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A college degree won’t keep you from getting screwed, but it will help you understand why you got screwed.
A good place to start might be making a high school diploma worth something again. It’s not even a badge for a reasonably good attendance record now.
When the govt purports to make everyone special, then no one will be special.
After teaching in public school for years, I am now in a private college-prep school.
The only students in public schools who will have ANY chance of getting a college degree are the pre-AP/honors kids. (30-50% depending on the school)
At my school ALL the kids are pre-AP/honors and 98% complete a college degree within 6 years.
That’s my take after 30+ years of teaching.
Credit school counselors and inattentive parents.
“You must have a great GPA, so don’t take any high school courses that might be challenging...”
So Dick and Jane graduate college with degree’s in psychology, sports medicine, women’s studies, art, poli-sci,...that’s nice...but good luck finding a job!
We graduate about 10 times more of these “skills” than there are available jobs.
There are an enormous number of kids that would be much better served through an apprenticeship/mentorship opportunity.
Most kids use college as a means of exercising irresponsibility at tremendous cost - all the while never using the degree that they obtained.
I can honestly say that college simply helped to get me my first job - that's it. It was a worthless experience otherwise.
A good mentor would have accomplished the same goal at much less cost to me.
An interesting article of occasional insightful nuggets mixed in with unsupported anecdotes, such as the story of the Carl Icahn school. I question the assertion related to the electrician’s wage eventually falling behind the college-education wage premium. I would contend that an electrician with a modicum of moxie that went beyond conduit and wires could establish an electrical contracting business that would continually outpace his college-educated peer that just worked at some corporate drone job that required a sheepskin. This would apply especially to the growth in the value of the business when considering net worth between the electrician and the corporate drone.
This author is inadvertently demonstrating that college did little more for him than improve his ability to string correctly formed sentences together. The analysis is childish.
Why does anyone bother with National Review anymore?
Yeah, but how many people can get work with a degree in Womyn’s studies?
Too many people graduate from college with no real skills. I’ve edited documents written by people with masters degrees in communication. They can’t write, they can’t spell and they have no hint of proper grammar.
My grandfather, a factory worker with an eighth grade education, had better written and spoken english skills. He also had much greater math skills.
Our educational system needs reform from the first grade. We need a strong focus on basic math, reading and writing skills. Without those, higher learning is pointless.
We have schools bragging about primary students working with computers. They should be learning how to read and write. They should be learning the basics of math without the aid of computers or calculators.
What is the point of a third grader learning how to make a powerpoint presentation if he can’t do simple math?
A lot of the jobs that now require college degrees did not require those 20 years ago and do not require college level skills. We waste a ton of money in training people for those. I’d rather see a much stronger vocational and community college system than an increase in people spending four years to (supposedly) gain skills that they do not use.
BTTT
Can we convert a batch of a couple hundred lawyers into a single good plumber?
“To prove this point, Murray reprints in Real Education some questions missed by eighth-grade students who took a standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Their failure to answer such simple questions accurately is astounding. For example, 32 percent of students chose the wrong answer to this question (meaning that if you count the students who guessed right by chance, about 40 percent didn’t know the answer):
What is 4 hundredths written in decimal notation?
(A) 0.0004 (B) 0.04 (C) 0.400 (D) 4.00 (E) 400.0 “
This is 4th-5th grade math. We are not teaching basic math skills well. We know this. Blame John Dewey and progressive education....
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-dewey-wrought.html
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/correcting-john-deweys-errors.html
The right purpose of education is learning and training the mind, but our education system, hobbled by the flawed theories of progressive influence in education, sought to undermine real content in education and replace it with socialization (read: preparing them for the Ideal Socialist World by keeping everyone equally dumb), so it doesnt do this job ...
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/focus-of-education-should-be-learning.html
The pleas that we should send more kids to college because K-12 education is failing to have kids learn is a flawed prescription. The proper corrective is to fix K-12 education. Then we would see a huge shift upwards in the capability of students at every level.
In reality, College is a HUGE WASTE OF MONEY for many kids. an educational revolution is about to hit ...
http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2009/10/education-revolution-about-to-hit.html
I would take the opinion of Charles Murray (whom I greatly admire) any day over the bloviations of Marcus Winters.
Mr. Winters seems to be your standard-issue apologist for students who cannot hack scholastic achievement; instead, he foists the blame for their failures on the schools and the teaching staff. If it were indeed a function of teaching then you could jerk anyone off the street and make him a nuclear physicist.
Clark Kerr pushed the same BS on the people of California in the 1950s, and they fell for it. At the time, the university system in California did not charge tuition, and was open to “anyone who wanted to attend.” As a result, Cali STILL has the largest higher education bureaucracy in the nation, although Ronaldus Magnus put a stop to the no tuition nonsense.