I was reading some excerpts of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew B. Crawford, an academic/philosopher/motorcylcle mechanic. It was reviewed in the New York Times this weekend and excerpted in their magazine. He argues that college is not for everyone and there is nothing wrong with pursuing a vocation, especially when being a union plumber can net you more money, and give you greater job satisfaction than sitting in a cubicle all day.
I can tell you from experience that colleges are filled with people who would be better off elsewhere. It’s not necessarily that they’re not smart (though there certainly a LOT of dumb people in college). It’s just that they’re there for no other reason than that’s just what they’re expected to do after high school - attend a four year college. They have no idea what they want to do with their lives, change majors three or four times, and drop out after six years, having nothing to show for their effort other than tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
This also drives down the potential worth of a bachelor’s degree. For my father’s generation (he was born in the mid-50s), a bachelor’s degree was like some sort of golden ticket to the middle and upper-middle class. Now it’s little more than a pre-requisite to just about any decent, and a lot of not-so-decent paying jobs.
For the record I feel benefited greatly from my four years at a state university, though my job involves doing a lot of research and writing.
But does everyone stand to benefit from going to college? Or is this just a line of politically correct bs fed to us by guidance counselors and others who equate getting your hands dirty in a blue collar job with living a life of mediocrity?
I agree, in the old days college was a place “to learn how to think.” Even in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” you see the wizard say to the scarcrow, about institutions where men go to learn how to think.
But that isn’t really needed. Certainly it does no harm to “learn how to think.” But it isn’t necessary for being a success in every profession. For instance, there’s debate among Pharmacies is it really necessary for a pharmacist in today’s world to have a degree.
I’m not saying cut back on the training a pharmacist gets, but merely eliminate all the courses not directly related. So let’s say if you cut out all the English classes and the like that a pharmacist must take to get his/her degree and just focused on the science and math classes. This could cut a year of his education, and save money for the new pharmacist. Would that make him less of a pharmacist? Perhaps, perhaps not?
A computer programer certainly doesn’t need a degree in the traditional way. I used to do technical writing. This is insane. We have degreed computer programmers who took classes in speech and English and STILL cannot communicate well enough to write manuals for the products they make. I had to do technical writing to translate between “computerese” and English. Clearly taking those courses was a waste of time and not need for them. So why not a vocation school instead of a degreed program.
Learning stuff never hurts anybody, but just today I saw in the New York Times where it stated that with rapid developements in Science, nearly half of everything a person getting a bachelors in Science, will be outdated by the time he/she hits his THRID year in college. Not by the time he graduates but by the THIRD year.
So you can see a lot of education is being wasted. And with the cost so high, it’s not productive to teach that way.
This. More or less claptrap from a bunch of eggheads. I went to college, but then again, I’m not handy.
Here’s what The Wizard says:
Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatis Comitiatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of ThD.
I always took this as a fairly cynical thing to say. As if to say universities don’t teach you how to think, and degrees printed on paper don’t make you smart, but that’s the way we seem to operate around these parts, so here you go. The Wizard didn’t actually give Scarecrow a brain; he issued a diploma (from a phony school for a phony degree, no less) and that was enough to appease everyone.
Then again, I went years as a child thinking the moral of The Giving Tree was “People will screw you.”
It seems that a college degree has become, for many jobs, an easy way for employers to weed down the number of applicants. Not to find the best candidates, just to limit the numbers.
In my industry (sales related) I see lots of jobs that now require degrees that 10 years ago didn’t. Has the job changed? Yes, but not in a way that requires a college degree.
There seems to be a mentality that a college degree trumps training, experience, common sense, work ethic, etc.
Not everyone should go to college. I don’t think there’s any serious debate about that. The question is, what should they do instead, and how can we encourage people to do those things instead of going to college by default?
A quality science curriculum isn’t designed to teach you some canonical body of facts that you can regurgitate forever. It’s designed to teach you well-established basic information you need to function in your field, to give you experience working in a scientific lab, and to train you to think like a scientist. Those skills endure, even if some of the specific facts you’ve learned don’t.
My reaction: Duh. This is not only true, it’s so self-evidently true that there isn’t much debate.
College isn’t for everyone. The people who should go to college are the people who would enjoy college itself and/or are considering a career path that requires a college education.
Some people simply are not capable of doing college level work. Yet, because of the emphasis on having a degree, many try. Colleges then feel pressure to lower both admissions and perfomrance standards, which devalues the degrees they pass out. I say college should demand performance to a fixed standard. Make the grade or flunk out. No more “insert coin and turn handle” degrees.
Who profits directly from this scheme? The entire reason why degree programs with low standards exist is that there’s money to be made. If you want to change that, you need to change the financial incentives.
I’m hugely skeptical of this claim. Just think about what the first two years of coursework of a science degree – you probably have your calculus sequence, followed by survey courses on the most basic parts of the disclipline. Something like Newtonian Mechanics, Electromagnetics, Thermodynamics; or intro to chemistry and organic chemistry; or intro to biology and intro to evolution. Almost all of the material covered by these courses is 100 years or more old, but it’s still in daily use in their disciplines, and thus, not outdated.
As a high school teacher I am seeing a HUGE problem with the whole “prepare everyone for college and it will drive everyone’s performance up” philosophy we have here. I teach 9th grade math. We require 4 years of math for all students and the lowest math class we offer is Algebra 1. There is no technical math or pre-algebra type of math.
I had a student last year who just failed 9th grade for the second time. His point of view is that he doesn’t need most of these classes to be a mechanic and he’s good at that because he works with his uncle. So he refuses to work because it’s too hard and not relevant. The school’s policy won’t let him go to our vocational/technical school until he’s caught up on his credits at the regular school.
He’s definitely wrong in his attitude of refusal, but the school is wrong with its policy that isn’t helping this boy at all. He probably will be a great mechanic if he can make it there, but requiring him to take a college prep curriculum and keeping him out of the vo-tech school until he can perform at that high level is not going to get him anywhere.
I know I’m simplifying my example, because there are a lot of other factors with this kid, but I see kids every day that have an awesome potential to be full productive members of society, with great jobs that will provide for their family. BUT… These kids will never and should never go to college. They need math and other courses that will prepare them for real life, with higher-level thinking being the culmination not the basic courses. (Of course, that’s gets into the whole idea that all kids need to know how to write a check and do taxes and all of the other real things we all do, and what class is that taught in?)
So no, not everyone needs college or is cut out for college. But everyone does need a skill of some sort, whether they get it in college or get it in technical school or get it at on-the-job training.
No, and I’ll go one better. Ever since I was in high school (good lord, twenty years ago?) I thought there should be some sort of national apprenticeship program. Students attend general education classes for part of the day, then receive paid on-the-job training for the remainder of the day.
I see two problems with this. The big one is that not everybody knows what career they want at the time they go to college, so there is a value in exposing them to a variety of disciplines. The other problem is more idealistic: I think learning is good for its own sake, so if we try to make it purely practical, something is likely to get lost.
Not everybody needs to go to college for their career or personal development, I think that’s plain. So there is unnecessary social pressure for some people to go. People who go when they don’t need to go end up saddled with debt. But the difficulty is that it is not always clear who will benefit from college and who won’t.
From personal experience, I can’t say that many of my required classes were unnecessary. And I liked most of them.
Edit: Then again it seems to me that a lot of people end up in careers they did not go to college to study. I wonder if there are some statistics that will show how common that is.
I think most people would agree that your attitude – while admirable – is a minority position. Most kids go to college to check it off as a prerequisite to getting a job. If there’s any learning taking place, it happens by accident.
If college graduates truly valued “learning for its sake”, I think we’d see evidence of it in their discretionary spending. After the degree is awarded, all the college textbooks are sold and $$$ goes towards DVDs, TVs, fishing rods, gadgets, etc.
At this point, most jobs require (or at least reward) a college degree, so I needed a degree to get a job as well. You are probably giving me too much credit. And I don’t know how rare my attitude is.
I think textbooks get sold because they tend to be very expensive and the students don’t have too many ways to cover their cost. Many of them aren’t necessary after college either, no matter how good your attitude is.
“Necessary?”
Of course they aren’t necessary… but that’s the whole point: “learning is great for its own sake (which is why I choose to keep these unnecessary books)” 
This kind of goes to the two cultures argument. I know a kid taking community college classes to get some sort of Pharm certificate (definitely not a Pharm degree) and he is only taking relevant classes. But I think there is some benefit in someone in college getting exposed to a wide range of opportunities. Our pharm student might decide Shakespeare is just the thing, after all. Plus, I think there is a great benefit in people in humanities programs learning some science and math, and those of us in science programs should do likewise. Time to really specialize when you get to grad school.
Two things. I don’t see how a speech class helps one in writing - an English class either. And I say this having worked closely with an excellent technical writer in writing a manual - a manual our customers thought was better than the software. 
There is a big correlation between organizing a paper or book to be written and organizing a program to be written. In both cases just jumping in will lead to spaghetti code or spaghetti prose.
Second, there is a lot more to computer science than learning the basics of programming in a given language. 25 years ago CS profs I knew dreaded entering freshman who could program a nice game in BASIC on the C64, and thought they knew all there was to know about computer science.
Which article was this? I doubt very much the Times said that, but I’ll look. The frontiers of science move pretty quickly, but the basics, which is most of what an undergrad learns, doesn’t. Anyhow, this argues against teaching facts. The best thing college does for you is to teach you how to read and interpret information, whether from textbooks or papers, how to plan an experiment or a task, and how to organize all of the above. A good chunk of the computer science stuff I learned 40 years ago is outdated today, but my professors teaching me how to learn has stood me in good stead.
In recent years, trade schools have been advertising in Quebec with the message of “if you’re smart and skilled and ambitious, you can have your own business one day”.
Sounds okay to me.
Less of a pharmacist? Perhaps not. Less able to think about questions like “Should a pharmacist be required to take English classes”? Less able to read and understand and respond to what other people have said about the question? Perhaps.
I think the question you’re asking is, Should being a pharmacist require education or should it require vocational training?
Heh. I have a degree in English which at the time I thought I would like to teach. Many moons later, after various wine-salesman and restaurant management jobs, I operate a carwash as a career. I am required to be mechanical. I am now a plumber. I am required to be an accountant (of sorts). I am required to be many things I never dreamed I’d be and have relatively little to do with my college education.
I am so far removed from what I thought I’d be doing lo these many years ago, and my career is so far removed from what the career path of my degree would generally dictate.
I think this happens a lot, as you say.
Here is a link to the article I mentioned in the OP, in case anyone is curious
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html