Resolved: The American people should significantly decrease the number of people attending colleges.

Great Debates
121

Of course. I learned that when I figured out that a Cameroonian villager can speak five languages, build a house with his own two hands out of plants and earth, and plant a millet field that will feed his family all year long. Plenty of very smart people never went to college. Indeed, many of the most heartbreaking brilliant people I know specifically avoided it or dropped out because they don’t have the temperament to put up with the BS aspect of it.

But it’d be foolish to say that four years dedicating yourself full time to education, surrounded by people interested in education, guided by experts whose job is to guide you, and with the access to libraries, research facilities, etc. counts for nothing. On the whole, university provides a solid foundation for what it takes to be a life-long learner- the ability to research, analyze and communicate. On the whole, people who went to university read more, debate deeper and write clearer (of course, some of this may be because more intellectual people are likely to attend university.)

I mean, it just takes a quick look at my Facebook friends to figure out what’s what. My old high school friends who stayed home have updates like “Can’t waitz for the paaaaarty” and “OMG the baby is one year. three months and six days old LOL!” and “6 days till PAYCHECK!!! TACOS!!!” where as my college friends tend to have things a littler meatier to say. I mean, I’m sure binge drinking, reproducing , working in cubicles and buying shit are very excellent skills that they have refined and perfected. But I’ll humbly submit that my idea of “education” is a bit more productive.

122

Indeed. Many of the kids I went to college with went to college b/c their parents made them.
Vivalostwages…re your posts about developmentally delayed students…SO TRUE!!! I really think there needs to be post secondary programs specificly for kids who are retarded. So much of the time they end up at a community college to get a degree but they can’t swing it.

123

It does if you do it right.

The BS is the point anymore. The BS feeds people and houses them and gives them some status as people pulling their weight in society.

The lifelong learning and education-for-its-own-sake? Congratulations. That’s the new BS.

124

Well, let’s just put it this way…

Would you rather be on a message board where only non-college educated people could post, or one where only college educated people could post (accusations of elitism aside- just looking at the quality of interaction.) Yeah, me too.

Anyway, if being a plumber is such a great deal, why don’t you go out and be a plumber? Oh, you don’t want to? Yeah, the other people in college are probably there because they don’t want to either.

125

I can only respond that a whole lot of us are hiding out from the real world now that it’s necessary to eat so much bullshit to be part of it.

126

This sounds like the Sixth Form Certificate system that was used in NZ when I was in Sixth Form (it’s subsequently been replaced). Students were awarded a grade from 1 to 9 (1 being excellent, 9 being not very good at all. You get the idea).

All well and good in theory, but schools only had a finite number of each grade ranking to give out, based on the previous year’s (5th Form) School Certificate Exam results.

The edited highlights are that it was entirely possible for a subject to have only 4 or 5 “pass or above” marks to give out for a class of 20-30 students. And it was also entirely possible for the top student in the class to get (say) 93%, the next three students to have 88-90%, the student after that to have 85%, and the student after that had 82% and yet would fail because there were no more “pass” marks available.

Conversely, it was entirely possible for a class to have so many “pass” marks to give out that it was nearly impossible to fail, or students could end up with really good grades despite not scoring at the high levels you’d expect the grades to represent.

The whole thing was a complete disaster and was (at least amongst the people I knew) regarded to be completely meaningless. The idea, of course, was that you went on to do Bursary (7th Form Examinations, AKA University Entrance) and so your Sixth Form grades become irrelevant and meaningless the say you started 7th Form.

127

Statistically, that seems unlikely.:smiley:

By that logic you don’t need a high school or kindergarden education either. Maybe we should all just go straight to grad school?

Law schools have decided that it does not make sense to admit students who have not already demonstrated academic ability at the college level. College provides the foundation necessary so the law schools can focus on teaching law.

We didn’t always have the option of being plumbers either because people shit in outhouses.

Delaware created the first bar exam in 1763. The ABA was founded in 1878 and started pressing for states to only admin lawyers to the bar who had completed a bar exam after competing several years of post-grad work. You are probably thinking of the Multistate Bar Examination which was created in 1972.

Six states actutally - California, Maine, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming and Washington. New York allows it after one year of law school.

Yes, one could theoretically learn law on their own like Abraham Lincoln. However I don’t see the point in the modern age. By going to law school, you learn it in a structured and competetive environment where you will be exposed to thousands of like-minded peers and instructors. I don’t believe you can receive the same educational benefit on your own.

What’s “too late”? You can drop out, cut your losses and go become a plumber any time you want.

These kids who are totally unprepared and have no interest have several choices. They can either struggle through and complete the course anyway, drop the class or take a shitty grade.

128

By that time they’re already up to their ears in debt. We could do better as a society by those kids.

129

Nownow, they’re HIGH SCHOOL students, their ambition is inversely proportional to any perceived longtime reward, it would actually require organizing and not being lazy. At most it would just cause an upturn of whining “why doesn’t anyone listen to what I think!?” Whenever they enter the house. I think we’re safe.

130

Seems like there are a lot of people here who are full of BS. Everyone has an excuse for why they haven’t achieved anything. “The system is against me”, “the world is full of bullshit”, “I’m smart enough without a degree”, “no one values my major”, blah, blah blah. At what point do you figure out what you want to do with your life and take the required steps to get there?

I’m sorry but I don’t get it. If you are smart enough to start a business without an education or the job you want doesn’t require one, go for it. Plenty of people do. If the job you want requires a degree, then go get a degree. But mostly I just seem to see people bitching that the world is “unfair” because the system doesn’t work the way they want it to.

131

I don’t think it’s expected, really. I don’t have a high school diploma (or a GED) and I’ve never had any trouble finding work in a variety of fields (in the past 6 years and currently I’ve been a waitress, bartender, done food prep, catering, been a cafe manager, done sales, been a secretary/accountant, and done kitchen design). I don’t think my education has ever even come up. Usually I put down which high school I attended, no need to mention that I never graduated.

I don’t make a lot of money, but that’s fine because I don’t want to. :smiley: I’ve also never had a job with benefits, and usually have several part-time jobs at once, but I can afford to buy my own insurance.

132

msmith537, you strike me as a intelligent, rational guy. So I’ve wracked my brain to understand why I am in such disagreement with you in this and past threads on the subject.

Based on things you’ve said, with all due respect, I get the impression that your experiences in this matter are limited in a couple of ways.

FTR, I’m not whining: I feel that the system has treated me great. I’m grateful for its forgiving nature (I was 26 when I graduated, having gone back to college after a couple years off). I got an electrical engineering degree from an ABET-accredited program at a large public university cheap enough for me to work my way through and graduate debt-free (and there is no way in hell I could afford to do that, at the same school, at today’s tuition rates). The program was pretty competitive to get in and get through. I worked my ass off, and while I wished at the time that I had more time for stuff like girls and football games, I feel that the education I got was well worth my efforts.

I got a good job with that BSEE, and my employer eventually paid my way through two master’s degrees at much more elite institutions. I’m doing fine - this year, I will pay the alternative minimum tax. No whines here.

You mentioned upthread the high success rate of people you know who went to college, and cite this as evidence that there’s no problem with the system? I too could look around at my the people I work with daily and note that none of them regrets going to college, even if they incurred debts.

However, I have also stayed in touch with friends and classmates from my home town who didn’t get nearly as much payoff from college. Some of them had bad breaks, and/or didn’t have the right personality for competitive professions. But not all of them. There is also a notable difference in the resilience to that debt between solidly middle-class kids, and the working class. They don’t look at six-figure debt the same way.

Another area in which I think (and if I’m wrong about you on this, please correct me) that your experience with the educational system doesn’t encompass the big picture: you don’t seem to have had much contact with people teaching ‘in the trenches’. I have never taught public school, but I have lots of friends who do, and I volunteer at a local middle school. I also have a brother who teaches college math to freshman and sophomores. He and his colleagues agree that the shift towards maximizing enrollment has significanty harmed their ability to teach the students who are actually trying to learn. This may not affect people who deal mostly with the success stories of the educational system (like you, or, on a daily basis, me). But that doesn’t mean there’s no problem.

The “Buyer beware” argument is appealling. I’m enough of a cynic and small-l libertarian to believe that people shouldn’t expect the government to guide them by the hand in making career decisions. Neither of my parents went to college, and I managed to find my way.

But I’m not cynical enough to think that a system that accepts tax dollars is entitled to mislead uninformed people (who are, after all, paying some of those taxes). Opposing government intervention is not the same thing as condoning government duplicity.

Them’s my sentiments.

133

I’m not sure what points you are disagreeing with me on, but I do think there are certainly problems with the system. The high cost for one. I also think it can also reinforce class boundaries. I’m sure there are plenty of others that I can’t think of off the top of my head. I just think the benefits of a college education outweigh all the negatives.

I don’t think a “one size fits most” system makes sense after K-12. One can even debate whether K-12 should be “one size fits most” or a mult track system of remedial, advanced placement and mainstream classes. One of the nice things about our system is that there are so many different options for people. There are all kinds of schools at all sorts of cost and educaion levels. There are other options like trades or the military and so on.
As a general rule, having an education opens up more doors so that’s why people go to college. As I said, there are studies that show that a college degree is not that great of a financial investment once you take all the costs into account. But I think there are a great deal of intangible benefits to both the individual and society as a whole in having a well educated population.

134

I agree 100%.

Agree again. Which is why I’d prefer that the filtering process favor qualified students regardless of means, instead of unmotivated, unprepared ones with money (or even worse, no money, but access to student loans). But running a public institution like a business conflicts with this plan (and yes, I know I sound like a broken record as much as I say this).

Here we part company. All the negatives? I can’t understand how you can make such a sweeping statement. The costs outweighed the benefits for you. And for me.

But can you really say that the benefits of anything outweigh any cost? Apart from, maybe, life-saving measures?

Do you remember Michael Dukakis’ proposal to help people afford college? Opponents dubbed it the ‘company store’ plan. You borrow money for college from the government under more reasonable interest rates than available at a bank. Each thousand dollars you borrowed obligated you to pay some percentage of your income, for life, to the government.

I’d like you to imagine two hypothetical kids. You’re familiar with Andy Bernard on ‘The Office’? Well, imagine that Andy had a twin brother, separated at birth and raised in a working-class family. If they send him to Cornell, he’s still going to end up a mediocre salesman at a paper supply firm. Was it worth the cost?

You could argue that it wasn’t worth the cost to send Andy, but at least it didn’t bankrupt the parents. Working class Andy would probably be better advised to pursue his musical efforts. He’s a pretty good banjo player. But if he decided to go to college, he’d owe his soul to the company store.

Trade schools in this country have gotten better, but there’s still room for improvement. Many of them used to be nothing more than conduits for government loans. Spy Magazine once published the default rates on student loans at various institutions. Some trade schools approached 100%.

The military does provide good training. But it’s mission is to win wars, and that mission has to take priority to education. Talk to a recruiter if you want to hear all the pros and cons of enlisting. Oh, and if you believe that last sentence, that is why we’re disagreeing.

There are benefits to having a fit society. I’m all for everybody exercising every day, but not in favor of them going into debt to hire personal trainers.

135

It’s like the old saying “if you think college is expensive, you should try ignorance.”

But, yes, I suppose that college does not produce a net benefit for every single student from every single college.

Well, the problem is Andy Bernard and The Office are fictional. Andy will continue to work at Dunder Miflin as long as it is funny to have a pompous Ivy League grad working with a bunch of slack-jawed troglodites in Scranton, PA.

But regardless. There is no guarantee that graduating from the Ivy Leagues will land you a $200,000 a year job IRL. I mean that’s a problem no matter where you go to school. No one knows their potential as an 18 year old high school graduate from Podunk, Wherever. Part of going to college is expanding your knowledge of the world so you are in a better able to position yourself to be successful in it. But as a general rule, there are long term financial benefits to going to better colleges.

136

FTR I am also not whining about the opportunities life has handed me. My career has been (and still is) enjoyable and profitable and unlikely to have been more successful with a college degree.

I get that this supposed to be a joke, but your comments in this thread suggest that you really do believe that the alternative to college is ignorance.

137

And this is an important thing to remember. There are entirely too many jobs in the US that require a degree when really, it’s un-necessary.

You don’t need a degree to be the manager of a retail store.

You don’t need a degree to be a secretary/PA.

You don’t need a degree to be a writer.

But the situation in the US is such that you do need a degree to apply for many of those jobs. So I understand what the OP is saying, but perhaps the answer is not to make it harder to get into uni, or to discourage people from going, but make the degrees more specialised- ie, stop treating uni like a third-stage High School, and make degrees relevant to a particular job field instead of the “general education” purpose they seem to serve now in many cases.

138

Well, one of the reasons they don’t want to be plumbers is because they were told by their parents, teachers and friends that plumbing and other types of blue collar work was beneath them. So they could very well have loved it, but they just never looked at it as being a serious option. I don’t have any kids right now, but someday if I had a son who said he wanted to a be plumber, I’d tell him to go for it. At the very least, it’d save us a bundle in tuition.

139

Maybe you can enlighten us on what you think it means to be “educated” and “well informed”? And what should a typical 18 year old do to become such a person?

Or maybe you could share with us how you think someone who devotes himself to intellectul pursuits in a structured environment for four years isn’t more educated and less ignorant than someone who doesn’t?

As I mentioned, most of my college classmates or even most of my high school classmates who went to good colleges didn’t go to college to work in retail or as secretaries.

So I guess the flip side of the question is why are so many college grads working in jobs that in the past typically did not require degrees?

140

There are many roads to becoming educated and well-informed. Why should we expect someone to know everything at the start of their career?

Devote himself to intellectual pursuits in an unstructured environment?

Hence the point of this thread. Employers want smart people. A degree is cheap and easy evidence (from the employers’ point of view) that someone is smart. A positive feedback loop inevitably ensures that most smart people will go to college so that they have evidence that they are smart. But - from the potential employees’ point of view - there are cheaper and easier ways to show that you are smart. We have lost those ways.

We have a model for education that works well for doctors, scientists, lawyers and engineers (et al). I don’t think it works so well for other professions - including, even, some professions that require smart people.