The problem with this is that there are numerous motivated, bright students who don’t know what they want to do yet, for the first couple of years of college. Although the emphasis colleges place on general education is variable, those first two years are much the same, broadly speaking, in American colleges and universities everywhere. In a way they are a continuation of high school, but ideally one that is is much more rigorous and demanding in content. I suppose the way you tell if you actually did go to a university or college and not something else that was wishfully so denominated is if, after the first week of your freshman year you said to yourself, “Wow, this is much harder than high school was!”–even if you had found high school easy. Unless, of course, you’re a super genius or something. The student who decides to major in history and literature may end up as a teacher or a librarian, and not make a great deal of money, but we need the people who do those jobs to have a depth and breadth of knowledge and scholarship which I doubt was every provided by the high schools alone. You couldn’t just set up a kind of vocational school to pump out teachers and librarians in, say two years post high school.
Here you seem to contradict your earlier statement, but that’s fine. I have mixed feelings about this too.
I have a stepdaughter who did a liberal arts major, and then got a master’s in education at an Ivy League school. She got out of this country and is teaching in a private school in Europe. She’s taken on a lifestyle I can’t even imagine, being bumped up the promotion ladder and living the life of an ocean hopping world citizen as her employer sends her off to one training program or conference after another. It is so different from the way teachers are treated in this country it’s unbelievable. It just goes to show you can never tell where an art history major will end up.
And yes, I am a bit jealous (sigh).
ETA: No, I’m not a teacher but I always wanted to live in Europe, at least for a while. I did, as a student, but that’s not really the same thing, and it was a very long time ago.
I agree that many students don’t know what they want to do with their lives when they finish high school. I was in that boat myself. I think part of the solution is to expose kids to more numerous and varied workplace experiences. Not many high school seniors have any idea what most jobs are like, unless they’ve seen their parents at work. I know I’m judging by my own experience, but learning and studying was an entirely different thing once I had seen the value it could have in my life, beyond taking home a good report card.
I also agree that college should be more rigorous than high school. But it can actually be less rigorous, if you’re comparing a high school that had decent standards with a college trying to maximize its revenue. Turning away unprepared students may eventually raise standards, but it doesn’t generate as much money as admitting everyone and then charging college tuition for remedial reading and math.
Kids who eventually develop enough of an interest in learning to become teachers or librarians are not generally the kids I’m suggesting avoid (or delay) college. I’m talking about the ones who have no interest in ‘book learning’ whatsoever, to the point that they’re hostile towards it.
And I would draw a distinction between students who study literature or music realistically expecting to hold down a ‘day job’ indefinitely while they write or gig at night, and students who are naively believing the propaganda that “a college degree will ensure that you earn more money” while majoring in such subjects.
I am not saying there is no value to college for such kids, only that it may not be worth the cost.
Another thing that’s come up in the other related threads is the irrational status value that many Americans place on college, which plays a big role in coercing kids into college. I would rather have a child who happily made a living as a locksmith or carpenter than one who struggled through a degree in some subject they didn’t care about. I contend that many parents, especially college graduates, would not feel this way, and pressure their kids into college whether or not it’s a good fit.
Off the top of my head, from among my school friends that I am still in touch with, I know:
An accountant, several bankers (most bank managers in retail banks, several in investment banking), one chemist, many computer programmers, a few nurses (and an ambulance driver) and one journalist. One of the bankers has a degree (in chemistry), as does the journalist. The chemist has a PhD. I did an apprenticeship in Electronic Engineering but ended up a software engineer.
Back to the point. The rapidly rising cost and the difficulty in getting aid, will result in less people attending college. Wages are stagnant and unemployment rampant. The cost of college will stop the lower class from attending.
Millions of foreclosures and bankruptcies put schooling on the back burner.
Sadly, I believe this will likely happen. And I would strongly prefer that reductions in attendance be based on merit and motivation instead of family income, so I’m not looking forward to it.
It is definitely tougher today than it was when I was young to attain more economic prosperity than your parents did, and it keeps getting tougher. (I hate admitting this because it robs me of old-geezer credibility: we’re always supposed to say that kids today have it easier).
Well…um…I guess I glad you got that off your chest.
Rather than argue the relevancy of a college degree for every possible profession, I will say this. IMHO, the increasing need for a college degree is an attempt by companies to quantify the skills and background that they believe makes a successful employee as their industry matures. I think the downside of a college education is that it creates a very “institutional” mindset. Students become very used to working in an environment where they are specifically told what to do and when to do it. Completing those tasks results in moving on to the next level. They take that mentality with them to their post-college careers. Get a job, perform your tasks, eventually make middle management.
Where I believe colleges are lacking is that they don’t teach students how to “hustle”. That is to say, they often don’t teach the skills required to identify and capitalize on opportunities in an unconventional manner. People who have these skills are often very successful as entrepreneurs or in certain sales related jobs.
Is it? I think it is more that our expectations have risen. In our parent’s day, a two-car household was exceptional, children generally shared rooms with their siblings, a good family vacation would be a camping trip at a nearby national park, and housewives bought cook books like “Feed Your Family and Save Money with Variety Meats.”
These days a middle class family expects to have two cars (maybe even more if there are teenagers in the house) at least one of them large, a home with multiple bathrooms and separate bedrooms for everyone, family vacations in Paris and spaghetti with imported beef and organic tomato sauce for dinner.
Hell, the electronics alone are astounding. Pretty much expects to have a cell phone, computer, digital camera, and MP3 player. Many people who don’t consider themselves particularly well-off walk around with hundreds of dollars worth of gadgets on them every day.
Maybe it’s just because my school (University of Arizona) was top 50 in it last I checked, but getting in the Engineering program at my school is brutal. It’s severely limited and has high GPA and standardized test requirements if you want entry from high school, if you can’t meet those you have to get through a certain amount of degree-related credits (12, last I checked) with a high enough grade to be considered in advanced standing for the major. I’ve heard stories of some of the mid level classes curving tests where most students got 93-95s where 93 is curved to an F, 94 to a C, and 95 to an A. And yet the program is absolutely filled to the brim, without the standards the program would be in absolute chaos. Not to mention all seniors have to do an actual project for a company (or something on campus if they can find something, I think, they have to propose it).
If my school is any indication (and it may not be) the shortage of engineers is probably because the programs themselves are pretty much meat grinders.
Of course, going to college and graduating doesn’t really make you smarter necessarily. I’m a Computer Science major, there are plenty of bright people and there are plenty of average (or slightly below such) people willing to learn. The bright become brighter and the average become better (if not raised to the level of the bright kids).
Of course, there are plenty of people who may be able to do the class material, pass the tests, write the programs, but are in it just because they have to be, or because computer science is lucrative enough to make them some dough. These people will, I assure you, never enjoy your conversation about philosophy, computers, or anything else. They’ve usually forgotten half the class two months afterwords and then cram it back just in time for the test if a future class needs the concepts. These kids don’t care about having their opinions challenged, don’t care about refining concepts or understand what the best applicability of anything is, they just want the piece of paper that will give them money.
These are the people that would be best going into a trade profession, the ones that can pass school but still don’t care. They can do an apprenticeship, and start making money faster.
How do you weed them out? I want to say you don’t. I think school admissions should be laxer, there are people who don’t do well in high school but thrive in a college setting, I was one of them (though I did have an existential crisis that probably helped with that). Still, I’d recommend everyone who goes through not a class or two (almost everyone has one of “those” classes) but an entire degree just to get the green paper to go do some nice plumbing or carpentry or something. Hell, practically my entire extended family is in some permutation of carpentry/construction/plumbing and they make fantastic amounts of money - frequent vacations to exotic locations, owning large houses with acres of woods around them, techno-gadget 124A, the works.
I guess what I’m saying is that people who shouldn’t go to college are the people who have no specific marketable interests who just want some nebulous career that generates money, and will latch onto whatever roller coaster flavour-of-the-month degree that will get them there the fastest. The people who should go to college are those that are genuinely fascinated by something that they want to spend their lives learning and doing that require specific skillsets that a specific degree’s program is designed for.
Oh, and the analytical thinking and stuff should be bumped back down to high school. Maybe I was a little hasty, and in actuality, maybe college should become the new high school, degree the new diploma, but cut the tuition costs (and raise them for graduate school maybe). I still don’t quite like it. I actually think that high school suffers from its current “like junior high with three electives instead of two” model a tad, it would benefit from mimicking the college one a bit more. But that’s another thread entirely.
How many high school seniors know what they want to do at that level of detail? The reason for going to the best school you can get into is that you are exposed to far more things than a mediocre school, and you also can be exposed to people really at the forefront of a field. Maybe you won’t give a crap, but how do you know if you don’t try?
Inflated expectations definitely contribute to it. We are to an extent victims of our own prosperity. You are absolutely right about how many electronics gadgets and services people manage to spend their money on, whether they have any or not.
But as late as the mid-1970s (when my brother graduated from a public university), people getting degrees in just about anything were expecting jobs that would at least lead to a middle class lifestyle. Engineers and computer scientists got even better-paying jobs, right away. Law school grads all got jobs (how quaint does that sound?)
Part of the problem in comparing economic conditions then and now is that today we spend more of our income on some things that definitely aren’t luxuries. A second car may have been a luxury then, but that was before suburbanization brought us those lovely longer commutes. Housing*, college tuition and health care have all gone up faster than incomes.
Health care is an especially good example of the complexity in comparing then and now. Medical science has made staggeringly fast advances: in 1970, if you tore your rotator cuff, you couldn’t get it fixed, even if you were a billionaire. But if you were an average joe who fell and broke your leg, you didn’t get hit with an ER bill for one third of your annual income, making health insurance today almost like liability insurance.
I know these things are not directly related to the subject of the OP. But I think they’re informative in assessing the economic benefits of college, and whether past conditions are influencing people to put too much value today on a college education.
*I know housing prices vary greatly by region, but in my experience, it’s not cheap in most places with good employment opportunites.
Some do. But mostly people who go to the better schools have at least a vague notion that the world is a competetive place and the better education you can get, the more competetive it makes you.
That prosperity is a direct result of having a highly educated, flexible workforce.
Really there is no reason we “should” do anything. There are enough different types of schools and programs that people in this country can generally find a path that meets their professional, intellectual and financial needs. Voyager has a point that kids don’t often know what they want to do when they grow up. Part of the point of going to college is learning about the world to help you figure out what you might be interested in.
If someone just wants to get a diploma just to have the credential for professional reasons and doesn’t care about the “intellectualism” of it, who gives a shit? The world needs people who want to actually get shit done more than it needs people to pontificate on every subject they think they understand.
Sure, college is a business. But people know which schools are the good ones and which ones have lower standards. People can tell who went to school for a 4 year party and who took their education seriously.
And off the top of my head I can say you’re wrong about lawyer. You don’t need college. You need college AND three years of law school. College itself is just the way station on the line to lawyersville. As someone else pointed out, it didn’t always used to be this way. You could choose to bypass it all and become an apprentice in a firm. At one point well over half the lawyers in this country got into the profession that way. That pathway closed off rapidly when the ABA instituted the bar exam in…1972, I believe. Now you have to have graduated from an accredited law school just to sit for the exam. Only two states, Delaware and Vermont, still allow the apprenticeship route but it’s rare even in those states.
A few of the others on your list also require not just college but college AND a graduate level school for additional training. For the most part I have no problems with that. Specialized professions require specialized training. But again it’s a situation of college itself only being training for more schooling, which kinda defeats the purpose of college being opportunity opener. And it doesn’t address the numerous jobs that really should require no specialized training save for what you can pick up on the job that still requires a college degree simply because the boss says it does.
According to U.S. and World Report, the University of Arizona has an acceptance rate of 80.5%. With such a high acceptance rate for the university as a whole, the engineering program presumably has to conduct a great deal of additional screening.
However, this is quite possibly one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard in a while. This is not evidence of a rigorous program; on the contrary, this is evidence of an poorly written, simplistic exam with no ability to discriminate between students.
Any instructor who constructed such an exam is an idiot who has no idea what they are doing. Such a test is useless so far as being able to discriminate between “A” students and “F” students.
There are two possible fixes for such a situation: give A’s to everyone, or make the test more difficult.
I used to be an instructor and course coordinator for the chemistry and physics program at a college preparatory school. With experience, I could write an exam (taken by as many as 150 students) in which I could predict the class average in advance. An ideal exam was one in which the class average was 75%, and had a nice bell-shaped distribution around this average. If the class average was 94% (as in your example), we either had exceptional students, or, more likely, the exam was too easy.
Typically, college instructors will bias exams towards greater difficulty, because you can always curve the exam results up. I have never heard of a situation in which grades were curved down, as you contend. And FWIW, I graduated from a top-20 nationally ranked university.
Your nail lady wishes she could talk horticulture or needlework or something to you. College is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the sole gateway to knowledge, and to think yourself smarter and more knowledgable than the average person because you got educated in a rather limited subset of knowledge deemed appropriate for schools speaks of a great ignorance about how much there is to know.
I never said it was good, just that there may not be as many because the classes are hard to pass, even for asinine reasons. I’ll admit it’s hard to separate the crap from reality sometimes, I’ve heard from multiple people (including grad students), that Engi 1xx courses that have too high a volume of students have been known to covertly use RNGs to determine “reasonable looking” grades to weed people out. That rang my alarm bells, but I’ve been told it many times so I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t, I’ve never taken a class in any of the engineering departments.
Wait one cotton pickin’ minute there, fella. With the career value of a BA/BS shrinking every month, you want people capable of “analytical thinking and stuff”–presumably including critical thinking—before they’re even old enough to vote?
Talk about a recipe for social unrest. A generation with so much awareness of how things might be different, and of how little power they really had, would make the Russian Revolution look like a taffy pull.
