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CNN.com ^ | 08/22/2006 | AP

[EDINVA]

I didn't mean to imply that 'most college degrees aren't worth anything' .. but I do think there's a glut of schools out there that really aren't 'colleges' as *I* think of 'college.'

Let's say that I would not pay $25+k/year or a cool $100=125K for one of my kids to go to some of these schools just so they could say they had a college degree. I'd rather spend my hard-earned $$$ sending my kid(s) to a good trade school. (and I do have a kid who graduated summa cum from one of the USNWR 'top' universities and 2 who are slowly working their way thru the local community college while they decide what they want to be when they grow up).

As a society, we've bought into the value of a college degree when it's not appropriate for every kid, and certainly not right out of high school. I like the British 'gap year,' actually.

I guess my real irritation is with too many 'colleges' that are perfectly willing to take parents' hard-earned $$$ to confer a worthless degree on a kid who's not up to real academic rigor. You don't see a lot of successful companies recruiting on those campuses.

[GovernmentShrinker]

With that being said, I think most 4 year universities are issuing real degrees, and requiring pretty substantial work.

It depends an awful lot on what major you're talking about. In physical sciences and math, yes. In finance and most economics departments, yes. In English, History, PoliSci, Communications, ____ Studies, most Anthropology departments, no. Fact is, even the top schools have departments where students can do basically nothing but fuzzy feel-good make-it-up-as-you-go-along, and walk away with a degree.

And some departments require lots of hard but pointless work, largely memorizing the details of fuzzy feel-good stuff previously made up by the prof and his/her favorite fellow academics, and going off on tangents following the prof's silly whims instead of the student's. I know a young woman who majored in English at a highly ranked college, whose professor absolutely insisted that she revise her thesis on Shakespeare to include discussion of "Shakespeare's use of metaphorical semen". She had no idea what the guy was talking about, but labored diligently to make up some nonsense that seemed to satisfy him.