Posted on 02/12/2013 6:39:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Evidence continues to mount that college is not for everyone, but the United States persists in the fiction that students are shortchanged without a four-year degree. The real losers in the final analysis are young people who are counseled to pursue a sheepskin when they have neither the interest nor ability.
The downside of this policy is seen nationwide. For example, in California the new requirements have led to an increase in the high school dropout rate, as students became discouraged trying to pass academic courses necessary for admission to the state university systems.
Yet these results were altogether predictable. When students see little connection between their studies and their future plans, they either act out or drop out. In either case, they become costly unintended collateral damage.
The Alliance for Excellent Education makes this unequivocally clear. The secondary education system in this country produces 1.2 million dropouts annually. If the dropouts graduated, the economy would likely benefit from nearly $154.3 billion in additional income over the course of their lifetimes. The numbers, ranging from $147 million in Vermont to $20.7 billion in California, reflect salaries, entitlements and criminal justice spending.
The picture in college is not much brighter. Students there aren’t learning very much. In “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa tracked several thousand undergraduates in two dozen universities. They reported that 45 percent of students do not significantly improve their critical thinking and writing skills after two years. Even after four years, only 36 percent did so. Although more than half of the freshmen who took the test didn’t take it again as seniors, the findings are not surprising. Too many students have no business being in college in the first place because they lack the wherewithal.
Despite these figures, reformers are in denial.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Study math, science and engineering. It is sink or swim.
About 10 years ago, I was at a gathering where there were a bunch of liberal public school teachers.
They were absolutely AGHAST that I stated that “college isn’t for everyone”.
I was caught off guard. I thought it was obvious that some people just would not benefit or could not take advantage of post-highschool education.
The logical progression will be to alter a college education so that no-one fails.
I disagree, partly.
What is a bad policy is sending US jobs to China.
Wake up people. China is now the world’s premier exporter. Number one.
We are number two.
China is growing. We are falling. Wake up.
Did China take away so many US jobs by being free?
No. China is not free.
America is free, yet we hurt America by closing factories here.
Wake the *&*( up people. Bring back US jobs now.
The kids around here are starting to realize paying for brainwashing and going into debt is stupid.
They are making plans accordingly.
Well, these are kids who are being educated in high school, as opposed to being brainwashed, used and abused.
They can discuss both sides of all of Homer, write in a foreign language, and not Spanish, oh and they can speak and write in English (though they stilll favor the use of the utterance “like” in every sentence. They listen to Beyonce, but realize it’s not really music, and the can think and make decisions.
They’re not buying into it. All it takes is an afternoon at a neighbor’s house with grown kids roaming and calling post college, scrambling for jobs on their parents’ cell plan at 25 yo, multi tens of Gs in debt and unable to string a chain of real thought together in a sentence.
Scare them straight, then they see beyond college and what they have to do to get there and what they wan tto be doing when they get there.
The fact that the Obamadork got through college says all that is needed about standards.
The quota boy slid through...thereby besmirching the reputation of each and every institution of higher...er..quota education that let the loser in...and let him graduate.
Liberals will never agree that we already have too many barely literate burger-flippers with useless college degrees.
They are determined to push everyone through the advanced leftist brainwashing factories they call “college”.
College for all is good for professors and colleges. For students not so much.
The best of the best have to float in a sea of mediocre students and professors when they could be learning the most from the best.
RE: America is free,
America used to be free. But I don’t call heavy regulations, mandated and outrageous pensions and benefits, and increased taxes on the successful free.
I call these BURDENS on businesses. Is it any wonder many of them are looking overseas?
One professor, recently, was very up front about that.
He was ecstatic that “red state kids” were being sent to universities so that they could be “exposed” to more leftist ideas and likely be persuaded to change their ideology.
The prof said that “liberal” fertility was nil compared to conservative/Christian families, but the idea that all need to go to college would counter that trend.
That’s good but it’s a different subject. Check a curriculum list at a “good” college.
See what they are learning.
Talk to a post graduate student who’s had no direction in their curriculum from caring parents.
It is not education. If it were, these kids would be screaming for jobs to come back here and they’d be competitive. But they’re not.
$30,000 per year should guarantee an education.
We=ake up.It doesn’t have to and it does not in fact.
The consumers here are idiotic from the parents allowing it to the kids who don’t have direction.
Instance:
“Oh, is english the second lnaguage of your childs’ (high school) chemistry teacher? Sometimes that’s the problem. My college sophomore has trouble understanding her bio teacher because she’s from (another country) and can’t speak english really at all”
!!
For 38 G per year plus housing, this is the level of consumer protection these kids are learning.
N O
I strongly disagree.
China is becoming a monolith, and it is to an extent, the very people in America who should be raising an eye, who are enabling it.
Bring American jobs home now.
I’m serious. We have exported enough jobs. Bring them home.
Told my boys years ago that if they went to a Tech College to learn to be a useful member of society and learn self-supporting skills, I’d help them through college. If they chose a liberal POS do-nothing, state university school to become a Useful Idiot, they were getting zip, nadda, zilch.
One nearing graduation in Computer Engineering, the other is still a bum. ;)
Yep, that is what they have been doing with K-12
The fact is there are great many "students" that have no business being in high school and even those that can't handle elementary school. It's a denial of reality to think otherwise and it's denial of reality that is causing this country to sink.
What is truly amazing is the ability to force society to accept false reality. That is real power.
The high influx of minorities into the “college for all” system will make giving a failing grade “racist”.
Simple.
Bigger problem is lack of skills jobs. Right college is not for everyone, unfortunately if you don’t want to go because you want to work with your hands, your only choices are burger flipper jobs, retail cashiers, or if you are lucky construction or mechanics. Of course if you are somewhere with illegals all around even those jobs are gone now.
Some people are not wired for college. The real tragedy is how this nation has turned legitimate, skilled blue collar workers into a menial, unskilled peasant class so we can be more global and diverse. Instead of remaining a shining city on the hill that the rest of the world could aspire to we chose to trash the city so we could look like the rest of the world.
Stop allowing foreigners to come here and go to college subsidized by the taxpayer and then they take what they learned in college and on the job back home to their home country to undermine our industries and steal our technology. The globalist mindset is BS and killing us.
And it’s bad for we teachers who get stuck with students who are illiterate, cannot figure out how to calculate percentages, and who don’t show up to class and then complain when they fail.
I teach a class at the local community college which has open enrollment. The horror stories I could tell you. But I also teach at a university and there are kids there who shouldn’t be in college as well.
Too bad we don’t stress technical schools. A good electrician , plumber, or hair-stylist are always needed and can make more money than a lot of college graduates.
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