Without a scholarship or a lot of grants, you aren’t gonna get an education at a local public (state college I’m guessing) college for 20k.
Unversity of Missouri (state college, only well know for Agriculture and it’s journalism school, is 20k a year counting room and board and other fees.
You have just neatly summed up why great demographic swaths of America are so uncomfortable with edumacation - and very probably why so much emphasis is placed on potential dollar-generating majors instead of “useless” disciplines.
You are confusing correlation with causation and also possibly using the word “civics” differently than I.
I happen to know government trivia such as the House of Representatives has 435 total people and can name the last 20 Presidents sequentially off the top of my head. I’ve visited the legislative buildings in Washington DC and also my home state. On a school field trip, I remember sitting at the actual desk in the chamber that my state representatives met in and pressing the yes/no buttons for mock votes.
I don’t think all off that civics knowledge gives me any advantage over others. If it did, I’d be the first to admit it and be really smug about it. If I was pursuing a career in politics, that govt info might be helpful. Otherwise, I’d gladly trade that civics knowledge for something more useful, such as knowing the German language so I could read Faust untranslated. It would be great to get that time investment spent on “civics” put back into my 400,000 hour bank account to be used for something else.
As a transplant to America, I am shocked at the number of jobs that require a degree here.
My nieces and nephews back home left school at 18 to go work at a bank. My nephew was a bank manager at 22 (of a small branch) because - guess what - being a bank manager does not require college degree.
In my opinion, you don’t need someone with a degree for the vast majority of jobs - you need a smart person. Degrees don’t make you smarter. They are a crude, expensive intelligence test. Colleges and employers collude to make everyone think that you’ll be useless to society without a degree. That becomes self-fulfilling when everyone starts to believe it.
I am not even talking about blue collar work. I think most white collar workers would do better with an apprenticeship, on-the-job training and evening classes.
FWIW I value the arts and humanities and philosophy and science tremendously but I think degrees in those subjects are best reserved for people who have a calling for them. Other people who are interested will learn about those subjects on their own. The rest don’t need to spend four years learning stuff they are not interested in.
As a transplant to America, you may have noticed already that we like evaluating each other through crude, expensive, self-fulfilling criteria. They happen to reap great benefits if you’re in charge of things and cultivate the right attitude.
We don’t, OTOH, particularly care for smart people unless they demonstrate an ability to a) plow a straight line or b) compel others to do so.
Average annual cost of a public 4 year school is $6,585. For a 2 year school it is $2,402
Collegeboard.com? No thanks, I don’t trust sites that look like blogs. Find me an actual .edu that lists their “estimated” yearly cost as 6.5k and you will be talking.
Until then, AVERAGE simply means that a good portion of students get scholarships, which doesn’t prove me wrong since I SAID “unless you are getting a scholarship or a lot of grants”.
Mizzou is a relatively cheap school. And yes, room and board, transportation etc count toward the final goal. So even if you find a college that has tuition of 6.5k you aren’t gainsaying my site, because it lists books, room and board and transportation. Does your little blog list those? Or do they assume mommy and daddy are paying for it?
Didn’t get edit in time, but here is a non-blog, .gov citation:
annual cost for public institutions was ~11k.
I’m sorry, I forgot that you set the rules of the debate and it was my job to go find your stats for you.
As far as the cost of tuition, fees and books, it is still around $7000 a year. The cite you give includes room and board as well. To you that may be part of the cost of education, but that is iffy. Some people do not count it, some people live with family, etc. I am only counting the cost of tuition and fees. And it is $7,020 for a public 4 year university.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/slideshow/ALeqM5ifmMBwQfkudqXd4TNwtqlyHyVLXgD9BET2L00?index=0
Plus the average you give seems to be a mix of 2 and 4 year institutions, which are drastically different in cost.
I haven’t made such a claim, but you have, so it’s up to you to define your terms and defend your claim.
Yes, because more than 50% of students live with their parents. Except MOST public schools require you at least spend your sophomore year in the dorms.
I found the stats, and they were greater than your pathetic blog stats. Endorsed by the government, not some random blogspot person with too much time on their hand.
Either way, more people go away with more than 20k debt for a 4 year degree, public schools included (though not 2 year community colleges which Mr. Blog writer probably didn’t account for).
Government stats include room and board but your little wanna be journalist doesn’t. I guess if you had an axe to grind you would stick to those guns no matter what…
To clarify, I said earlier that “many” not “most” college graduates have net negative.
In my interpretation, you said it in a backhanded way. You said…
“I again have to ask; how would a country benefit from having more ignorance?”
…which was your response to “American people should significantly decrease the number of people attending college.”
Given that 62+% of American high school kids already go to college, I think for you to now say you haven’t made such a claim is specious.
Is it fair for me to rewrite your question as, “how would a country benefit from having less than 62% go to college?”
If no, then what kind if language semantics game are you playing?
Anyways, I have better statistics in my books but this webpage and this article gives a flavor of the financial difficulty college graduates face. 60% graduate with over $20,000 in debt. 66% are living paycheck-to-paycheck. 74% are struggling to pay off their loans.
The debt load is trending upward every year. One of the key points I’m stressing is that parents and kids don’t fully know these negative financial outcomes. The debt caused by college has now become big enough that college is no longer a “slam dunk no questions asked” situation – especially for diplomas that are not in the hard sciences.
Are you really attacking me over collegeboard.com? That is awesome. I think I’m attracted to you now.
I have spent much of my working career working with ignorant bumpkins who get their news from Rush Limbaugh and have little idea of the world outside their small circles. The fact that they work in a factory doesn’t make their need for education less. If anything, they need it more. And you think that too many people are going to college? The fact that they may be happy being a plumber doesn’t negate the fact that if done right, college teaches you how to think. By your way of thinking, many of them don’t really need high school, either. Let’s just teach them a trade in middle school and save everyone a whole lot of tax dollars, since their education would just be wasted. If a person would rather attend a vocational program than college, fine, but even they might be better off learning that vocation in addition to getting a college education. To say that too many people who are getting a college education aren’t academically prepared for it is absurd. The goal should be to improve the high school education so that they are better prepared for college. 45% of college-aged people are attending college? We should be aiming a lot higher.
Let me backtrack slightly - I was thinking only of the 4-year university that I attended. I wasn’t thinking of the community college that I attended before transferring. The teaching there was significantly better, although it’s still true that the majority of what I learned there I could have learned on my own, and often did. (Not because I’m a genius, but simply because anybody of even modest intelligence who applies themselves to the task of improving their knowledge of something can make significant advances towards that goal. They just have to think they can, and they have to want to.)
At the 4-year university, most of the time the professors didn’t do anything useful. (Two different professors read the text to class in lecture. That is all they did, aside from give tests. They made overhead projection sheets directly from the text … and then read them aloud. Seriously.) Others would just go through examples that were already gone through in the text, thus not helping in the slightest. Or, they’d just say that the TA would cover the subject more, which might or might not happen. In short, the vast majority of what I learned there was self-taught, and the majority of the rest could have been self-taught. Yeah, there were probably a few nuggets of knowledge that I might have otherwise missed. But not thousands of dollars worth of knowledge. And the opportunity cost (in terms of both money and knowledge) is huge. Had I just gone to Amazon.com and bought the same texts, I would have had at least 99% of the knowledge and spent only a fraction of the overall cost.
(University of Minnesota Duluth. Computer science major / English minor. One of the English professors was awesome, and is a noteworthy exception to the above.)
I guess my overall point was put best by Ruminator:
An education is a terrific thing. Going to college is only one way of getting an education about something, and certainly not always the best way. People should be aware of the numerous options they have to improve their knowledge.
I think we should have A level/O level (whatever it is limeys do) sorts of testing to sort out who’s what. Not binding, of course, but it could be a way of getting folks into the trades who are well-suited to it, and weed out people who aren’t suited for college. However, I would guess that much of the deadwood in college are only there because their parents pay for it and insist upon it. I don’t know what you can do about that; maybe have technical schools masquerading as colleges for well-supported lame-o’s.
Instead of weeding people out, the colleges should be weeding them out naturally. The work should be hard, and if you aren’t up to the work you drop out. It’s your wasted time and money.
In other words, it’s not that too many unqualified people are being let in, it’s that too many unqualified people are being allowed to continue and eventually graduate. I’ve never been one for restricting who can enter university- especially based on something like a standardized test. There are just too many bright people out there who don’t fit the mold but would do fabulously in college. If you are willing to bet your time and money on it- go for it! But if you don’t succeed, you should be O-U-T.
Though you didn’t convince that more people need to go to college, I fully agree with your assertion that high school education in this country is in vast need of a major overhaul. The fact the people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are so popular tells me that high school (and even many colleges for that matter) does a shitty job of teaching people critical thinking skills.
I find it poignant to hear people equate college with knowing civics. People used to learn civics in high school, or even junior high. And maybe I’m waxing nostalgic, but when I was a kid, friends of my blue-collar parents were much more knowledgeable of the mechanics of government than their counterparts today seem to be. I remember when I was nine years old, asking the guy who owned the jukebox in our restaurant what this ‘electoral college’ thing was. He explained the whole thing to me. (The one thing he couldn’t explain was why there were 538 votes instead of (100 + 435) = 535.) This was in West fucking Virginia, in 1968.
even sven, you are spot on that lowering the standards is defintely part of the problem.
Why have standards been lowered? Often, it’s so the university can maximize enrollments (and thereby, tuition revenue). This goal is incompatible with high academic standards. It’s more common at less exclusive, public institutions. Places like MIT and Stanford maintain standards. But they can turn away applicants and still have full enrollment, of qualified students.
My brother (who teaches at a large land-grant university) tells me about the increasing numbers of slacker students who make up for their lack of motivation and preparedness by aggressively negotiating everything. If their teacher doesn’t pass them, they trump up a complaint to the teacher’s boss, or boss’s boss. The higher up they go, the more likely they will encounter an adminstrator who prefers maximizing revenue to maintaining standards. Although the admin will invoke all kinds of high ideals - “We must encourage students to continue their education”, etc. - the real motivation is the bottom line.
Are such students any better off after four years of such expensive shenanigans? Even if they get a degree in some non-marketable field, they’re in debt up to their eyeballs (assuming they haven’t just been spending their parents’ money). They’ve maybe gotten practice negotiating. But they could do that working in sales.
I hope to God this never spreads to things like medical school. The day that aggressive idiots can bullshit their way through surgery certification is the day I move to Canada or England (or Thailand!)
And you really think they’d have gotten something out of college if they didn’t get anything out of high school? College, perhaps more than most activities, is one of those things where you get out exactly what you put into it.