A college education is a weird thing that sometimes feels like it means different things to the student, the employer, and the actual college.
When I was going through college, I even was able to see the increasing tendency towards a feeling of it being like a summer camp for adults. So many funded student groups, student services out the wazoo, money dumped on glow ups for student housing. It's hard to say that no student services should be funded or that no student groups should exist, but with the rise of admin bloat and the rise of stupid courses that are basically fanfiction 101 taught by criminally underpaid adjuncts, it's hard not to see that many residential colleges are focused on students having fun and pushing them through to graduation.
But students think they are getting a job certificate and employers are expecting that people with college degrees have useful skills and I think that the mismatch is just untenable.
We hired a couple of recent college grads and they are wonderful, curious, hard workers. They ask questions, they defer to expertise, they try new things and learn new skills. So I don't think colleges are a completely doomed project. But the amount of debt they are saddled with relative the the relatively small amount of real skills they obtained is heart breaking. They don't get paid enough. It's hard to tell if their maturation was actually enhanced by college. Probably? Maybe? Maybe not? Who knows. But it can hardly be worth the 10s of thousands of dollars and lost income for 4 years.
I went to private school, and from the time I got there to the time I graduated, it was all about “getting into the right college.” For a long time, I believed that not going to college was akin to original sin. Now, almost 35 years later, I envy those kids who aren’t paying on student loans until the Second Coming and wish I’d started making money right out of high school. College is beyond overrated.
One can become an auto-didact in history or philosophy or English literature and never set foot on a college campus (and I say this as someone who holds a history degree and still maintains an active interest in the subject). Aerospace engineering or a medical degree-not so much-or not enough for me to trust your involvement in my health or travel w/out a credential!
Well, sorry that Jeff Maurer did not get a good education at college. It happens, and maybe he should have become a plumber instead of a writer. We can look at many people, politicians especially, who went to Harvard or Yale and came out bigger idiots than when they came in.
But college for me was a.great adventure. Now, I went many years ago so the debt burden wasn’t so hard to bear. But I learned about philosophy and aspects of history that I never would have discovered otherwise. I learned aspects of writing and how to do more with a paragraph than just state an idea. I learned math and programming skills that were only given to the highest ranking students in high school. I also learned about turning assignments in on time and other skills that made me a better employee and manager and better self-employed person. I made friends that I still have to this day.
So college, like every experience in life, comes from what you make of it. No, some people shouldn’t go to college. Others should. Unfortunately, there’s no real good way to tell which is which. But we’re now loving in an age where going to college, or reaching out past your high school learning, is considered a bad thing,and that’s wrong as well.
What I like about Jeff is that he is both inciteful and hilarious, a good trick.
There is a Yiddish expression for what I just said - 'blowing sugar up ones ass' but it was deserved.
I belonged to a hippy cultish group of which the leader spoke to the fact that people got dumber going to college. And he was an ex college prof. And I was an egghead who eventually did get into Harvard though declined (that's a great brag and I went to UNC instead so presume I had something to do with the SCOTUS decision) but in my wayward youth I was an auto mechanic and a carpenter and can rightfully attest that those things are much harder to do than college.
I was capable of doing great on my MCATs while I still once did a valve job that ended with the car in the junkyard.
I don’t know…. No intelligence required to get a college degree? I guess that IS what we, the engineering majors, said about pretty much everyone else that wasn’t in a science or technology degree. Sad thing is, the business majors/lawyers end up running everything, making all the money and getting all the good looking girls.
In an important sense Jeff's comments are both bang on, yet irrelevant. Let's go back to the 60s, soon after the Sputnik scare produced the federal NDEA law, NDSL loans for students, and all sorts of money suddenly being fire-hosed into higher ed in order to 'catch up with the Russians in science and technology' and, if you read the Act carefully, catch up in humanities, literature, history, and languages as well.
There has *always* been a philosophical conflict in America about what education, particularly higher education is *FOR*. Jefferson, for example, thought it was for the production of liberally educated rational citizens. Others of the founders thought it was for preparing folks to participate in the economy. These two contrary aims/goals/purposes have been controverting higher education ever since.
After the massive post-Sputnick influx of cash, the congress rather rapidly shut off the money flow. Higher ed, sensing a threat to its life style came up with an argument to sell to the politicians, namely, an extremely strong revival of the economic goal of higher ed: college, like barber colleges, etc., existed to train individual people for the work force, tout court. College was in individual good, not a public good. The politicians bought it, with the immediate consequence that the state university was no longer seen as a place of commong good, but rather as a place where individuals acquired future value for themselves, not the state. State funding of higher ed thus immediately plunged, the feds reacted by instituting interest-bearing loans, higher-ed reacted by turning tuition into a profit center, and suddenly *education* was a secondary goal of higher education. Welcome to today's university.
I've always been very glad I went to college, the first person in my family to do so and I couldn't have worked in my field without it. I needed to learn certain skills in my field that college gave me. That said, it's not for everyone and we need to be encouraging more people to take an interest in technical skill job (plumbers, electricians, etc.) We'll always need those and people can make a very good living at those jobs.
The sad thing is that ad is likely well researched and focus-grouped - if my family in small-town Brazil is anything to go by. To me, Brazilian society is quite hierarchical and having a bunch of impressive-sounding paper is the main way that a person who is not of well-connected family has any chance of being considered for a responsible role in society. Real qualifications such as in medicine, or "soft" qualifications for politics (though observe the lack of formal qualifications of the 2 most recent presidents of Brazil - that's where connections get you). So there is a kind of debasing of the currency as in order to get ahead, people add qualifications beyond those needed to do a job.
In my other world, engineering, qualifications are "necessary but not sufficient", i.e. new people need a huge amount of technical background to draw on depending on the project, BUT they also need to have an innate problem-solving drive that can't be taught.
There are many useful degrees and, relatively, in expensive schools. I have little sympathy for people who spend a shit ton of money only to end up unskilled with few employment opportunities. Not all degrees are created equal and who the heck ever said spending $200,000 for a generic arts degree was a good thing. Choose wisely young people and accept responsibility for your choice.
I was one of those kids who was super good at school. I was the valedictorian of my class at the second-biggest high school in the state, the only kid in the state who aced both major standardized tests (I happened to be great at those and only had to take them each once), had tons of AP test 5's, and was a Presidential Scholar. I ended up at the best Ivy out there, didn't pay much for it (no-loan financial aid for the win) and met lots of other super-smart kids, and wouldn't trade my experience for anything.
That said... I could've gone to a small liberal arts school almost anywhere and probably had an equally excellent time. I later went on to grad school at one of those "Ivy-plus" places, and really regret getting a masters in a humanities field (I thought I wanted to go into academia at the time; thank god I dodged that bullet). I could've spent those two years doing anything else productive, getting a real job, learning stuff, growing as a person et al that wasn't just in service of an exorbitantly expensive and ultimately pointless degree.
There's lots to a college experience, and I think it's intrinsically valuable as long as we keep in perspective what its real purpose should be: intellectual growth, fostering curiosity, and expanding human knowledge in an intentional community of learning. So many colleges today... don't do that. And lots of kids would be better served growing and learning in the context of real professional environments. But employers just up the ante all the time by requiring college degrees to sort out who's "good enough". I think Freddie deBoer is onto something with his critique that college cannot simultaneously be a vehicle for equality (or "equity") while also determining who's "better" than who. You can't level the playing field and create an elite caste with the same tool.
I think a college degree can be extremely beneficial - and not just to colleges! But my own experience was more mixed. I did almost accidently manage to get a degree in an interesting (and unprofitable) field that I enjoy, and was exposed to an assortment of diverse influences, like non-Western religions and philosophies, LOTS of Grateful Dead shows when ecstasy was still "legal", and students who came from families wealthier than Central American countries. College was a lot cheaper then, and I paid off my debt after a few years, but I don't know that the academic experience was the most important part of it and I probably could have found a similar experience with less overall expense.
Did you ever happen to run across the data that shows that with a college degree people in general earn quite a bit more $$$ than those who don't have one? I suspect that is a major reason many students stick it out. But along the way they may actually pick up some knowledge or idea that helps them be more successful in many ways other than $$$ too.
Not going to an elite school earlier would only have delayed finding out that their graduates lack both skeptical and creative thinking. (you would have inevitably run into one of these clowns sooner or later.)
A college education is a weird thing that sometimes feels like it means different things to the student, the employer, and the actual college.
When I was going through college, I even was able to see the increasing tendency towards a feeling of it being like a summer camp for adults. So many funded student groups, student services out the wazoo, money dumped on glow ups for student housing. It's hard to say that no student services should be funded or that no student groups should exist, but with the rise of admin bloat and the rise of stupid courses that are basically fanfiction 101 taught by criminally underpaid adjuncts, it's hard not to see that many residential colleges are focused on students having fun and pushing them through to graduation.
But students think they are getting a job certificate and employers are expecting that people with college degrees have useful skills and I think that the mismatch is just untenable.
We hired a couple of recent college grads and they are wonderful, curious, hard workers. They ask questions, they defer to expertise, they try new things and learn new skills. So I don't think colleges are a completely doomed project. But the amount of debt they are saddled with relative the the relatively small amount of real skills they obtained is heart breaking. They don't get paid enough. It's hard to tell if their maturation was actually enhanced by college. Probably? Maybe? Maybe not? Who knows. But it can hardly be worth the 10s of thousands of dollars and lost income for 4 years.
I went to private school, and from the time I got there to the time I graduated, it was all about “getting into the right college.” For a long time, I believed that not going to college was akin to original sin. Now, almost 35 years later, I envy those kids who aren’t paying on student loans until the Second Coming and wish I’d started making money right out of high school. College is beyond overrated.
I want to hear more about the total joke hippie freak show experience. When are we getting that post?
One can become an auto-didact in history or philosophy or English literature and never set foot on a college campus (and I say this as someone who holds a history degree and still maintains an active interest in the subject). Aerospace engineering or a medical degree-not so much-or not enough for me to trust your involvement in my health or travel w/out a credential!
Well, sorry that Jeff Maurer did not get a good education at college. It happens, and maybe he should have become a plumber instead of a writer. We can look at many people, politicians especially, who went to Harvard or Yale and came out bigger idiots than when they came in.
But college for me was a.great adventure. Now, I went many years ago so the debt burden wasn’t so hard to bear. But I learned about philosophy and aspects of history that I never would have discovered otherwise. I learned aspects of writing and how to do more with a paragraph than just state an idea. I learned math and programming skills that were only given to the highest ranking students in high school. I also learned about turning assignments in on time and other skills that made me a better employee and manager and better self-employed person. I made friends that I still have to this day.
So college, like every experience in life, comes from what you make of it. No, some people shouldn’t go to college. Others should. Unfortunately, there’s no real good way to tell which is which. But we’re now loving in an age where going to college, or reaching out past your high school learning, is considered a bad thing,and that’s wrong as well.
Always good to start the morning chuckling.
What I like about Jeff is that he is both inciteful and hilarious, a good trick.
There is a Yiddish expression for what I just said - 'blowing sugar up ones ass' but it was deserved.
I belonged to a hippy cultish group of which the leader spoke to the fact that people got dumber going to college. And he was an ex college prof. And I was an egghead who eventually did get into Harvard though declined (that's a great brag and I went to UNC instead so presume I had something to do with the SCOTUS decision) but in my wayward youth I was an auto mechanic and a carpenter and can rightfully attest that those things are much harder to do than college.
I was capable of doing great on my MCATs while I still once did a valve job that ended with the car in the junkyard.
I don’t know…. No intelligence required to get a college degree? I guess that IS what we, the engineering majors, said about pretty much everyone else that wasn’t in a science or technology degree. Sad thing is, the business majors/lawyers end up running everything, making all the money and getting all the good looking girls.
In an important sense Jeff's comments are both bang on, yet irrelevant. Let's go back to the 60s, soon after the Sputnik scare produced the federal NDEA law, NDSL loans for students, and all sorts of money suddenly being fire-hosed into higher ed in order to 'catch up with the Russians in science and technology' and, if you read the Act carefully, catch up in humanities, literature, history, and languages as well.
There has *always* been a philosophical conflict in America about what education, particularly higher education is *FOR*. Jefferson, for example, thought it was for the production of liberally educated rational citizens. Others of the founders thought it was for preparing folks to participate in the economy. These two contrary aims/goals/purposes have been controverting higher education ever since.
After the massive post-Sputnick influx of cash, the congress rather rapidly shut off the money flow. Higher ed, sensing a threat to its life style came up with an argument to sell to the politicians, namely, an extremely strong revival of the economic goal of higher ed: college, like barber colleges, etc., existed to train individual people for the work force, tout court. College was in individual good, not a public good. The politicians bought it, with the immediate consequence that the state university was no longer seen as a place of commong good, but rather as a place where individuals acquired future value for themselves, not the state. State funding of higher ed thus immediately plunged, the feds reacted by instituting interest-bearing loans, higher-ed reacted by turning tuition into a profit center, and suddenly *education* was a secondary goal of higher education. Welcome to today's university.
I've always been very glad I went to college, the first person in my family to do so and I couldn't have worked in my field without it. I needed to learn certain skills in my field that college gave me. That said, it's not for everyone and we need to be encouraging more people to take an interest in technical skill job (plumbers, electricians, etc.) We'll always need those and people can make a very good living at those jobs.
Great perspective.
The sad thing is that ad is likely well researched and focus-grouped - if my family in small-town Brazil is anything to go by. To me, Brazilian society is quite hierarchical and having a bunch of impressive-sounding paper is the main way that a person who is not of well-connected family has any chance of being considered for a responsible role in society. Real qualifications such as in medicine, or "soft" qualifications for politics (though observe the lack of formal qualifications of the 2 most recent presidents of Brazil - that's where connections get you). So there is a kind of debasing of the currency as in order to get ahead, people add qualifications beyond those needed to do a job.
In my other world, engineering, qualifications are "necessary but not sufficient", i.e. new people need a huge amount of technical background to draw on depending on the project, BUT they also need to have an innate problem-solving drive that can't be taught.
There are many useful degrees and, relatively, in expensive schools. I have little sympathy for people who spend a shit ton of money only to end up unskilled with few employment opportunities. Not all degrees are created equal and who the heck ever said spending $200,000 for a generic arts degree was a good thing. Choose wisely young people and accept responsibility for your choice.
I was one of those kids who was super good at school. I was the valedictorian of my class at the second-biggest high school in the state, the only kid in the state who aced both major standardized tests (I happened to be great at those and only had to take them each once), had tons of AP test 5's, and was a Presidential Scholar. I ended up at the best Ivy out there, didn't pay much for it (no-loan financial aid for the win) and met lots of other super-smart kids, and wouldn't trade my experience for anything.
That said... I could've gone to a small liberal arts school almost anywhere and probably had an equally excellent time. I later went on to grad school at one of those "Ivy-plus" places, and really regret getting a masters in a humanities field (I thought I wanted to go into academia at the time; thank god I dodged that bullet). I could've spent those two years doing anything else productive, getting a real job, learning stuff, growing as a person et al that wasn't just in service of an exorbitantly expensive and ultimately pointless degree.
There's lots to a college experience, and I think it's intrinsically valuable as long as we keep in perspective what its real purpose should be: intellectual growth, fostering curiosity, and expanding human knowledge in an intentional community of learning. So many colleges today... don't do that. And lots of kids would be better served growing and learning in the context of real professional environments. But employers just up the ante all the time by requiring college degrees to sort out who's "good enough". I think Freddie deBoer is onto something with his critique that college cannot simultaneously be a vehicle for equality (or "equity") while also determining who's "better" than who. You can't level the playing field and create an elite caste with the same tool.
I think a college degree can be extremely beneficial - and not just to colleges! But my own experience was more mixed. I did almost accidently manage to get a degree in an interesting (and unprofitable) field that I enjoy, and was exposed to an assortment of diverse influences, like non-Western religions and philosophies, LOTS of Grateful Dead shows when ecstasy was still "legal", and students who came from families wealthier than Central American countries. College was a lot cheaper then, and I paid off my debt after a few years, but I don't know that the academic experience was the most important part of it and I probably could have found a similar experience with less overall expense.
Did you ever happen to run across the data that shows that with a college degree people in general earn quite a bit more $$$ than those who don't have one? I suspect that is a major reason many students stick it out. But along the way they may actually pick up some knowledge or idea that helps them be more successful in many ways other than $$$ too.
My 51 year old brother in law mentions his university math degree every time I see him, no doubt bc I dropped out.
Not going to an elite school earlier would only have delayed finding out that their graduates lack both skeptical and creative thinking. (you would have inevitably run into one of these clowns sooner or later.)