Pretty sure a plumbing contractor would make more than a plumber.
ETA: Yeah whatever, Boyo Jim
Resolved: The American people should significantly decrease the number of people attending colleges.
This hits close to home for me, unfortunately. I went to college at 26 and just graduated this last December. I went to an in state college, and paid for it entirely through loans. I found it difficult to work 40+ hours a week, and ended up cutting down to 25-30 hours a week. Therefore some of the loans were for room and board and such. Total cost: over 80k.
I chose IT eventually (biochem was pretty useless as a B.S and I felt I wasn’t grad school material), as it was “HOT” at the time.
A couple months before I graduate I hear all kinds of bad things about the economy.
Now I can’t even seem to interest those hiring for Janitorial jobs. I have 3 years part time experience programming (for the university itself) that I thought would help me land a job, but nothing. People at the job club say that part time experience doesn’t count for “experience required” so I’m relegated to the lowest rungs of entry level.
I think a lot of this is because of so many people going to college, and not just the economy.
Anyway, just my anecdotal 2 cents.
Tuition hikes at Michigan universities demonstrate need for reform – Michigan Education Report (2005-03) – Mackinac Center Have someone read it to you.
Well…I majored in English. And then I wound up teaching it in college–part-time, hourly wages. But I can’t get full-time work for love nor money because there are too damned many of us and very few FT jobs. So now I’m off into health occupations, which I wish I had gotten into years ago.
I wouldn’t say all the English training was useless–you have to be pretty good at it for transcription–but I do see your point.
In my experience, there are two kinds of people who advance the “college isn’t for everyone” opinion:
[ol]
[li]People who say “College isn’t for everyone. Of course, I’m college material. But that guy over there- why doesn’t he realized how much more fulfilled he’d be if he was a plumber?”[/li][li]People who say “I wish I wasn’t expected to go to college, because it’s a lot of work and it takes too long to get the payoff.” Of courses, one of the biggest reasons why businesses want college graduates is that it proves they are will to do a lot of work and delay gratification. [/li][/ol]
Exactly. We all benefit from a more education populace. I wish we had the resources to send every plumber, fry cook and janitor to the highest level of education they have the ability and willingness to achieve. I’d love it if I could discuss philosophy with the nail lady. The smarter we are, the better.
And of course there is the little catch to everything- when we start deciding who “doesn’t really need” to go to college, I promise you it’s not going to be the sons of the upper class, no matter how daft. The people who could benefit the most are almost certainly going to be shaved off first.
The real problem with college isn’t the learning, its that college is expensive and (to a smaller degree) takes up productive time. These are issues we can fix. I do think college should be more difficult. And I do think there should be more emphasis on the value of internships and work experience during the college years. And I think we desperately need to reign in tuition costs.
My thoughts are summarized in this this and several other threads.
College in America has become too much like a business seeking to maximize revenue. Admitting every who has (or can borrow) the cost of tuition, and spending two years teaching them subjects they should have learned in high school helps this goal.
even sven, I guess I’m a variation of type 1. I think college is a great option for many people. I myself am very glad I went to college, both for career reasons and the learning I picked up. But I see increasing numbers of people who chose college without really thinking, and realized too late that it wasn’t going to be worth their time and money. My professor brother tells me horror stories of kids clogging up his math classes who are totally unprepared and have no interest being there. The system didn’t do them a favor by admitting them and taking their money.
And for the record, I think well-prepared students are ‘college material’, whatever their socioeconomic class. (Neither of my parents went to college, and they didn’t have any money to send me or my brothers).
I love encountering waitresses and clerks who are erudite and well-read. But I don’t think getting more people to go to college is the way that usually happens. The people I know who fit that category usually develop a love of learning much earlier in life than college age. And I can think of a few such who didn’t even go to college!
Based on the sentiments in your last paragraph, I think we’re not all that far from agreeing: I too believe college should be more difficult and maintain standards, as opposed to maximizing enrollment (and tuition) by letting everybody in and through.
But don’t you think that would result in fewer people going to college?
I think that there is still a prevalent attitude that if you get a 4 year degree, then life will be easy street.
I was taught that by my grandfather. He busted his ass in a glass plant for 40 years while he saw the college grads with cushy jobs. I don’t think he looked any further than “college” to see what they had that he didn’t, so he pushed his kids to go to college to get good jobs.
Fast forward to the next generation, I think that grad school has almost become like that. You need a marketable skill in a good graduate school to get an easy street job.
I agree that promoting ignorance is bound to have negative results. Instead, we should be focused on the margin, with people who are attending college but aren’t likely to earn a degree and more importantly people who aren’t pursuing any post-secondary education but could be. Those people should be encouraged to attend trade schools or especially community colleges.
Community colleges, being inherently more practical than 4-year colleges, ought to work with the local business community to offer associates degree programs that will actually get their students jobs.
Businesses should realize there actually are a lot of fairly basic jobs that don’t really require a bachelor’s degree, and change their hiring practices.
I don’t understand this idea about unnessary graduate degrees. I can understand individuals being annoyed that they’re not competitive with their undergrad degree and feeling like in the past, that alone would be sufficient. But if you look at any actual graduate degree program they all seem to offer specific advanced knowledge in their field. I don’t have an advanced degree - I own my company and I’m a bit sheltered from hiring practices on the employee side but it seems like anything except maybe an mba should be about actually learning advanced topics in your field.
Why don’t YOU read it and quote the relevant parts? Or is that too much work for you, so you turn to lame insults instead? I don’t mind insults, mind, but yours are lame.
From your cite:
I did a quick Google search last night and found this:
12%…7%…5.6%…even 19%. Does not equal 20%. And a recession is not a depression. Anything else?
-XT
Interesting thread. My question: why is a high school diploma so (apparently) worthless? You should leave high school with:
-a good command of the language
-ability to understand compound interest, details of a mortgage
-understanding of government
- a good understanding of american and world history
-a good understanding of world geography
Instead, we have high school graduates who don’t understand the details of the interest charged by credit card firms, who don’t know who their senators and reps in Congress are, and who don’t know why WWII was fought.
The ignorance of financial matters is significant-people who don’t understand compound interest are prey to unscrupulous lending practices, and fall victim to all sorts of scams. Why should a HS grad need remedial math? I don’t get it.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1674008/authority_on_obesity_says_retrain_your_brain/index.html
This cite indicates tuition at CMU has gone up 219 percent in 10 years. 118 in the last 5. While that shows exactly the numbers I stated, I would agree that not every college in Michigan has gone up as much. There are thousands of them you know. Some probably have gone up more.
The unemployment rate in the Detroit area in is 22 percent. In Detroit it is 29 and change.
You quibble like a child. The fact is college is going up rapidly in cost while unemployment is climbing and wages are dropping. That will bode poorly for those who are not near the top of the financial heap. It will make it even more difficult to escape poverty.
Because everyone who graduates high school (which is most people) has one. It doesn’t stand out on the resume to employers. It’s the “Qualification Creep” mentioned upthread- everyone’s got a high school diploma/leavers certificate. So people go to university and get a bachelor’s degree. And suddenly everyone’s got a bachelors degree and it becomes difficult to get even a fairly middling job as an assistant manager at a major retail store without one. At least, that’s what friends of mine in the US have told me.
It’s a bit different here and degrees are still A Big Deal, but depending what field you’re in you may find that having a Bachelor’s Degree in something isn’t enough to make you “stand out”- or you might find yourself getting a perfectly good, well paying job despite never having been anywhere a university campus or polytech.
I’m not saying your average Australian/NZ High School Leaver is “smarter” or “better” than a comparable American one, but I do think they are better prepared to function “in the real world” than many of their American counterparts.
Article not found. There is a lot of discussion in Detroit, pointing out that many unemployment figures and the people needing assistance indicates that Detroit is in a depression.
Disagree.
What college has morphed into is a selection “filter” for hiring purposes. It’s a relatively inexpensive filter from the perspective of businesses recruiters. That’s the reality that people don’t want to admit. Although parents and university brochures will pay lip service to the notion that you go to college to “get an education”, that’s just delusional justification in many cases.
Let’s say we reduce the cost of college to zero. Make it absolutely FREE for everyone. Anyone who wanted to go could go. What would eventually happen? A new “filter” would eventually take it’s place. That filter might be in the form of a new test. Companies would hire folks who got high marks on the post-college-SAT-trivium-quadrivium exam. And then there would be workshops and new “schools” (that cost money) sprouting up to meet the demand of college graduates trying to conquer the new testing filters. Or a new filter could be in the form of a special 1-year post-college study program (that costs $$$ and is hard enough that only smart people can pass).
Free college tuition does not solve anything. It just moves (or re-labels) the goal post. 2 things would be inevitable: #1 the replacement filter will cost $$ and #2 the new filter will select the % of candidates that “college” used to accomplish before being watered down.
I think everyone knows that Detroit is a shithole. It’s not necessary to read an article on a website which links to conspiracy theories, 9-11 “truth” sites, and Jeff Rense to figure that out. And also…what a poorly written article!
Those are the final two paragraphs of the story. Paragraphs! Who’s writing the stories on that site, 6th graders?
In my area, the Southeast, $50-75 is actually a pretty good wage. And plumbers have more job security these days than a lot of college graduates, including MBAs. Go to almost any city in the country, open up the local paper and look at the want-ads, and you’ll see that there will almost always be someone hiring for plumbing related jobs.
You wanna feel really ignorant? Wait until you need to call a plumber for a big plumbing problem and then write him that check. Or just look in the paper and see how easy it would be to get a job if you were a HVAC technician.
ETA - here in the South I would kill to make 50-75K with my masters’ degree.
Learning is a great thing. Tons of people in college because they’re “supposed to be there” aren’t learning shit and would be better off elsewhere, and this is from somebody who could rhapsodize for years about learning for learning’s sake. Even more people get to college, take out big loans, and then find out that they hate it or can’t hack it or whatever and then they drop out, and they never even got the chance to go learn to be a pipefitter. It’s ridiculous to say that we’re “moving away” from the skilled trades - yeah, there aren’t many factory jobs around, but a lot of those weren’t skilled either. You can’t really outsource HVAC repair to India.
Well, so what?
I again have to ask; how would a country benefit from having more ignorance? Yes, it’s true that a high school degree doesn’t carry the weight it did 80 years ago, but it shouldn’t. I can only think that’s it GOOD that a high school education has become commonplace. It’s good for everyone to be educated, even if they’re working not-so-fancy jobs. Getting an education certainly doesn’t hurt your chances.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about. I’ve hired plumbers and written them big checks. (Incidentally, my plumber had a high school education, plus he had to apprentice for years under a provincially regulated program to become a plumber - hardly an uneducated fool.) I didn’t feel at all ignorant, any more than I do when I pay the dealership to fix my car, or pay my dentist to fix my teeth. Other people have skills I do not. Your point eludes me.
I think college isn’t for everyone. My reason is the following: There’s absolutely nothing I learned in college that I couldn’t have learned for a tiny fraction of the cost using the Internet, a decent public library, and Amazon.com.
I don’t consider the time and money I spent on college to be wasted, but I do consider them to be poorly spent.
And doctors and nurses.
We had another thread about this a few months ago, and someone made a point I liked: threads like these are usually full of college educated people saying other people should not have gone to college. While I agree it’s a problem when people get degrees they can’t use, or end up with a lot of debt for a degree they didn’t not really need for the jobs they are doing, that doesn’t mean fewer people should go to college. People should not be discouraged from continuing their educations, period.