Posted on 06/07/2012 4:31:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last month the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development released data showing that college graduates generally do not regret going to college, despite lots of criticism of the value of higher education. Today the center released a new report focusing on the depressing state of America’s recent high school graduates, who seem to agree about the importance of further education.
The study reported on a survey of high school graduates of the classes of 2006-11 who do not have college degrees and are not enrolled in school full time. This group overwhelmingly believes that additional education beyond a high school diploma is required to succeed:
Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers UniversityThe online survey was conducted between March 21 and April 2, and covered a nationally representative survey of 544 high school graduates from the classes of 2006-11 who did not have bachelor’s degrees and were not full-time students. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus five percentage points.Seven in 10 of these recent graduates said they would need more education if they were to have a successful career. Despite their belief in the value of post-secondary education, though, only 38 percent definitely planned to attend college to get more education in the next five years. Barriers included skyrocketing tuitions and family obligations.
(Excerpt) Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com ...
I would love to see how this percentage breaks out for Home-School, Private-School and Publik Screwel students. I bet I can guess where the majority of the 25% come from.
Don’t know about home/private school, but here is an interesting breakdown:
Specifically, the study’s findings include the following:
Only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges.
Only 51% of all black students and 52% of all Hispanic students graduate, and only 20% of all black students and 16% of all Hispanic students leave high school college-ready.
The graduation rate for white students was 72%; for Asian students, 79%; and for American Indian students, 54%. The college readiness rate for white students was 37%; for Asian students, 38%; for American Indian students, 14%.
Graduation rates in the Northeast (73%) and Midwest (77%) were higher than the overall national figure, while graduation rates in the South (65%) and West (69%) were lower than the national figure. The Northeast and the Midwest had the same college readiness rate as the nation overall (32%) while the South had a higher rate (38%) and the West had a lower rate (25%).
The state with the highest graduation rate in the nation was North Dakota (89%); the state with the lowest graduation rate in the nation was Florida (56%).
Due to their lower college readiness rates, black and Hispanic students are seriously underrepresented in the pool of minimally qualified college applicants. Only 9% of all college-ready graduates are black and another 9% are Hispanic, compared to a total population of 18-year-olds that is 14% black and 17% Hispanic.
We estimate that there were about 1,299,000 college-ready 18-year-olds in 2000, and the actual number of persons entering college for the first time in that year was about 1,341,000. This indicates that there is not a large population of college-ready graduates who are prevented from actually attending college.
The portion of all college freshmen that is black (11%) or Hispanic (7%) is very similar to their shares of the college-ready population (9% for both). This suggests that the main reason these groups are underrepresented in college admissions is that these students are not acquiring college-ready skills in the K-12 system, rather than inadequate financial aid or affirmative action policies.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_03.htm
Not sure I believe these three but I am always suspicious of "groupthink" memes like "you need a Degree to get ahead"...
“I even took some political science classes for BER and none of the teachers crammed liberal ideology down our throats.”
Liberalism isn’t an overt act in most cases; you might not even detect they did it. It is the steering of your thoughts by leaving out facts you do not know and replacing them with lies you also know nothing about. A person leaves thinking you have all the facts and those facts lead them to believe in something or in a certain way. That is the method of propaganda: Don’t let the subject know they have been brainwashed.
Did you ever fact check what you were told, researched the subject further? Did you simply accept what you were told because it was what you had known “your whole life”? Did they actually teach you how to think, how to research and discover for yourself, or did they teach you what to think while making you believe those thoughts were your thoughts all along? Did many of their comments start with such phrases as, “As we all know…”, or, “Of course...”? Did they ever bash conservatives, racist white guys, Republicans, men, etc., ever? Where they truly apolitical or did their biased comments simply seem common and normal and so you didn’t notice them?
I have known a number of people that have claimed their teachers and schools were apolitical and didn’t indoctrinate them only to find under questioning they actually did receive the liberal propaganda. I had this neighbor that claimed their two girls had not had anything even remotely like that happen. Once we started talking with those girls they discovered they had and a full does of it. They even had that, “Sign your name on this promise and promise not to tell mommy and daddy that we are teaching you these lesbian sexual techniques. It will be our little secret.” I kid you not. They constantly received comments against non-liberal people, places, historical events, etc. They were made to feel bad about not being liberals, yet, they felt that environment was “normal” and “that’s just school”.
So, did you really have an apolitical experience, or did you simply not notice?
47% of black kids thought they “definitely would” go to college? Sorry kids, they just don’t hand out that many basketball scholarships. I am sure that straight up 90% of those 47% saying they “definitely would” go to college were talking about athletics and not scholastics. There is no way 47% of black high school freshmen think they are going to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant or any other profession needing a college degree. No way.
All the negativity toward college on this thread is scaring me.
I hope you parents who have high school children with solid technical academic aptitude are not steering them to become carpenters instead of doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants.
Just how many high school drop outs became big name CEO’s last year? 10? 20? 100? 5000?
We had 5000 kids in my high school. Sure, you just go on telling your kids to drop out and become CEO of a tech start up. Go for it. You may have an extra room they can use to live with you the rest of your life anyway.
It is insane to take kids with solid academic aptitude and intentionally steer them into lower paying, less secure blue collar jobs when they can get a bachelors of science or masters of science degree and make more money with more job security in a better work environment. Just insane.
I agree that many bachelor of arts majors are worthless. It is the parents job to steer their intellectual children away from the arts and toward the sciences. You can’t always do that, but discouraging children from going to college in favore of a lower paying blue collar job, often with much more difficult working conditions, is just insane.
Most of you on this thread are nuts. You are whacked out and giving horrible advice. Any child with the aptitude to graduate from college should be encouraged to do so in one of the sciences or technical fields. To not do so is to betray your children. It is really sad to see so much bad advice on one thread.
I worked for a company that was started by three teenagers in Seattle delivering cross town on bicycles.
My husband has a degree that he has never used. Luckily, he went to school when you could actually put your self through college. However, if he had to rack up the kind of debt that it takes now, he would not have gone.
I think that if you a specific career in mind that take a college degree, by all means go. If you are just going to get a blanket type of degree, you are wasting your time and money.
You would be better off taking that money and starting a business.
RE: All the negativity toward college on this thread is scaring me.
It is NOT college per se that people are skeptical about. It is the following that people are questioning :
* What KIND of college you attend.
* What course one is taking.
* What subjects one is enrolled in, and what is being taught.
* Whether one is even intellectually cut out for college or not (Nearly half of American students drop out of college before attaining their degree ).
* Whether it is worth taking on humongous tuition debt as opposed to considering other alternatives.
American College tuition debt is approaching a trillion dollars already and many are defaulting on their college loans.
THOSE ARE LEGITIMATE CONSIDERATIONS IMHO.
No one is saying that kids with solid academic aptitudes should not go to college. What people are saying is this -— WEIGH THE COST, THE CAREER YOU PLAN TO PURSUE and determine if there is a demand for it. If not, THINK OF OTHER ALTERNATIVES.
Pull out all engineering and economics degrees and college salaries drop precipitously. The salaries are skewed because of these very successful degrees.
What America needs is an effective certificate and apprentice program. The truth is if you can do the job you’ll succeed. Sales or entry level is one way to start and as a boss myself I would never care if a degree existed or not. If the employee or subcontractor is doing the job satisfactorily the market will edit out the trash.
I went to Ohio State. There was no liberal indoctrination going on..no secret papers we needed to sign. Sure, there was liberal, women's studies and gay groups on campus but they did their own thing.
Most of my business classes were fairly conservative as well as the teachers.
When humanities majors are required to take Diffential Equations, then I will agree with you.
I agree with every word you said. Your post is entirely sensible. Look at most of the posts above. The tone is to tell kids don’t bother with college at all whatsoever as it is a waste of time toward your future income and job satisfaction.
Very few people posting against college above made the sensible qualifiers you did.
Most young people don’t want to put out the effort it takes to go to college, nor do they want to defer their income earning years. You have to put your “life” on hold for 4 years, while your friends out their in the work force are enjoying their minimum wage earnings and their partying weekends.
This may sound like I’m being facetious, but when friends are paying for a brand new car on their minimum wage salary, while you can’t afford snacks because all your money is going into books and incidentals, that’s not a lot of fun. Your friends call on the weekends but you have homework, reading and term papers to do, so your weekend is mostly booked. Sorry, no camping in Yosemite with your friends. You’ve got to study.
Now, if you’ve got a friend who is an apprentice at union hall or has a bit of gumption and smarts, you have to watch him pulling down a nice paycheck well above minimum while you take home nothing toward your savings/car/home/lifestyle for 4 to 5 to 6 years.
The bottom line is simple. If you are a parent and give your kid an out, making him think he can get a solid middle class $60,000+ annual paycheck not going to college, then most kids are going to take that out. They are already sick to death of being stuck in school for 12 years straight and all they want is a paycheck and an apartment away from you. They will take any out you give them to avoid college so they can join their friends in earning money to party and have their own place.
People like the ones on this thread who say college is worthless and don’t qualify it, are really doing a disservice to kids who can make it through a solid scientific or techincal major in collge.
My father was a high school drop out to enlist in WWII. Out of the cradle, it was never an option for me not to go to college, and I became an engineer. There is no way on God’s green earth I would be making my $98,000 annual salary if I skipped college. No way on earth.
Yes I went when it was much cheaper to go and competition was not this stiff for jobs, but the principal is still the same. The workforce needs skilled workers and that includes blue collar trades but that also includes college graduates.
I graduated into the Reagan recession of 1981 and I couldn’t land an engineering job for 2 years. In the meantime I landed a job at a grocery store and the first day I was hired I was told that college graduates go straight into the management track and I was guaranteed to be eventually made a store manager and if I did well, into a regional manager. Guaranteed. Just between you and me, I would have been a horrible store manager and most of the high school grads I worked with would have done better at it. But that is how college works. In many ways, you are fast tracked to the top due only to your degree.
That is not to say their aren’t great jobs for high school grads. People need sprinkler installers. People need HVAC techs. People need radiograph techs. People need non-destructive testing techs. There are plenty of good jobs out their for people from good tech schools or good tradesman.
But people on this thread should not kid themselves that those jobs generally pay as well or are as pleasant to do as most jobs college graduates have.
Regardless of income, blacks pay very litte for their college due to scholarships etc.
My son graduates HS tonight from a Vo-Tech school. He took HVAC and got a job with the company that trained him during his Co-op . In a couple of years he should make a decent living. Unlike his older brothers he was not interested in college. I think he will do just fine.
This is my one and only beef with Rush. He has a strong anti-higher education stance. Tells the audience colleges are indoctrination centers and a waste of money. Routinely tells the audience they don't need a 4 year degree and look how well he turned out.
Rush is like the Bill Gates of the world, the .0000001% that does very well, raw talent and some luck thrown in but far from the norm.
Beck and Hannity also do it to a degree. (no pun intended)
Speaking of people on this thread who should not kid themselves that non college jobs pay as well or are as pleasant to do as most jobs college graduates have.
I mean, HVAC tech pays decent, but have fun crawling around the dead rats in the attic on a 115 degree day in Pheonix Arizona while cutting your arms up on the barbs of sharp steel. Sure you can beat the heat if you work nights instead. People just loooooove graveyard shift.
Meanwhile, that environmental planner is working at a nice pleasant desk job in an air conditioned building.
Sure, they are both earning the same money, but one is really busting their ass to get it and the other is just using their head to get it.
I mean, you can make decent money as an ironworker, working with sprained fingers and a back back all your life, but that environmental planner can work until 65 easy with no health issues to fight after they are 50 or 55 years old, like the ironworker has.
I am an engineer. For 12 years in the SF Oakland bay area I worked on overseeing the contractors work on 4 of the areas bridges All new construction.
My typical day:
Get up at 6 am, have breakfast and shower.
Arrive at 7 am to work.
Monitor the contractors work for contract compliance and enforce the contract.
Leave for home at 3:30 if I didn’t have overtime. Usually out by 5:30 if I did have OT.
Arrive home at 4:00 and almost never later than 6:00.
OK, I had some big concrete pours go to 1:00 am and I had plenty of weekend and night work when the contractor fell behind and had to accelerate work to meet the schedule. But this was usually fun for me as it wasn’t typical. It was a fun change.
Contractor laborers typical day.
Get up at 3 am and have breakfast.
Drive 3 hours from their California valley home through the brutal bay area morning commute and get to the job site by 7 am.
Work all day in a trench making live sewer connections, or...
Work all day in a mud pit placing drilled in hole piling, or...
Work all day humping heavy bar reinforcing steel and draggin it into place, bending and kneeling, or overhead, and getting cut and scraped by the razor shart tie wire.
3:30 pm leave for home.
6:30 pm, get home or...
8:30 pm get home after 2 hours of OT work, knowing you have to get up at 3 am the next day.
Which would you want your kid to do?
Rush is still rubbing his father’s nose in it that he was pressured to be a lawyer like the rest of his family. So he pretty much dismisses college at every turn. “See, I made it big and you can too.”
I have more than one beef with Rush, like still carrying the water for the GOP, not taking enough callers anymore, not backing up other radio hosts, etc., but yes this is definitely one of his flaws. I am usualy at work and can’t listen, but when I do hear Rush, he is mostly boring anymore.
I lilekd Rush when he used to lots of liberal callers and completely devestate them with his impeccable arguments. Now, he is just 2 hours of boring monologue with 5 heavily screened groupies calling in.
Once a month he takes a liberal caller to slice and dice. I wish he would do that one hour a day.
After having seen so many of these threads, I can assure you that this one is typical of threads on FR. I cannot help but think that a lot of the comments come from people who are, at best, high school graduates, and I suspect many of them are just damn envious of those who have more education than they do.
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