OT: College is a rip off

[RickH]

Students getting out of college today are facing a pretty bleak future and massive debt as universities raise prices at a rate faster than inflation and any other "service" in our economy. I feel sorry for the next "millenium" generation, Starbucks can only hire so many liberal arts majors to make coffee. You thought the mortgage bubble was bad wait till the oncoming student loan bubble, it will be worse because you can walk (foreclose) from a mortgage, but student loans are written in a way that exempts the defaulter from claiming bankruptcy (this unusual twist in the code was won by university lobbyists). I have a son in high school, I think I'm going to encourage him to become an entrepenaur and not hang his hopes on a degree meaning anything. When literally everyone has a BA or MA, then the degrees become pretty useless. I'd rather have a creative, work-a- holic go getter who is genuinely excited working for me than a graduate with the expectation that his degree means much. It is best to just begin looking for a job as a non-graduate, live at home for a while, gain experience, then maybe attend college at night once you find out how to best focus the enormous cost of college on skills that will benefit your employer.

These Operation Wall Street folks should be pickiting outside Harvard, The University of Chicago, Northwestern, etc. because unlike the corporate CEO's those tenured/pensioned university administrators ARE truly ripping them off directly.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, I spent ~20 years on a campus working on my job. About 5-10% kids are cream of crop who will be leaders of future generation in many different field. The problem is unqualified kids clog schools wasting education dollars and making all of them look bad. I know some grads can't ever write their own resume.

[Frank]

My eldest son, who graduated college over 20 years ago, says that colleges are prime examples of unbridled capitalism.

When I graduated, a half century ago, colleges were starved for funds, educators were paid less than counterparts in industry and if they wrote a textbook, it was a labor of love because it hardly paid anything.

Today colleges are awash in money, professors make more than industrial counterparts and get free tuition for their offspring and a popular textbook brings in tons of money and new editions come out frequently to keep down used book sales.

The government's making more money available just allows the colleges to charge more. Neighbor concerned about his son losing bank job as loan officer because government is taking over the loan function.

Also, don't forget, colleges are non-profit institutions that don't pay taxes. Many have huge endowments that just keep growing without spending on the college. I quit donating to my schools years ago.

The scum of the educational system protesting wall street are misguided and should be protesting colleges and their greed and the government that feeds them money to get a useless education.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Many of these kids would be better served going to a trade school or getting into an apprenticeship.

[Charlie]

We have a tendency to paint all college programs with a broad brush. This is ignoring what major courses of study are being perused. Even as the OP has written that "literally everyone has a BA or MA, then the degrees become pretty useless." is not entirely right. There must be an underlying consideration when the student is selecting a major of who will want to buy my services when I have graduated.

A holder of BA in math or statistics or the like has something to sell.

Maybe, not so is the well read but unsalable owner of a degree in, let us say, modern art or French literature. This student has something to sell, but no customers.

It is not necessarily the kid's fault for having spent four years getting into this position. When they started out their life experiences are limited in scope. What is missing is competent adult guidance. Sometimes it is the parents' failing because they have not had the opportunity to get into the college scene and do not have a good enough understanding of the system to provide good guidance.

Then there is the guidance counselers in the education system. I am considerd to be a heretic by a neighbor who is a retired dean of students at a major midwestern university when I take the position that a good degree is should be the equivalent of a union card.

If your diploma does not open a door or two, you have likely pissed away four years and lots of money. Maybe an apprentice program would have been a better choice than finding the best party school.

My college years were spent in the hard sciences. They have paid off.

[RickH]

de quoted text -

Yes, one can always love/read philosophy, and art, and literature and dance, etc. without having to pay an aging over-opinionated hippie $5000 a quarter. Do the hard work in college of getting a degree that is in demand, because getting a worthless degree will be infinitely harder in the long run. I work in industrial embedded systems, and I have the luxury of truly enjoying the arts all I want, any time I want, and I do to a great degree. If one obtains a degree in lets say womens studies, the only paying market for that is to regurgitate womens studies again as a teacher of womens studies. Womens studies may be fulfilling, and interesting, but whoever allows their kids to go down that road is either putting their kid into massive debt, the family into massive debt, and making life infinitely more difficult for everyone. You can follow your heart in ways that will still let you be a more-in-demand member of society, with more value to offer to people who will pay for it, simply because society values it more and intuitively NEEDS it more, like the engineer who designs a motor that uses 50% less power. Who really contributed more to the good of society, her or the woman who teaches womens studies?

[krw]

You misspelled "Crony". Colleges have their mitts out to government, *BIG* time.

That changed right after. My father was a prof at the time. He was offered

3x his salary to go back to industry.

The last part was true forty+ years ago. My brother even had texts that his profs wrote. Because they were only used in one class by one university, they were quite expensive. Of course, a new edition came out each time the class was taught. Oh, and the prof did nothing but read the text during class. Attendance was mandatory.

Yep. Loans are one of the prime causes of the increases in tuition.

I never did. They're crooks, too.

They should at least be camped out on the front lawn of the White House.

[krw]

Then they'd have to work.

[Dean Hoffman]

There was a time when the military was an option. I don't know if that's realistic today.

[dadiOH]

I has a pair of profs that co-authored the text they used for first year chemistry at IU.

The first semester guy was a GREAT teacher...very interesting, very dynamic. People would come to audit just to hear him

Second semester guy was dry as dust in the Sahara, did nothing except read the text. In a monotone.

I got an A the first semester, barely a C the second.

I don't recall attendance being mandatory but I was there and still caught up on my sleep the second semester.

[dadiOH]

I agree with what you say but I also think it is part of the problem. Time was, universities were there to create educated people...people who could think...people who could derive solutions for many kinds of life problems. Now, they are much more narrowly focused and are churning out people skilled in a narrow discipline; many of them don't have the common sense needed to get out of a paper bag.

I am not saying that universities should not educate people for the professions, just that I think they should place more emphasis on general education. Maybe three years for a basic degree followed by two years of intensive professional training? I also think they should be more discerning on admissions; not all HS graduates have the mental capacity and/or ability for college.

[Peter]

[Edited out for brevity]

This discussion is entirely OT for this group, but interesting nonetheless.

The controversy over the utility of humanities versus sciences (also referred to as liberal vs. technical education) is not new. One of the most thoughtful discussions of this issue was C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures", originally published in 1959 and his additional thoughts on the subject written 4 yrs. later called, "A Second Look". I recommend both books to all who find this an interesting topic.

Some may dismiss those discussions saying that times have changed and there has been a paradigm shift that make the old arguments irrelevant. However, times have been changing since the Big Bang. It is a facile argument but not necessarily a valid one.

My view (as one who majored in sciences at a liberal arts college, obtained a post-graduate degree in one of the sciences, and made a career in science) is that except for the rare true genius, no one can become competent in a technical field without rigorous formal education and training in that subject area. Even if one can self-teach, society has imposed formal licensing and credentialing requirements that almost always preclude a successful career. One can always cite the exceptional few, e.g. Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, but I'm talking about the typical person of college age in our society.

In the humanities, I believe that there is an entire spectrum of personality types. Some have latent abilities that only flourish when exposed to an academic environment; for others, their creativity flows spontaneously. You can create lists of highly regarded authors, composers, artists, musicians and others who make the humanities their life's work and find many examples of those who never had a "higher education" as well as those who only blossomed after their studies were complete. (And there are those who trained in one field but excelled in an entirely different one for which they received no formal preparation.)

As for the value of the humanities, I believe that there are adequate examples, just in the 20th century, of how re-empowered societies responded when their government had deprived them of their humanities-related freedom to see the plays, hear the concerts, attend the museum exhibits and practice the religious belief of their choice.

I believe that just as almost all of us need both social interaction and the privacy of solitude, we need the societal contributions of both technology and the humanities to live an enjoyable and comfortable life.

[Davej]

Well, with all work being outsourced overseas the only jobs left here are business management, accounting, and the service sector. Colleges are going to have a problem when potential students realize this. Probably a better future for them to learn auto repair or HVAC.

[Steve B]

[Steve B]

Many of these kids would be better served by the advice my dad gave me.

"You want to go to college? Sounds like a fine idea to me. Let me know how you do." End of conversation. Money was not discussed. (money was never seen) The college I did get was paid for by YKW.

So many kids today have an expectation that their parents will pay for their college, and that includes a college of the student's choice, which is coincidentally known for its partying rather than successful alumni.

More kids need to "earn" their way through college. But they get handicapped from the start by having everything provided. College, like expensive toys they got in childhood, has no value when there is no work involved in earning it.

We do have many students who earn their way through college, and some who go on their parent's money, and who are successful.

I wonder how many students actually pay their parents back for the free ride. And then, they come out with a degree in something that can't even earn them as much as a welder. That's because a degree in something valuable would have taken effort, and would have cut into the drinking time.

Yes, college is a rip off, but it takes two people to make it happen. And there's always going to be a lot of rich snotty kids lined up at the front office. And there's always going to be a lot of rich businesspeople who are glad to take their money. And once they got your money, they couldn't care less if you even show up for class.

Steve

[krw]

Attendance wasn't mandatory for any of my classes (engineering college) but his were (Veterinary Medicine). If they were allowed to skip, there would be zero attendance; just wouldn't look good.

[RickH]

The most frustrating thing to a student who knows what they want to study, is when a college makes them take meandering, amorphous, "core curriculum" classes. If a studend wants to take all Information Technology classes, they are usually forced to take sociology, a language, ecology, english lit, etc and really dont get to take IT classes until later. That is a lot of wasted time IMHO. A well rounded, problem-solving, IT engineer is one who has taken IT classes for four solid years, and wrote computer code till 2AM evry night for

4 years, the "myth" of how taking meandering liberal arts classes "rounds out" a studen is a myth propagated by colleges who have a higher profit margin on those classes. It costs millions to set up an IT or engineering program in equipment, it costs nothing to set up some classrooms for English lit. English lit students pay same tuition as an engineering student, the markup for teaching literature is a much better return because it has no overhead in floor space and equipment.

[gfretwell]

I am not sure if it is still true but I agree, in the 60s, employers valued being a veteran as highly as being a college grad, particularly if you were in a good Rate/MOS and had some good schools under your belt. Navy electronics schools were the gold standard. It also demonstrated that you had some life skills and that you have not been living in a cocoon all your life

My biggest problem with US education is that it is so inbred. Teachers, Professors and the administrators who run their operations all went to school when they were 5 and never left. This has been going on for 4 generations. You have teachers, teaching teachers how to be teachers and nobody understanding what they should be teaching. It is no wonder these people do not have any awareness of the real world.

[gfretwell]

Unfortunately this has translated into $100,000 student loans that they have no real way to pay back. That is one of the biggest gripes from the OWS kids.

[George]

I tink it is a good ting to be abble to right two, doens't you tink dat?????

Actually from working my way up and having folks report to me a well rounded person is a much better asset than someone who only knows say how to code well. The most talented coder is of minimal value if they don't understand say accounting principles or business practices or lacks good language skills (both written and spoken English) etc.