Posted on 09/23/2022 1:24:53 PM PDT by karpov
The Biden administration is seeking to “cancel” student debt by transferring what individual students owe to the American taxpayer.
Opponents question why Americans who never graduated from college, and had none of the attendant benefits of a degree, should pick up the tab for those who did. Defenders of the Biden order counter with the observation that tens of millions of young Americans are weighed down by debts they may never be able to repay.
What both sides ought to ask is why we are sending so many young Americans to take college degrees in the first place. If students really are struggling to pay off college debts, does that not raise some fundamental questions about the value of what they are being taught?
More and more young Americans are, it seems, questioning the value of a college degree. Today, only 42 percent of Americans aged 18-24 are enrolled in college or graduate school. That figure represents a significant drop since 2010, when the percentage attending college peaked.
More does not mean better when it comes to university, and if anyone in America is in doubt, he should look across the Atlantic at the British experience.
In my native Britain, a mere 15 percent of young Brits went to college or university in 1980. Since then, it has been the objective of every UK government to encourage more people to go to university.
By 1990, one in four were going to university. 20 years after Prime Minister Tony Blair set a target of having half of all young people attend, that target was reached in 2019. Today, almost 60 percent of young women in England pursue higher education.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Many kids who head for college would be better off in the navy or Air Force. Best tech schools in the world, combined with hands on experience immediately following. Not to mention the travel, maturing, and seasoning at no extra charge. And, they pay you.
If your interests lie in something that doesn’t have a direct application to a job or career, there is nothing wrong with getting a degree in it as long as you understand that, you don’t bankrupt your parents getting it, and you don’t shoulder some stupid debt level to get it. Get your degree in medieval French literature if that’s what you love, and then go to work on the shop floor prepared to work your way up from the bottom. Or, again, go see your navy recruiter. He’ll know what to do with you.
I can envision that in some fields, such as software, a degree will become a hindrance to getting a job.
If their loans were for a Tesla or pickup truck there would be no problem. But school loans are “violent”.
While ago,
I have read somewhere, that there are about 10,000,000 college degreed persons busing tables.
There is just no need for half of the population holding degrees.
Dramatically expanding the number of universities in Britain has made many of them degree factories. Courses consist of modules, in which students are instructed on what to think, rather than necessarily how to think. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the sheer volume of students that universities now process.
The rise of degree factories has meant more standardisation of higher education, not least the standardisation of thought. The romantic notion of a university is that it is a community of free thinkers, cheerfully pursuing scientific and intellectual inquiry. Many British universities are very different from that.
Many UK universities have become cheerless institutions in which standardised thinking is rigorously enforced. In one British university recently, a feminist academic was driven from her post by the relentless hounding of... students who accused her of “transphobia.”
[bold emphases mine]
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