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To the college graduates out there if you had to do it all over again would you go back to college?
Quote:
Forty-five percent of those who enter college fail to graduate within five years. If you are in the bottom 25 percent of your high-school class, you are not going to make it through college. It’s much worse than a waste of time. It’s a waste of money, perhaps a great deal of it. If, at age 22, with a college degree, you settle in for a career in retail that doesn’t require a college degree, laden with student loans, you’d have been much better off if you had started your career four years earlier instead of spending four years puzzling over T. S. Eliot, post-revolutionary Africa, and trigonometry.
For those who aren’t well-suited for college: Go to the kind of school that actually teaches you a job — i.e., a vocational school, where students stay engaged by doing things and learning in the process — rather than dozing your way through a lecture. Learn to be an electrician or a plumber and you might even lose interest in Club Upper Middle Class. You’ll be warmly welcomed at Club Successful Working Class, and you may find the people who go there more fun to talk to anyway
I have a lot of former students who are smart enough, but they get degrees in philosophy, gender studies, African-American studies, etc..., which are less conducive to acquiring a career than let's say...electrical engineering.
...and then they get out and can't get a job with their degree...they wind up bitter at the world working as a barista at Starbucks, running a register at Panera bread, or signing an agreement to work for less than minimum wage at some charitable non-profit organization.
Meanwhile their are some STEM degrees that we have to import foreigners into the country to fulfill our needs.
I wonder if other schools have seen this issue too....college graduates who struggle to get a "career-style job" that they needed their degree to obtain.
I went college because that’s what people did and had no directions for life... what I learned was useless but it was required to advance further in my career. For most people, college/vocational school need only be 2 years unless there is something specific they are looking to achieve..
Many kids aren't ready for the college scene at 18. They just want to party, so to me that is a waste of $. We told our sons we would pay for college, but not for partying or the "I don't know what I want to be" degree. Four and 7 years respectively in the military and now they were/are ready for it. Plus $ saved in the bank and they own their late model cars.
FYI: the kids that are successful in completing trade school or vocational training aren't usually at the bottom 25 percent of their class. They're usually still somewhat motivated.
The kids actually struggling in high school are usually the ones that are floundering afterwards - bouncing from McJob to McJob if they're lucky, often not working, and then having kids by age 20.
Yes. I also plan on going back to get another BS in computer science over the course of a couple of years in my free time just for fun and to keep the mind sharp.
Unlike trying to become a trade person, no entity out there except universities will teach you how to do things like clone a gene, mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, Fourier transform cyclotron resonance, let you fix an ion trap, uplc/hplc, or a whole laundry list of other highly technical techniques and instrumentation that can lead to well over 6 figure paying jobs. Most private companies can't even afford some of the types of equipment and facilities that top notch research institutions house and train students in/on. Learning science and engineering can not be done outside of a university. And no, just learning from the book is not doing real experimental science and engineering. It requires thousands of hours of toiling away in the lab or a government run institution under the guidance of people who are actually better than you so that you can learn from them.
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