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-There are some degrees that are rock solid. I.e. an engineering degree from a good school, medical degree, law from the top 20. Those will open doors, I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
-But the payoff/benefit of degrees from marginal schools can be very suspect (i.e. tier 2 or 3 law). Basket weaving. A ph d in literature. Higher education needs to be transparent and honest about the value of their degrees.
I think we set up a false premise in k-12 that you need to be "smart", "gifted", "intellectually curious" to succeed in college. Not true. It's not as big of a leap as people think. You have grade inflation. High school has been so dumbed down, the smart kids could tackle a lot more.
I agree a degree in a basket weaving field is useless. "General Studies" "Romantic Literature" Whatever. All you can pretty much do with those is teach.
However, a degree in a practical field from a decent school unlocks a lot of doors and is very important in today's job market. There are plenty of people in high up positions that have less education than what would be required of new hires today. A lot of it is probably unnecessary, but that's the world.
it seems like college is not what it use to be. now a days there are a million schools trying to get all the students they can..Do you think its worth the money you put into it? Are jobs there like they usta be when you got out of college? whats your views?
I agree a degree in a basket weaving field is useless. "General Studies" "Romantic Literature" Whatever. All you can pretty much do with those is teach.
Nonsense. You can becoming a full blown academic researcher in those fields. Calling it useless is absurd.
Which is exactly why it is worth it to get a degree.
But in some ways it can be problematic as it means one has to spend more money and take more time, and also that is time not spent on making money (opportunity cost). In the old days one could become a secretary out of high school. That means: no debt.
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Originally Posted by Conqueringfools
So many people are missing the point. College is only worth it if there are jobs to be had. Look at all the out of work college graduates. You think they are all under achievers who majored in psychology or humanities? WRONG. There are a lot of out of work engineers, nurses, lawyers, etc. It has nothing to do with them in most cases. It's the global economy. The global economy has changed drastically and is going to burst wide open in the next few years unless there is a major war that breaks out to distract the masses of what is going on. Think about one little fact.........the great USA is in debt to the tune of TRILLIONS! Now you don't have to have a college degree to understand that cluster f@#k we have gotten ourselves into.
And to the people who say you need to be smart and ahead of the curve as to what to major in......oh really? Medical doctors could be obsolete in the not too distant future. As fast as medical technology is advancing we could all be hooked up to computers and robots where the computer spits out a diagnosis and our blood is run through a supercomputer and our body is scanned from toes to nose in order to find out what's wrong with us. MRI technology will look archaic with the advance of nanotechnology etc. We aren't there yet but we are on the precipice of a complete revolution in medicine. I would never advise my son or daughter to become a doctor.
And also .. biology majors in undergrad, and people with law degrees. It's about supply and demand. Too much supply... not enough demand...
what's this nonsense about nurses being out of work? If that is the case they aren't looking in the right places. There is a projected shortage of nurses and doctors in this country. No matter how sophisticated technology gets, there will always be a need for people trained in helping people deal with sickness, recover from injury and disease or simply to die.
There's not enough demand because the world has changed drastically in the last 30 years with the onslaught of technology. Everything nowadays is automated and you've got robots doing brain surgery. The world's population is growing rapidly. There isn't an economy to keep up with it. So the world is going to have to face some hard decisions. Eventually we are going to have to pay people not to work. That's just the way it will have to be. Either that or we have some serious population control. Then what kind of assault on personal freedom does that require? The future is going to be one big cluster f#$k I think.
You know what bugs me is how the "powers that be" don't even seem to be discussing this. They're more interested in gay marriage or legalizing weed.
You know what bugs me is how the "powers that be" don't even seem to be discussing this. They're more interested in gay marriage or legalizing weed.
I think one issue that needs to be debated is whether the great innovation and technological advances in our world are only going to benefit a few people or whether they are going to be used to benefit all of us. If we have an economic and political system that allows a few corporations and wealthy people to keep virtually all the benefits from this than inevitably, the distribution of income in this country is going to become more and more lopsided and a large segment of the country will ultimately be drained and have very little.
Taxation and proper administration of government could take some of the huge profits that our system produces for a few and use them to provide education, job training, and health care for the masses. Yet, if certain elements continue to prevail in society none of these things will happen--or they will be greatly diminished--because of propaganda that "this is socialism". Many people do sucker for these lines.
Ultimately though, these kinds of economic issues are going to have to be addressed by our society.
Often when we cite counterexamples to the increased earning-power of college graduates, those counterexamples are plucky and enterprising blue-collar folks who master a skilled-trade, often parlaying that into their own business, or ascendency as tradesmen and eventually managers. I submit that these people, while perhaps not gifted in understanding calculus or memorizing irregular German verbs, have the propensity and character to succeed regardless of their educational wherewithal. If we are going to critique college graduates in "fluff" majors and either dead-end jobs or unemployment, we should compare them not to successful plumbers and electricians, but to folks who crawled their way to high-school graduation with a 1.7 GPA, worked part-time in their neighbor's roofing business before getting fired over habitual drunkenness, and now inhabit their parents' basement.
This is exactly what I mean:
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Originally Posted by yellowsnow
I could most likely pick up enough jobs to make a living rewiring outlets from ads on CL and doing other simple jobs.
Somebody with the enterprising hustle to practice a trade based on ads on Craigslist would do well, with or without a college degree. Somebody whose imagination is limited to using Craigslist for finding puppies to adopt, on the other hand, would greatly benefit from the institutionalizing maturity obtainable from college.
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Originally Posted by no kudzu
but in reality how many 17 or 18 year old know what they want to be "when they grow up"? To ask somebody that age to lock in a career choice does not seem wise to me and would keep many talented folks away from potential awakenings once they have a chance to see what college is all about.
I'm not persuaded that this is unrealistic. Until only a few generations ago, the basic answer was that a young man would undertake the same vocation as that practiced by his father. It is only fairly recently that teenagers became faced with a bewildering array of choices, and even more recently (say, the past 30 years) where making a "dumb" choice at age 17 netted such devastating life-consequences. Perhaps we're regressing to a world before the 20th century, where only the aristocracy and gentry attended college for purposes of "broadening" themselves, where for most people education meant the learning of practical skills, and where the default choice was for children to mimic the career paths of their parents.
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Originally Posted by Mandalorian
I agree a degree in a basket weaving field is useless. "General Studies" "Romantic Literature" Whatever. All you can pretty much do with those is teach.
The natural route for a degree in the humanities isn't teaching, or flipping burgers. It's a cushy middle-management job in your rich uncle's insurance company or investment-bank. Being conversant in Latin and Greek has no bearing on a salesman's capacity to close the deal, but it IS a badge of caste-membership. Cementing one's caste-membership was all that was necessary to assume one's proper role in one's caste. The tragedy of modern times is that so many middle-class people are attempting to live the lives of the affluent. If we revert to regarding a humanities-degree from an expensive private college as the exclusive privilege of the upper castes, we'd save the rest of society vast amounts of heartache.
Here is the bottom line: the 20th century was a fluke of history.
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