Mainly today the ownership of a sheepskin merely says that you have been brainwashed by liberal college professors.
In Taiwan, high school freshmen are put on 1 of 2 educational tracks. College bound students must take college bound classes. The 2nd track is for learning trade skills. On the trade skill track, you can graduate high school with the necessary skills for working in a factory, garage, or many other blue collar positions.
There are reasons for college degrees. If you want to be an engineer, you need requisted training you are not going to get in the local vo-tech. Same with medical degrees, science, etc. If you want to build houses, you could get a degree in construction management, but then you might not need those skills until you are building dozens of houses. What you really need is carpentry skills to begin with, and those can be gained on the job or in a vo-tech.
For me it was a means to a dream. You needed a degree for Air Force pilot training. That same dream still requires a degree from an insitution of higher learning. O’vomit’s opinion that everyone goes to college, is an astounding pronounement blowing a degree out of proportion to it’s value to a dream, and watering down the entire concept, so what’s new, just one more in a long logn long line of disagreements with the ONE.
The four year ‘sleep away’ liberal arts college is dying. Online education and practical skills-oriented advanced education will replace it. Thank God.
It amazes me how long and how well bricks and mortar institutes of higher learning have held on to their monopoly, with escalating costs.
Eventually, you’d think the old university/college paradigm would give way to more satellite campuses and online learning options. Not for all courses of study, but for a good many.
The cost has gotten far out of reach for a middle class family and current student loan indebtedness is approaching $1 trillion. Default rate is jumping as well because many graduates with a lot of debt cannot find well paying jobs.
“Assessing The Value Of A College Degree In A Tumultuous Economy”
We still have a ways to go before we can accept that some knowledge isn’t as important as other knowledge.
Universities very existence depends upon this obvious truth being kept from a vast majority of students so they will continue to fund University bureaucracy and perks.
Universities and Governments are cannibals that feast on the souls of the young. They assign doom to whomever they choose and tell them its a privilege.
Both will perish in flames when the doomed decide not to exist in the roles assigned to them by the elite.
College is not always necessary, especially for the first two years’ worth of courses.
Alternative Sources of Free College Credit and Continuing Education Classes
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/Alternative-Sources-of-College-Credit-and-Continuing-Education-Classes
Bad garbling of one widely quoted survey. It wasn’t that half of recent college grads can’t get jobs and the rest are underemployed, but that half of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed. Not a great start to an op ed piece.
Today, a college degree is usually a ticket to join the college club. A club that the only requirement is to have a piece of paper (like the one the scarecrow received in Oz) that says that you are smart while those who can’t join the club due to finances or personal responsibilities are too stupid to be hired by members of the club.
Not long ago most did not attend college but had to go out and work for a living. Today, college is almost the 13-16 extended grades of public education (student loans and grants). Worse yet, a high school education back in 1965 was equal to most degrees obtained today.
What happened?
The majority of the youth of yesterday worked as children. It was thought of as a way to earn an income (rather than an allowance) and taught both a lesson in responsibility and work ethic. I started at 9 sacking groceries after school and summer. From there I worked at many different jobs and with each gained knowledge that has lasted a lifetime.
Many of my generation did the same and in the end, started and owned businesses (like myself), invented new products and procedures and prospered from it. In every case, we started at the bottom and worked ourselves to the top.
The moral of the story is that my generation started at the bottom and worked ourselves to the top. In today’s generation, all that is needed is some type of college degree (in most cases the type does not matter, what matters is that they have that piece of paper issued by the Wizard of Oz) and expect to start in the middle rather than the bottom where they gain knowledge of the actual mechanics and processes of they will have to manage at the mid-level.
We need to go back to letting the parents determine at what age their children work and we need to go back to the way it has always been done since the dawning of time...apprenticeships.
It is so bad here in the U.S. that it against the law to hire anyone younger than 17 years old unless it is a family member.
Don’t get me wrong for college is required for the “disciplines” (Technical, engineering, medical, and related fields along with the legal professions).
Most degrees handed out today are not worth the paper they are written on. No wonder these new graduates can’t find jobs. They have the education in fields that are not really important and there is no demand for them. When they graduated from the 16th grade many found employment flipping burgers and exercising the proper English phrases they learned at college like “would you like fries with that sir?”
America used to be a manufacturing giant in the world and now we are an assembly midget putting foreign parts together. Back then a college education was normally in a field that really meant something and our country flourished. Today a college education is nothing more than a ticket to the college club (with the exceptions noted earlier).
Our current dictator is one of the outstanding members of the college club...and he has the Nobel Prize too. Not only does he have a piece of paper but he has some gaudy looking round hunk of metal to show for it too.
Are airports valuable? Yes, sometimes, depending on if they serve a need and are properly laid out and constructed.
So it is with college degrees.
Traditionally, the degree holder was marked by a good work ethic, the ability to delay gratification, and curiosity. Those things are all associated with higher incomes. This is true, by the way, for almost all traditional degrees. I am a medical doctor, my B.A. is in English with a concentration in Shakespeare, which has proven quite valuable in my work with humanity.
The need for a good work ethic, delay of gratification, and especially curiosity are no longer required for most college degrees. This being so, it's not surprising that the correlation between a degree and employability, or any other successful outcome, is weakening.
We, as a nation, have confused training and education. Training prepares you to do a specific job. You train to become a plumber or mechanic. Sorry to rain on some people’s parade, but you also train to become an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor. An education is meant to make you a good citizen. A citizen in the old Greek meaning of the word. The trouble with education at our universities is that it is done so poorly. An education from our universities is probably a waste of time and money, but that is because it is so poorly done, not because an education is not worthwhile. Educating people, when done well, is extremely worthwhile. The education given at our universities is like the weenies cooking at a convenience store. A good education is like lobster and prime rib at a fine restaurant.
Why, when the prices of other products and services either remain flat or decline, do tuition rates steadily rise?
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I know a tenured college professor at a state university who pulls down a huge salary — over $200K. He’s a good guy but that’s just excessive IMO, especially when you consider the abundant time off he gets. Rising education costs should be a national scandal but the schools have done a good job of dumbing down the populace and protecting themseleves under the illusion of “everyone needs a college degree”.
Paleface Lizzy Warren was paid over $300,000 a year to teach ONE class at Harvard.