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.
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.
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)
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.