Depends on a lot of variables, most notable what you want to do. If you want to be an accountant, engineer, doctor, lawyer, professor, business manager, vetrinarian, astronaut, officer in the military, banker, or a bureaucrat, you probably should not quit college. If you want to be a stay at home mom, auto mechanic, HVAC tech, ship fitter, coal miner, retail clerk, salesman, or you have no idea what you want to do, you are wasting your money.
Yeah, I was scratching my head over the title being unrelated to the article. That a school offers a goofy degree is no reason to quit.
...and I’m inclined to insist it’s what you do with the degree - any degree - that matters. A degree is a ticket to begin the race, not a guaranteed win.
Charles Murray is right. What is needed are credentialing exams so that employers and others could know that certain subjects had been mastered.
Are employers really interested in degrees, or do they want motivated, smart, and educated employees and some way that measures that? I'd say it is the latter.
Most of the work done in banking, accounting, bureaucracy, and business, does not need a specific degree to do the work. Since the existence of European presence on this continent this work was done by people who did not attend college. Most in fact were homeschooled or attended one room schools in a spotty manner...even up to my father's day ( born 1913).
Even in professions such as medicine, dentistry, architecture, ( and especially law), qualifying exams could replace many of the basic and fact-based courses. Mentoring, of course, would still be required but the cost to the student could be greatly reduced by the use of qualifying exams for many courses.
Qualifying exams could start in first grade. For example, once a child demonstrates mastery of addition math facts, he would immediately move on to subtraction math facts.
All courses provided by state elementary, high school, and universities should be available on-line. The taxpayer paid for it so access should be free to all. Private qualifying exams could prove that the student mastered the material.
Finally....This could be a Mark Zuckerman opportunity. Those who privately produce Internet material and provide the certifiable exams could offer the material to the students for **free**. They could become as rich as Zuckerman, if they accepted advertising.
I’m a stay at home mom, and I’m glad I have a college degree. First, I worked for 10 years as a software engineer, and that is where I met my husband (a fellow engineer). That right there makes my degree worth it.
However as a mom, it’s great toe able to help my kids with all their homework or have discussions with my kids about what they are learning.
One of my daughters has a brain injury and my husband has cancer, I’m the one that researches health issues. It’s helped to have my degree.
I need to go back to work, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find something even though I haven’t worked in years.
Verizon requires a college degree for new sales associates. Not that the degree conveys any special skills, but in this economy they can pick and it’s a simple filter to weed out the numbest of the numbskulls.