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I admire your dedication to self-education. I agree that it is important to be a life long learner and agree that learning doesn't happen just in the classroom. Kudos to you for that!
But, if you've never actually attended college how do you know with certainty that you've received a better education simply by doing research for freelance writing projects than many of your peers received in college?
Because I still talk to most of the people I went to school with, and their ignorance on very basic matters is astounding.
Because I still talk to most of the people I went to school with, and their ignorance on very basic matters is astounding.
You don't go to college to improve your basic awareness. You go to school for that. If you didn't pick up the basic stuff in school, that's your problem, not the school's. And no college degree is going to magically fix that, especially if you are hell bent in not trying to educate yourself.
Unless you are training for a trade, college is absolutely worth it. For everyone. Jobs that even just a decade or two ago didn't require a degree now require one.
The trick is not to pay too much for it. The only colleges people should be going into debt for are the top top top tier...basically Harvard and the like. If you can't get into those, which 99.9999% won't, then your goal should be paying the least for the most useful degree you can buy.
One thing that causes middle-class families a lot of hardship is this idea we have that you have to "go away to college" to get the full college experience. Hogwash. Living at home is a great way to cut the cost in half.
People should also look into the community college route into a four-year school.
The goal should be to avoid student debt at all costs for undergraduate! Graduate school like law and med school is a different story...some debt for that is ok with the understanding that you are taking on basically a mortgage for a long time.
The underlying job may not have changed to where the degree is useful or even necessary. It is just an easy cull for a weak labor market.
That route isn't for everyone and in order to fully experience the college experience and to cut "the apron strings", going away to college is a rite of passage to adulthood that is my opinion part of the problem we're seeing from the decrease in those even going to college at all. Not to mention the feel of attending the local community college can/does feel like 13th and 14th grade with many of the same students one attended high school with there as well. One has to also consider the social implications involved which include unfortunately a certain hierarchy that's established among a group that isn't beneficial to a majority of those involved. The new beginning at college away from home allows a student to spread their wings a bit and develop in ways not readily experienced in prior years.
Hey, if a family can afford the on-campus experience without a young adult (or themselves) going into debt, go for it! It is lovely to move out into a dorm and live in la-la land for a few years. Absolutely!
I was talking more about kids from working families taking out loans for that experience. Or their parents drain their home equity or take out loans themselves or reduce their own retirement savings. Stuff like that. That is just plain stupid.
It's funny how ingrained the whole dorm concept is for Americans. It's another example of something that was always just meant for the upper class (like fancy weddings) that has trickled down and become another expectation.
The underlying job may not have changed to where the degree is useful or even necessary. It is just an easy cull for a weak labor market.
Absolutely. Many companies around here won't even hire administrative assistants without college degrees now. Same for customer service jobs, that kind of thing.
You don't go to college to improve your basic awareness. You go to school for that. If you didn't pick up the basic stuff in school, that's your problem, not the school's. And no college degree is going to magically fix that, especially if you are hell bent in not trying to educate yourself.
I don't disagree with you, but it goes beyond that. Many of the people I consider my peers are not only ignorant, they are willfully ignorant. Whether it is the fault of the college education or not, they did not learn anything in college. Their college years were a waste of both time and money, not always because they didn't apply themselves, but also because some of them who did apply themselves were shuffled through the system while not even achieving a basic understanding of their subjects.
At least for the STEM path I took, if you put a top 50 school curriculum side-by-side with a community college curriculum, it's very different. A top college is teaching analytical skills. They don't bog down doing remedial high school. I've been a hiring manager for many years in tech companies. When I'm hiring new grads, I have to screen the people who went the community college/state school track carefully. I occasionally encounter qualified applicants but that's the exception rather than the rule.
There's a great deal of truth here. I see the resumes. Do interviews. Evaluate on the job performance. And in general those who attended a top school have better resumes and perform better on the job than those who attended local colleges and CC first. I see it on work performance even years later. Those from lower tier schools top out pretty quickly and never seem to get beyond basic cookbook engineering. Those from top schools are already doing research in college and come in knowing how. They have a greater perseverance because you have to perform up in that environment rather than the level being brought down to you.
Those from tier three schools don't even know where to begin researching a problem. Google and wiki are their only tools and they have no concept of a lit search for example. It really is a big gap in knowledge and the hard part is many of them don't even realize how far behind they are.
There's an old joke that college exists for 3 reasons:
Sex & booze for the Students
Football for the Alumni
Parking spaces for the Administration
The mission of most major universities hasn't changed to keep up with the modern era. There was a time when a student went to Harvard to become "educated," where education's objective was to make the student a better citizen. This was an appropriate objective back when most Harvard graduates went on to careers in the public sector (say, the State Department) or banking (major NYC banks or wall street) while most land-grant colleges prepared their students for agriculture or teaching careers.
That era is long gone, but major universities haven't read the memo.
They still believe, incompletely, that a liberal education is the key to being a better citizen.
They have never quite understood the underlying premise that to be a good citizen, the graduating student must have the skills to win and hold a good private sector job. You're not a good citizen if you're not contributing to society by performing well in a job. Having a career is table-stakes to being a better citizen.
True to form, elite univerisities charter blue-ribbon commissions to study the question: "does a traditional liberal arts education still matter?" Also true to form, they staff these commissions with Professors of History, Philosophy, Sociology, Gender Studies and the like. The conclusion is as preordained as it is tainted.
There's a great deal of truth here. I see the resumes. Do interviews. Evaluate on the job performance. And in general those who attended a top school have better resumes and perform better on the job than those who attended local colleges and CC first. I see it on work performance even years later. Those from lower tier schools top out pretty quickly and never seem to get beyond basic cookbook engineering. Those from top schools are already doing research in college and come in knowing how. They have a greater perseverance because you have to perform up in that environment rather than the level being brought down to you.
Those from tier three schools don't even know where to begin researching a problem. Google and wiki are their only tools and they have no concept of a lit search for example. It really is a big gap in knowledge and the hard part is many of them don't even realize how far behind they are.
I think the gap is more in intellectual curiosity and raw intellect. Top colleges screen for that and every butt sitting in the classroom is capable of handling intellectually challenging material. Those people are being trained to create intellectual property and that's where the money is in high tech. You can train pretty much anyone with a few neurons firing to be a technician. By and large, that's what I see coming out of the CC/state school track. You occasionally find a diamond in the rough from that kind of academic background. Most top employers don't bother since the top universities already pre-screened for them. I spent much of my career in metro Boston tech startups where we typically couldn't skim the cream out of the top graduates. They all want to work for Google or Amazon.
To be a strong performer in my flavor of high tech where people create intellectual property, you need more or less the same intellect required to handle a medical school. Much lower than 120 to 125 IQ and you can't handle the work load. With respect to this thread, the college graduates I'm screening for are that bright and show some signs of drive, work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and communication/teamwork skills. That's the top-10% of the population, not from the bottom part of the 40% who go to college. I don't have much need for less bright people who can only handle repetitive task jobs.
Because I still talk to most of the people I went to school with, and their ignorance on very basic matters is astounding.
But college isn't about very basic matters. College is about getting good in one particular area. Grad school even more so.
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