Posted on 08/13/2008 6:42:34 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:
First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."
You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.
Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.
Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
A good first step towards solving the problem would be a federal law that:
1) Makes colleges ineligible for any direct or through-student federal financial aid, if they require “progress towards a degree” for access to and/or registration priority for courses. As it stands now, at most schools it’s virtually impossible to get into serious physical science or engineering courses, and many math courses, as an unmatriculated student, or as a matriculated student who hasn’t completed the decreed number of distribution requirements in other areas (including crap like “social justice” and “peace studies” and “gender studies” requirements).
2) Makes it illegal to require a degree for any type federal employment. Specific professional certifications, specific coursework, specific subject-area exams, fine. But not degrees.
And of course, states would do well to pass similar laws.
The requirements for degrees are determined by political, not academic, processes. And many of the requirements exist solely to appease noisy protest groups, and to create jobs for “underrepresented” minorities and women, who would not qualify for jobs teaching serious subjects. The scheme is to both appease political pressure groups and comply with EEOC mandates by creating worthless course requirements, forcing students to pay for them by denying degrees and serious course registration to those who don’t take the worthless courses, and using the money students (often using taxpayer money) were forced to pay in tuition to pay the salaries of the professors teaching the worthless courses. These courses and professors then form the foundation of the well-documented sharp leftward tilt in academia, that is way out of synch with the larger society that is being forced to pay for it all.
You are correct. Mine would have been redundant.
Learning how to tap a keg, open a bottle without an opener (and hitting a target with the cap). Useless? Au contraire!
Most people who go to college will tell you that they go because they want to be a ___________.
Except for medicine, college has nothing to do with learning a skill. You attend college to get an EDUCATION. You are exposed to history, ideas, spin , brainwashing, indoctrination and propaganda.
If you want JOB TRAINING, you need to get a job. YOU - the guy who only has a HS diploma - will then end up TRAINING the new guy. The one who just graduated from college. The one who will be your boss and is already getting paid more than you.
Don’t get me started...
“They should join the military instead and learn to love their country.”
Amen to that.
I am just shy of my BA in Business. I worked on it intermittently during my Army years. Some of it was paid for by you nice Taxpayers; some of it I paid for myself.
Long story short...when I retired from the Army, I was only 37; employers were knockin’ down my door to hire me, even without finishing my degree.
Since then, I’ve handled the accounts for two, two million-dollar plus businesses, and have run my own side-businesses for nearly a decade now. My husband is also self-employed. We raised three kids.
We’ve never missed a meal or a house payment, so I guess I really learned all I needed to know in the Army, LOL!
I resent that remark. I didn’t finish college, but have raised my children, and helped start a company that was sold to a larger corporation, and kept the books of the family business. I am now retired, but might just start something new if I want. All without a college degree. I just think the dumb lazy people are the ones who go to college.
College is as good a way as any to mire young people in major debt so they eventually have to get jobs and be good employees in order to pay off their student loans. Otherwise they would be laying around the parks scaring the squirrels and aggravating the gang members.
Dumb, lazy people are the ones that, without thinking, make comments like yours.
I can’t think of a single job/career that can’t be mastered with some ‘study at home’ and a spell as an intern.
College serves Corporate America as a very important tool for measuring a person. If a person is willing to throw away 50-75 thousand dollars and 4 years of their life to get a degree that person will be willing to do almost anything to keep a “professional” position within a company. This means that Corporate America knows that said people will work tons of OT and will salute and Amen any new initiative the company dreams up. Like...diversity...or Lean electronics. Said person can often be counted on to put their career above their personal life.
Well, it is going to be that way in the Workplace and Business, anyway, so people are just going to have to deal with it sooner or later.
Sorry, but everyone is not "The Same".
Cash flows from the stupid to the less stupid. Period.
PROOFS: Global WarmingClimate Change.
Hope and Change.
Many Hi-Tech IPO's
Etc.
Well said. Your points are the exact ones I have taught my children.
Its not about the education. It is about the perseverance.
Good one. From the movie “PCU” ...”my third sophomore year.”
This may the case at some colleges, but not most. At the college I graduated from -- ranked in US News' top 15 national liberal arts colleges -- class attendance is completely optional, and many students attend less than half the class sessions of any given course. One friend of mine actually managed to pass a course she needed to graduate without attending a single class or turning in a single assignment -- just took and barely passed the final exam.
I swear I am not making this up: She left a few notes in the professor's mailbox throughout the semester, apologizing for not attending, citing illness, family problems, yadda yadda, and never heard from the professor in response. A week before the final, she discovered she'd been leaving notes for the wrong professor, tracked down the right one, made up some more excuses, and was allowed to take the final. She later got an MBA from what at the time a was decidedly third rate business school, but which has since improved significantly (way beyond her capacity to get in, much less get through), but the BA from a highly ranked undergraduate institution and MBA from a now respected B-school sit on her resume, making her eligible for jobs she certainly shouldn't be eligible for.
OK, but does it have to take four years and cost $125,000? I can't believe that the particular set of job skills you cite couldn't be imparted more quickly and cheaply, and with less political indoctrination.
Now, if people actually want to go and get a true education--to read the classics, to understand art, science, literature, a foreign culture, and history, to write and think--that does take time and is worth quite a lot of money. But not many college kids are actually getting much of an education these days.
Speaking here as the mother of a young woman who is trying to get an education.
It was a line from Animal House (although slightly misquoted). It was not meant to offend anyone.
>>Fat, Dumb and Stupid is no way to go through life.<<
It’s a quote from a movie called “Animal House” where the students, stayed in College for years and years, partying and making problems. It’s not a slur against those who did not attend.
My hubby did one semester, dropped out and joined the Marines where he taught young recruits about computers. College is overrated. I spent my 20,000 to get a degree and got no where. Took a medical assisting course when I was downsized from my company and got the best job of my life!
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