Should everyone go to college?

[Voyager]

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

You know thinking on it. If the inflation metaphor holds true eventually the bubble will burst. People can only spend just so much of their lives at college. So eventually inflation will mean there’s not enough people that fill the requirments and they go back down.

There is one force arguing for more time in college. As people live longer, and retire later, the labor pool may expand faster than than the number of available jobs, especially if people like me sit in a job longer. There are two ways of dealing with this. The first is to encourage early retirement, but I doubt we can afford this given how much longer people are living. The second is to reduce the number of young people entering by prolonging education. That costs also, but if we finally get the cost of college under control this might be a better option.

I had an excellent time hiding out in grad school for most of my '20s, and actually got a good job at the end of it.

[Malthus]

@The_Tao_s_Revenge

You know thinking on it. If the inflation metaphor holds true eventually the bubble will burst. People can only spend just so much of their lives at college. So eventually inflation will mean there’s not enough people that fill the requirments and they go back down.

Also if it’s important to finding a job as current trends say it will be then there will be movements to to further integrate college into the standard school roster. Like high school, mark 2. Maybe it’ll be blended with high school to form a school system kids don’t graduate from till they’re 24. Actually with FAFSA and the like they sort of have that now.

Finally if it gets too ridiculous the government will step in. Not sure how it could help, but in democratic society you can be assured if enough voters are bothered the government will act. Even if it acts to the detriment.

Anyway the point is it can’t keep going up forever. Once it levels out it might even start to bottom out as companies realize a bigger hiring pool increases the chances for better employees.

I dunno. It used to be that high school was more or less optional: around the turn of the 20th century, a small minority of children attended high school - only by the 1940s was it the norm for children to attend.

High school movement

There is little indication that this is changing any time soon, and that we are going to go back to a situation where only a minority attend high school.

Are we seeing a similar shift in university education, or is this an unsustainable “bubble”? Hard to say. If I was a betting person, I’d bet on the former. In all sorts of ways, our society is extending adolescence for middle class type people, sometimes into ones’ 30s.

[ashman165]

I suppose this depends on what one chooses to define as “college”. For instance, is post secondary school itself college, or are restricting the definition to only academic studies?

There are many forms of formalized education which comes after high school, but we seem to look at vocational schools as not-quite-college, with some modifiers. For instance, medical school and law school are professional degrees, not academic. I don’t think anyone would argue these aren’t college, despite their being geared towards a particular vocation.

I used to be a professor of mathematics, which I think most people would agree falls squarely into the “academic” area of college. I sometimes find it odd that I share a title with a guy who went to what is essentially an advanced vocational school, namely a medical doctor. I don’t discount that many doctors are quite scholarly, indeed some of the medical doctors I know are people of true intellect. Their interests professionally just geared towards a non-academic degree.

I also know some academicians who aren’t the sharpest people around, but they have a Ph.D nevertheless.

Back to the issue on point, no I don’t think an academic school is right for everyone. I would encourage most anyone to at least give it a try, but that’s idealistic on my part. Not everyone has the mental firepower to slog through the tougher academic fields. And while I don’t think that knowing how to analyze a story to see if it follows the Aristotelian Unities is necessary to a happy, prosperous life, it’s hardly useless knowledge. The tricky thing about learning is that we simply don’t know how a spark of erudition today will impact a person tomorrow.

Perhaps for some given person that information may prove to be utterly useless. And I guess it isn’t necessary to have, but why restrict what someone should or shouldn’t know based on what I think is handy to know? I generally encourage my students to remain in college for at least a year to take survey classes in various fields so as to get a better grasp of what they entail. When I first started teaching, I foolishly thought they would have been exposed to that in their high schools.

The error of my thinking yawned before me.

I have, on the other hand, discouraged some students from pursuing a particular field because in my estimation they weren’t well-suited to it. For some this was a matter of maturity and interest, for others it was just a lack of ability.

That isn’t to say they still shouldn’t pursue some college, or rather tertiary education. Just that not every one of them is suited to some particular field.