Now that I have graduated with that oh-so coveted degree, I have a few thoughts about college.
Have I learned how to write better? No.
Have I learned anything about the US political system? No.
Have I learned anything about the election process? No.
Have I learned anything new about the plight of underdeveloped nations? No.
Have I learned anything at all? Indeed I have. A degree is overrated beyond the capacity for words.
Thank you all very much for paying for it, though. Five productive years of my life have gone down the drain on the taxpayer’s tip, which entitles me to apply for jobs that pay far more than I would have gotten not two weeks ago when I didn’t have a degree. The difference between then and now? Bupkis. Not a thing. Hell, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything that I learned in college that is more valuable than I learned here having it out day after day with you people.
So, really, what is the point of a university education? Is it simply a matter of the ordeal being the price of entry to a good job? Is it a rite of passage that is demanded of you because the people who are hiring went through it, so you should too? What’s the importance of it?
When you figure it out, let me know, because I still don’t. As far as I am concerned, it was the biggest waste of my time I could have possibly imagined, and for my trouble I will likely get paid more than the guy down the street who is no less intelligent than I am. Oh, he didn’t write the endless stream of papers and he didn’t pay the monstrous tuition, but then again he doesn’t have the all-important piece of paper, either.
Undermine the system from within. Get your job, rise through the ranks to where you’re doing the hiring, then give your old job to the fella down the road who didn’t get the sheepskin.
To have an objective, authoritative source to back up your claim of possessing particular knowledge. Maybe you had it all before you started, but I’m pretty sure most people don’t. College was certainly a learning experience for me, both within my discipline and outside of it, in the undergraduate required courses. I also learned many non-academic skills that have been beneficial to me in my professional life.
As a political scientist myself, I would have answered all four questions (writing, american system, elections, underdeveloped nations) differently. Are you really telling me you knew the specifics about poverty traps, socialization, writing scientific papers, gerrymandering, filibustering (etc) before you started college? I must say I’m impressed.
*Note that i’m not from the states so you might want to replace the american politics part with German uberhangmandate and the Russian president-parliament relation.
You just knew that a guy who started a thread bragging on how smart he was and how gud he wrote before he entered college which he doesn’t need and never did HAHAHAHAHA would make a spelling error in the first word of his title, didn’t you?
I know all of FootBall-i-p-w-y-f’s queries, answers. SO.
that and a poli-sci, history degree may, MAY, get a public teaching job in the states. ick.
OP, Who said you were educated? Your college? oh gag me.
You are just as you were in the navy, or whatever scrum you came from, A Person Unproven In The Workforce.
Change That. Prove YOUR Worth. or bang on, on the message boards. best wishes.
[hey, i’m from N’way as well, Footballer—you make sence, even in English.]
I knew a guy who spent five years teaching English at a fly-by-night conversation school in Japan. At the end of five years:
He still couldn’t read Japanese.
He could barely speak the language beyond ordering beer.
He had no jobs skills that were applicable to anything other than teaching English at fly-by-night conversation schools.
His analysis of the experience? “Japan is worthless.”
I agree that a lot of college is BS, and it does pretty much function as a gateway to keep the hoi polloi out of office jobs (note that now that most regular kids are going to school, even basic office jobs want masters degrees.)
But if you didn’t learn anything in five years, that’s nobody’s fault but your own. Nobody made you do the bare minimum. In college as well as life in general, you choose the education you get. What did you expect? Them to implant you with Matrix style knowledge chips or something?
So they didn’t expect much from your writing? Who cares what they expect? You could have pushed yourself anyway. Whenever I had to write a paper, I never chose the topic that would be easy to write- I chose something that I knew was going to involve a lot of research and thinking. I didn’t have to. I could have done fine with the easy and obvious topics. But I actually wanted to learn something. So I went out and learned it. So what if I could have gotten the same “A” by choosing something easy. The point wasn’t to get the “A”, the point was to learn.
So your classes didn’t cover the topics you were interested in? Well, your school had a library, didn’t it? Full of professional journals and other scholarly discourse. And surely you could have found at least one fellow poli-sci major to talk about these subjects with. When I was in film school we used to spend our evenings in the media lab watching weird old films and discussing them, just for fun. Yeah, my school didn’t offer a class about Westerns. But damned if I didn’t watch every Western I could find and read every book and article about Westerns I could get my hands on. And I worked Westerns into my other coursework when it was appropriate. A lot of the value in college having decent resources and a ready group of like minded people.
Did you study abroad? Run for student office? Attend conferences and clubs? Do internships? I didn’t, and I was an idiot. There is no time in life ever when you have so many things available to you, just so you can take advantage of them. Just so you can be a fuller, richer person. Every night on my campus we had a huge selection of free and pretty intellectually stimulating activities- films, plays, keynote speakers, etc. I usually didn’t go because I was “tired” and “stressed.” But I could have gone and probably would have gotten a lot out of it. Hell, looking back I could have probably gotten all kinds of scholarships, internships, etc. if I had just put out minimal effort. The fruit was hanging there right in front of me and it’s my own fault that I didn’t pick it.
Anyway, your classes aren’t the end of your education. They are just the structure to hang your education on.
Where I’m from, most of those things were covered in High School. College is supposed to be about delving deeper into subjects that interest you and/or providing you with career-specific education. You get out of it what you want, not what you expect the college to give you.
That being said, I do believe that many colleges could do a better job with preparing incoming students. I know a lot of people who drifted through college without taking advantage of everything that was available to them. The degree was simply a means to an end.
Exactly. What you get out of college is proportional to what you put into it. If I recall from your previous threads, you entered college with one goal: to get that sheepskin. Now you’ve got it. What are you bitching about?