No one in his right mind would invest $50k blindly, unless that person has been habituated to following orders, or is going to school on his parents' dime. Only someone who's spent his entire life in school, never having made a significant life decision, would ever be that foolish. But most children spend their lives in tax-subsidized daycare, never having made a significant life-decision, which explains why so many make such foolish decisions.
Without scientists and engineers, our economy will be grinding to a halt.
It will?
Do we serve "the economy" or does "the economy" serve us?
Should "the economy" be the ultimate arbiter of a child's vocation? Who says so? By what authority? And if the economy should not be the ultimate arbiter of a chld's vocation in life, who should be?
I heard this mantra back when I was graduating high school in'80. Back then Japan was going to take over the world. Anyway, I know plenty of unemployed or underemployed engineers. Regardless, people are free to seek employment as they see fit. "Society" has no right to channel students into particular professions. The primary responsibility for determining one's vocation rests with the individual and his relationship with God.
We are graduating less and less engineers every year (but have plenty of Women's Studies majors!).
Which is pretty funny. But when it comes down to it, a Women's Studies major is only slightly less useful than any other college degree. Historically, college graduates have gone on to lead productive lives, despite years of schooling.
With less patents and inventions and innovations in our technological sectors,...
Are there less?
...Japan and China will be taking over our business.
Even if this were true, who cares? I don't want to work in an electronics manufacturing plant, do you? And it wouldn't matter to me as an employee if the auto manufacturing plant in Tennessee was owned by Ford or Toyota.
Japan, with half our population, has graduated double the number of engineers in recent years than we have.
There may be some relationship between the number of graduating scientists and engineers, but it's a loose one at best.
Seriously, why should I care? Are they going to take the lead in MP3 players? The only societal reason for concern regards national defense, and the gov't can always offer financial rewards to those who deliver the goods.
Interestingly, even in the sciences, degrees don't correspond with productivity. Neither Jobs, Gates or Dell graduated from college. They were too smart to waste their time there.
So all students need to get the big picture view of their choices, not just to blindly follow their hearts, as in some liberal theory.
To your own self, don't be true. I guess Shakespeare was wrong.
How many students can "follow their vocation in life", as you say?
Everyone. But this begs the question as to what is everyone's vocation. Drumroll please... Everyone's vocation is to become a saint. The purpose of life is to know, love and serve God in this life so that we can be happy forever with him in the next. A true education will help us to learn how to know, love and serve God in this world.
Our secondary vocation is to either serve as a religious or as a mother or father.
Our third most important vocation is to serve as a friend to others.
Our fourth most important vocation is to find employment. But even this vocation must be centered on God. A person must humbly seek to determine his God-given gifts and talents, and how he can best apply them in life for the benefit of himself, his family, and society.
So you can see that modern schooling only attempts to serve the fourth most important vocation in life. But modern schooling fails even here, because the methodology of modern schooling (compulsion, lack of respect for the individual, lack of individual responsibility, etc.) serves to alienate students from themselves. Hence the teenage angst, societal alienation and self-loathing that is almost universally experienced by those children confined in gov't schools.
Confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, no privacy. That's what school is really about, Charlie Brown.
The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher
The Underground History of American Education
What is their vocation? How many know exactly what it is they want to do when they're in high school?
They can't determine even their "fourth vocation" because they've been alienated from themselves.
Life in the U.S. is full of choices and opportunities.
This is an argument for the broad classical Christian Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) over modern specialization.
I think you have tunnel vision and expect students to have it as well.
Life is a lifelong process, which is why students should learn broad thinking and communication skills (the Trivium) over specialized and compartmentalized subjects (the modern method).
And most do - because of school counselors and teachers having it as well. Their time in the real world and knowledge of our economy and how the various majors and resulting jobs interplay in it is been limited.
Get them out of school and get them working. Work tends to focus the mind.