also applies to a farmer who works hard to plant in the spring so that he can have a bountiful harvest for the fall. As for multi-year delayed-gratification goals, a farmer could raise cows or horses for market. Your bullet point is so generalized that it’s wrong to think of them as a one-to-one mapping to college coursework.
I think we have a tendency to overstate the net benefit of topics we’ve personally experienced (such as college, or volunteering, or having a child). We’re biased to believe the net benefit applies to most everyone else. A yoga instructor believes everyone should invest time to know how to breathe better. A cook believes that everyone would be more fulfilled if they knew how to creatively combine ingredients for original meals. A college graduate believes everyone would be aware of learning for the sake of learning if they went to college. Yes, all those skills are helpful. But sum up all the hobby horses that people believe you should know and you realize that no human lifetime could possibly complete 1% of them.
I say you can make more specific assumptions of a graduate of the NAVY SEAL program vs a graduate of a college. This is a bad indicator for the current state of college today.
The OP started as a reaction to the idea that someone who had not attended college was necessarily ignorant and furthermore would be unaware that they were ignorant. The suggestion seemed to be that the only way to know what you missed out on by not attending college was to attend college.
But now I am genuinely interested in the nature of what it is that I might learn in college that I couldn’t learn through other channels and on the very nature of a college education itself.
I believe the college coursework (the facts you memorize, passing tests, etc) is what people think of as a college education.
But I don’t think that’s actually the #1 benefit of college. The true benefit that’s very hard to recreate in other settings is a high concentration of high IQ individuals to interact with …IF… you got to the right college and take the right courses and hang around the right people. It’s not just the professors that teach you, it’s also your peers. When you pick a college, you also indirectly pick your peers.
(A related side benefit is that the alumni creates a continuous pipeline of graduates for companies to hire. For example, a bank has a lot of Duke grads which then hires more fresh-faced Duke grads and so on. I mention this “networking” aspect but acknowledge that it’s a social benefit and not an academic one. Your OP was asking about “learning” and job-worthiness is irrelevant to that.)
For me, the intelligence distribution curve at high school or a typical white-collar job does not approach the college peer group. Maybe if my white-collar job was a research position at Google or particle accelerator lab but that’s not a typical white collar job.
My wife is a college professor, and we’ve talked a fair amount about her teaching strategies and what she’s trying to accomplish for her students.
There are a couple of things that college helps with:
Comprehensive knowledge on a particular subject. You can teach yourself a lot of things on your own out of books, but when you don’t know something, one of the things you don’t know is exactly WHAT you don’t know. If a professor is doing their job right, they’ll try to make sure that you learn your topic is a systematic fashion, so there aren’t any major gaps in your knowledge or understanding.
Analytical techniques. Learning isn’t just about memorizing information. It’s also about discovering how to apply what you know. My wife teaches music history. Part of what she does is telling her class about different composers and different pieces. But a bigger part is teaching them a variety of different techniques for understanding how a piece of music functions. At the end of one of her classes she doesn’t just want her students to know a bunch of facts. She also wants them to have the thinking skills to engage with a variety of different pieces of music in insightful ways.
And for people who want to get the gist of it with less reading, check this Youtube video:
Yes, I agree that, upon reflection, my list is not useful. I apologize for posting it.
Yes, but you are comparing something very specific (NAVY SEAL) to something very general (a graduate of a college). Although it may not permit as many assumptions as for a NAVY SEAL graduate, I think you can make some assumptions about someone who has performed well in a rigorous, nationally-ranked program at an elite college.
I disagree on this. Every year, I work with new batch of college graduates and 90% cannot apply what they’ve been exposed to in college.
In the previous thread and this one, I think people are mixing up what college should be and could be vs what it actually is.
Consider what goes through the minds of high-school kids and their parents about college. “If Johnny doesn’t go to college, he won’t be able to _fill-in-the-blank.”
What’s the first thing that comes to mind to fill that blank with? “A good job.” If Johnny doesn’t go to college, he won’t be able to get a good job."
If college truly was a special place for learning how to “applying analytical techniques”, then the evidence should show that people by reflex would fill in the blank differently such as, “if Johnny doesn’t go to college, he won’t be able to learn on his own” or “if Jane doesn’t go to college, she’ll be ignorant.”
So why don’t we view college that way? Is it because we give lip-service to the ideal of college instead of acknowledging what it has become?
If you have to ask the question of other people, I would venture that you are not. (or think you are not)
Most people have certain things they are/are going to be, good at. I’d offer to anyone asking, be the best at whatever it is you are good at and you’ll be intelligent in your own way. Trying to measure intelligence against others will always lead to failure.
But then you yourself added on “specifics” to the generic phrase “college graduate.”
I agree, you can make some assumptions about someone who got a 1400+ SAT score and 3.5+ GPA + a degree from Harvard. However, all those extra qualifiers create an adult which (in my opinion) is not representative of the “college grad” that kevlaw is thinking of in his OP.
I think this is the most compelling case yet.
Arriving in Silicon Valley was joyful for me because I was suddenly surrounded by exceedingly smart people who were interested in the same things as me - not just computer science but philosophy and art and literature and politics. College is likely the first venue (for most people) where they discover a large group of people like themselves. I was fortunate enough to make it here under my own steam but maybe I just got lucky.
I wonder though if most college graduates think of the benefits of college in the same way - or if they even experiences those benefits.
I had similar experiences in the past - BRNC Dartmouth and subsequently when backpacking around the world - but neither of those were quite as intense as finding that everyone around me was interested in the nature of consciousness or Fermat’s last theory. That only happened when I arrived in Silicon Valley.
I guess I was discounting college because the coursework itself is so easy. But college != coursework.
It’s not that you couldn’t learn those things outside of college, it’s that it’s probably easier to learn what college will teach you by, you know, going to college.
As an analogy, consider the qualities that military experience grants. You could become as disciplined, as gung-ho, as combat-ready as a marine just by a bit of reading and research and some hard work in your garage. But it’s likely much easier to develop those qualities in the Marine Corps.
But ‘marine’ is a very specific occupation. The training for a marine is very specific and entirely vocational. What’s the equivalent in college in your analogy?
Just the qualities outlined by others. Things like starting something that finishes four years later, with many milestones along the way; living and breathing a community in which academics are at least nominally the most important thing around; subjecting yourself to a varied course of study with the explicit purpose of becoming a well-rounded person; an extended period of learning in which no one is responsible for you passing or failing but yourself, which I think tends to leads to learning how to learn. And the many things you learn about yourself in trying to achieve all of the above. Not to mention whatever you specifically learn at a college level. I could have read all of the same philosophy books outside of college, but I doubt I’d have gotten as much out of them as I did by taking philosophy classes; I know I wouldn’t be able to write as well, since I churned out many pages of essays, which was, minimally, a lot of practice at writing.
None of this impossible outside of college. But going to college is probably a much more effective and direct way of gaining those things.
On the negative side, college also selectively imparts arrogance.
My sister, an unemployed well educated teacher with a Masters, could not last two entire days working at Walmart. Although drowning in debt, those PEOPLE were beneath her and she could not POSSIBLY work there.
Egotistical elitism and classism, anyone? Oh, take no offense. I was talking about those people over there (points vaguely off in the distance).
But then aren’t they somewhat violating/contradicting #4?
I mean, they aren’t willing to do what it takes to get the education; i.e. working at what they are qualified for in order to pay for it. They want the education before they are willing to work hard for it.
at various points of being educated you’ll probably have different opinions of how “educated” you are.
i think it goes along a bell curve. fully uneducated, you know you’re uneducated. while in entry level training (college, cooking school, what have you) you’ll feel so much smarter than previously. however a little learning is a dangerous thing. as you learn more, you realize either a) how little there is to learn, and b) how much more there is unknown out there. Personally, i have found this to be true in the scientific community. we DO know a lot, but a lot of it is experimentally derived.
Did you read my posts in the thread where I admitted that, upon reflection, I did not think that my list was very useful? 
I don’t see any contradiction. I’m not sure I understand the point you’re trying to make.
Are you suggesting that no one should go to college unless they can pay cash?
Do you think that no one should buy a house unless they can pay in cash?
IMO people who default on their college loans are violating the social and legal contract (in the US) regarding payment for college - they aren’t “willing to do what it takes to get the education.” But for people who pay off their college loans as promised, I don’t see a violation.
That’s a very interesting question (the OP) and one I asked myself as well, when I was reading a Pit about Der Trihs that involved religion/atheism, etc.
I have my BA in Bus. Mgmt and MBA in Finance so consider myself well-educated, however, the level of debate in that thread truly blew my mind.
It all depends on what you are intelligent about and what you want to be intelligent about. College can only get you so far, then passion, interest and a willingness to invest the time in learning can take you a long way.
I encountered people who saw college as an apprenticeship. They were going to open doors, or qualify for promotions at work. They would do the minimum work to get by. They would brag about not even thoroughly reading the text. They would not get involved in class discussions. They managed to get degrees but, you could hardly describe them as educated.