College Education Arms Race Bankrupting America

[Johnnyallstar]

Female and a teacher...yummy lol. Had to.

Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad? Hot for teacher?

*snippity

Agreed. Here's my sob story to show how little public schools care. I started in public schools until they wanted me on drugs to slow me down. When I was in kindergarten and first grade, I would literally be reduced to tears because I was already an avid reader, and wasn't learning anything. I used to sleep with an encyclopedia because I loved learning so much, and it was just too much for a public school to try and deal with me on that level, so drugging me would be better for everyone right? My parents disagreed, pulled me out, and I managed to get into a private school by scholarship at the second grade level. I stayed there for a few years until they reduced 100% and 97.5% grades to C's because I refused to tutor an abusive, mentally handicapped girl who enjoyed kicking and spitting. Outcome Based Education was such an incompetent mess.

So then, I homeschooled for 2 years, worked well ahead, but due to family issues, and medical problems, it was easier for my parents to put me back into public school. What was the school's first course of action with an intelligent, hard working, knowledge sponge? Hold the kid back, he wouldn't want to be in a group of kids who weren't born in the same 365 day spectrum, would he? No, he would be much better off retaking a whole grade level and being with kids that were born in the same 365 day spectrum. So what if it stunts his intellectual growth, it'll be so much better for his self esteem, right?

Now, I'm working my ass off, paying my way through a private college, and loving it because they actually give a damn about me.

 

[xDarc]

Hold the kid back, he wouldn't want to be in a group of kids who weren't born in the same 365 day spectrum, would he? No, he would be much better off retaking a whole grade level and being with kids that were born in the same 365 day spectrum. So what if it stunts his intellectual growth, it'll be so much better for his self esteem, right?

Being with other children your age helps develop social skills. I have known some smart, extremely wacky ones in my day.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

What's worse though is how colleges and universities throw their money around to prop up biased research or political ideas.

It's ignorant comments like that which have caused me to spend this thread discussing avatars, user names, minerals, and Babylon 5.

As nice as your avatar is, your opinion that universities throw money to "prop up" biased research is absolutely insane and fairly offensive to those of us who have to work our asses off to get a share of that very VERY small pile of money. Do you really think those billions go to fund studies, research, and programs? HA. I wish. I could use a bigger paycheck.

As far as propping up "political ideas"... I'm not even sure I know what that means. It sounds like one of those vague conspiracy theories about liberal mind-control through television. For your information, universities don't support any one political party over another. They aren't legally allowed (at least not state universities, which is where I work).

So, other than trying to troll me (which worked! crap...) and other academics, your comment above is either misinformed or severely biased.

 

[kevintheshane]

I'm against every young American expected to take out an average of $18,000 in student loans. Absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary, and no one even questions it. This is a huge financial burden for the country.

I have a friend with 40K in student loans and he's still waiting tables at Denny's. How many people like this are out there? This is money that didn't exist until they decided to take out a loan, and it's money that isn't coming back any time soon.

I'd like to see people get out of school and be able to get a job, be productive, contribute, accumulate assets. Not spend the next 10 years living off of mom and dad, going further into debt so that one day they might make good money. This doesn't happen to everybody, but it happens to enough of them to make it a major problem.

To my earlier point, it is possible to graduate from college without debt, I graduate in May and I'll be debt free (yay!).

I agree with you, it is stupid to go 18k into debt for maybe the chance at a high paying job, but I think it has gotten to the point that everyone understands the college, like everything in life, is not a guarantee. At least part of the blame for people who have student loan debt has to go on the people themselves.

P.S. Going to College and getting a job are not mutually exclusive.

 

[xDarc]

So, other than trying to troll me (which worked! crap...) and other academics, your comment above is either misinformed or severely biased.

They're not allowed to be involved in politics, but they'll support research that carries an agenda, research that becomes a political football- including research on video games. So be offended, and be naive too while you're at it.

 

[xDarc]

I'm done for the night. Going out to grab a cup of coffee. Have a good night. And Bara, I'm not trying to insult you- but if you believe that universities don't get involved in that stuff indirectly...

Hope you get a raise. : )

Edited for double negative... lol.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

So, other than trying to troll me (which worked! crap...) and other academics, your comment above is either misinformed or severely biased.

They're not allowed to be involved in politics, but they'll support research that carries an agenda, research that becomes a political football- including research on video games. So be offended, and be naive too while you're at it.

What's wrong with research on video games? We could use a little more of that. The more studies done, the more it proves that current stereotypes about gamers are wrong.

Research is a good thing! It provides accurate information rather than random, unfounded opinions.

Edit: Seriously, why are you on the Escapist again? Other than zombie movies, which are only vaguely related to gaming culture, you don't seem to be very invested in video-games as art, or a respected media.

 

[Paragon Fury]

1: There is a severe shortage of nurses in every sector of the US (Public, Private and Military). There is a massive push to get more nurses as soon as possible; hence the number of nursing majors.

2: The US is no longer a "blue collar" economy, its a "white collar" economy. White collar jobs almost by definition require a college education, even to get a basic grasp of knowledge required to operate in that field. Even the military, many MOSs require an almost college-level of education, at least in one specific area. You have to go to college (or an equivalent) to be an officer even.

3: The US simply no longer desires the kinds of jobs that don't require higher education. No wants to grow up to be a plumber, or a line worker, or an electrician anymore because those jobs fucking suck. Mindless desk may be boring as shit, but it ranks higher on the prestige scale than carpenter. Pays better too.

4: Its not college education that are causing the problems, its colleges giving them to the wrong people. Giving out money and time to people who are blatantly unworthy of it or who never have any chance of paying it back is the real issue; just like what killed the housing market. More people getting college educations isn't the issue; more people getting them who don't deserve them is.

 

[kevintheshane]

Research is a good thing! It provides accurate information rather than random, unfounded opinions.

This.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Actually, I need to bail too. I've got class in the morning - I already stayed up late to post for this long.

G'night y'all.

Edit: And my ability to English appears to be failing me. Which is bad for an English teacher.

 

[vf501]

Guess you didn't know very many Engineering and Science majors. They make the cash and their degrees are more than worth the cost of the education since they generally can pay off any incurred debt within 5-6 years or less. That is also if they actually had to take out a loan and weren't covered by the many grants and scholarships available for Engineering students.

Tuition spent on a BA in English, Literature or PoliSci is usually wasted since those tend to be simple easy degrees. Very few people have the capacity to make those degrees work in the real world.

Talk to any Engineering student, they'll paint you a different picture of college as long as they are a serious student.

 

[conflictofinterests]

Well, speaking as a current college student going to school on grants and one $5k loan per year, I wouldn't trade my experience for anything. I really enjoy going to college. Maybe most people don't. Maybe most people are there to party or get a degree and get out. But I, personally, wouldn't mind being in the school system for the rest of my life if I could afford it.

That being said, the internet is an incredible source of education, and self-educated people tend to both be determined and very learned in their chosen subject(s). I have a feeling that employers may soon pull their heads out of their asses and start tapping the resources of a populace that grew up in the information age and display merit instead of those that payed a shit ton of money for this piece of paper that has experienced inflation like the USD hasn't known for decades at least. Then again, employers do tend to have a shit ton of applications to sift through for their positions, and "Self-Taught" doesn't look as good as "Harvard Graduate."

I think the whole school system needs to be restructured around the fact that almost everyone has or can get internet at this point. Information is right there for us all the time, and we don't need it couched in fluffy little anecdotes. We can learn more faster outside of class, but few are motivated unless there's some sort of face-to-face interaction. Give us an information skeleton to fill out with more and more facts until it's more complete a view of the animal than any one text book could give us.

That's another thing, textbook companies would THROW A FIT if we stopped relying on degrees for jobs. Lord knows half the price of college is keeping up with these new versions of books with words, or even *gasp* CHAPTERS, switched around to justify it.

Aside from that, there isn't a whole lot of prestige in graduating from an American college. Yeah, you graduated, yay for you. But you're not the 0.01% of the population that managed not only to get into, but to also graduate from one of the technical institutions in India, for example.

The people graduating from India may or may not be better educated than the average American college grad, but they are sure as hell smarter, and flat out brains beat out pre-career education every single time.

Other than that, for America at least, the way the global economy is going, people here are pretty much going to have to get a degree or go unemployed (unless the previous "companies getting their heads out of their asses" condition is met) because our taxes, safety regulations, and minimum wage laws make it prohibitively expensive to use Americans for unskilled labor. It's ten times cheaper, in some instances, to outsource than it is to keep American workers.

What that means is things are looking bleak for all but the best and the brightest, unless you feel like a) moving to one of those countries that now employs unskilled workers or b) repealing all the legislation that tries to make sure life in America is livable when you aren't rich.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I'll second this. Any opinion piece that starts with such a line is bound to be pretty off. Case in point.

OT: Congratulations, you've realized that a lot of what you learn in university is does not directly impact your career. New ground has clearly been broken. Me, I've taken sociology, world politics, and religion classes as gen-eds for a biochem degree.

But you know what? The fact that they're not in my main line of study does not make them worthless. I took the information that I learned from those courses and use it in my daily life. English classes are an absolute necessity as well, I won't comment on my own writing but the skills of my peers leaves a lot to be desired, let's just leave it at that.

Do you know why people look for college graduates when finding workers? I'll give you a hint: it's not for what you learned in school. It's a well-established idea that you learn most of your job while doing it. No, what they're looking for is the drive to work for your job, to sit down day after day and study things that you may never use. It's the ability to perform under stress, and to turn work in on time.

Your system of teaching only for what you need in the next five minutes will breed the kind of person that you can expect from a college dropout: someone who only does the bare minimum and is completely against education for education's sake. That is to say, it'll breed the intellectual equivalents of the machines that make auto parts.

Agreed, that's what education should be all about, but that doesn't change the fact that educational inflation is happening. You can barely do anything nowadays without some sort of a college degree, whether it's actually required for you to do the job well or not. Someone said it before, in a way it's quite disturbing that pretty much everything before college is just there to prepare yourself, eventually, for college.

And that, in turn, really screws some people over as college is horribly expensive, sometimes just out of reach. Those people are pretty much fucked. It's something I find quite shocking that I see in my own country as well. The government talks about wanting to transform out economy into a knowledge-based economy. Sounds like a fantastic plan to me, yet they want to cut spending in higher education and only make it less accessable. That's pretty much shooting yourself in your own foot, makes so little sense.

I've been posting on the web long enough to know not to waste time on well researched threads for people who don't appreciate them.

That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. You expect people to not care about your topic, so you don't put a lot of effort in it, which in turn means that people will indeed not care that much about your topic.

No wants to grow up to be a plumber, or a line worker, or an electrician anymore because those jobs fucking suck. Mindless desk may be boring as shit, but it ranks higher on the prestige scale than carpenter. Pays better too.

Which, I think, is a massive problem as well. Honestly, I hold more respect for a skilled carpenter or auto-technician than for some random manager.

 

[LandoCristo]

Hell, I think I'm one of the few people who want to go to college to actually learn anything. I'm fascinated by science (mostly physics, but chemistry is cool too, and screw biology), and want to go to college to learn more about these topics. Do I really care about a degree? A little, because the increased pay that often comes with a degree (anecdotal evidence, but my uncle got a 25% raise for doing the same job when he got his Bachelors degree), but I don't really have grand ambitions for life, so getting an uber-expensive degree to work a $60k job doesn't make sense to me. I want to go to college to learn, not to get huge debt so I can get a better job to help pay off the huge debt that I got by going to college.

 

[REDACTEDREDACTED]

2: The US is no longer a "blue collar" economy, its a "white collar" economy. White collar jobs almost by definition require a college education, even to get a basic grasp of knowledge required to operate in that field. Even the military, many MOSs require an almost college-level of education, at least in one specific area. You have to go to college (or an equivalent) to be an officer even.

3: The US simply no longer desires the kinds of jobs that don't require higher education. No wants to grow up to be a plumber, or a line worker, or an electrician anymore because those jobs fucking suck. Mindless desk may be boring as shit, but it ranks higher on the prestige scale than carpenter. Pays better too.

You're projecting your views onto the US at large - hardly a good argument. But you're serious, aren't you? That's what scares me. Some sort of "prestige scale" exists? That's the sort of thinking that led to a college degree becoming this "elite" status that everyone wants to pursue - that they need to pursue so they don't get a "crap" job. Never mind the fact that most self-employed and/or blue collar workers enjoy a degree of autonomy that white collar employees can only dream of - autonomy which has been shown to be key to happiness. (Seriously, 2 minutes with Google.) No, you must work white collar so you can...look down on others? Compare how good your job is to your friends? Make more money? If that's all it's about - money - take a "blue collar job" for 4 years, put that money into savings, and watch compound interest do its thing.

I'll reiterate my anecdotal evidence - the happiest people I know are those who are in business for themselves, and they are plumbers, electricians, contractors, cleaners, and generally blue-collar people. What good is it to be rich if you're miserable? What good is it to have a high-paying job if you come home from your cubicle+commute and hate the idea of waking up in the morning to go to work?

Anyways. Sure, you need a college degree to get into certain fields. But you shouldn't need it. It's become a requirement where it used to be a "leg up" on the competition - and it shouldn't even be that. Just because you were breathing and had a pulse throughout your forced march through school is no reason to give you a job over someone who's had experience and discipline, but no degree. The education system has become so watered down that it's no longer a proper yardstick.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Oh, I know well enough of the corruption and apathy at the high school level. I have gone into great, lengthy detail in previous posts, which I'll spare everyone from, but I totally agree with you. Part of the problem is that most teachers below the university level are simply that. Teachers. They are not practitioners within their field of tutelage, but simple plug and play stand ins who stay one week ahead of the students in the course package they're given from higher ups.

Sad but true. I recall in my high school I had an electronics and programming instructor who knew his stuff because he applied it regularly. He taught a conglomerate class for Visual Basic, FORTRAN, and two or three other (probably dead now) computer languages.

One year after I had him, he retired from our district and moved out.
His replacement was a student teacher doing his required teaching hours, and while he was certainly driven (and certainly not stupid), he was trying to teach something like 4 or 5 different programs/subjects at once; to the point where he had the only three remaining advanced C++/Computer students who hadn't graduated yet (myself included) essentially teaching for him.

The biggest hurdle to fixing these problems, I think, is Big Education. The unholy alliance between the teachers unions and the Dept. of Education have turned our schools into an abysmal money pit which only hurts the students, and damages the future of not just our country, but the world.

Around here, it isn't the Teacher Unions that are running schools into the ground, but upper level administrative staff and general School Board idiocy. My classmates used to joke about our High School becoming a prison to keep us penned away (and from committing crime out of boredom) from society, but then a few things happened during my Senior year (and after):

-Dress code tightened considerably
-The older wire-reinforced glass swing doors were replaced with these pane-free (no/small window) blue prison doors. And yes, they were the same exact sort of door they were installing in the region's new jail at that time, just minus the kevlar reinforcement.
-Mandatory hours of community service in order to graduate
-Numerous bans on harmless activities.
-Parent-Teacher "Policing" (certain school activities carried on beyond the classroom)

All we had the school board to thank for, and all done on an ever-decreasing budget.
I met someone on campus at my current university who shared some of his experiences, and they speak of administrative personnel who "retired" only for their replacements to arrive, clean up the mess they made, and then leave with an outrageous "retirement" package.

While I can see the necessity (at a basic level) for Unions to try to attract potential teachers to districts by keeping it from becoming a dead-end job, today's unions are putting considerable financial strain with their demands.
It's certainly a different age from when unions were definitely needed.

 

[VondeVon]

In my experience - in Australia - the main problem with tertiary education is not knowing what to do to get to what you want in the end. The best advice I've ever had is 'do whatever interests you and it's through those units that you will find your career'. Of course, this has led to more than a couple of absolutely fascinating, enjoyable but but time-and-money-wasting years as I tried many different interests until I found 'the one'.

Not too long ago, Tertiary education used to be free. I can understand why that might not be possible anymore, but I think the first year should be government-funded. Let everyone just try any darn unit they feel like, over a wide range of topics, for a year. Then at least when they get into debt for their education, it'll be for a clear goal.

 

[Marowit]

I am not sure what initiated this rant by the OP, and I even agree with some of the points - specifically if you're not going to try in school you shouldn't be going.

That said, without higher education there a lot of jobs that would go unfilled - OP thinks not (I suppose he imagines a world in which the US manufacturing is still around) - but in our current economy it's the truth. Our k-12 doesn't prepare its students with the knowledge necessary to code a program, navigate financial markets, work in a biological lab, etc...It may be possibly to re-tool k-12 to create more niche-oriented education, and thereby bypassing the need that secondary education fills...but then you'd have to deal with the similarities between that world and A Brave New World...if palliative care was equated with death panels one can only imagine how well that'd go over here in the states.

Personally, I got my job after graduating with a B.S., because of the degree I had and the training it provided me with. Seems worth it to me, but I am also not jaded nor consider myself old (I'm just about 27).

If you really wanted to answers to the questions you pose, about tuition, you could easily find that out - most public universities have to report where tuition goes. But, then again, that's not the point of a rant.

And no we're not backwards, we're actually ahead of the curve. Detroit is what the rest of the country is going to feel like in 15 years.

I am not so sure about this. Most services/industries that can be exported/automated have already been done - it makes the most fiscal sense to do so. Basically the reasons why Detroit has hit rock bottom, and our reliance on services industries/consumption for our economy.

But in 15 years if the area of the country I live in, New England, is like Detroit I'll give you a whole $5, and you can take that asset and put it in the bank.

 

[Johnnyallstar]

Hold the kid back, he wouldn't want to be in a group of kids who weren't born in the same 365 day spectrum, would he? No, he would be much better off retaking a whole grade level and being with kids that were born in the same 365 day spectrum. So what if it stunts his intellectual growth, it'll be so much better for his self esteem, right?

Being with other children your age helps develop social skills. I have known some smart, extremely wacky ones in my day.

If we were talking 10 year difference, I'd wholeheartedly agree. If we were talking 5 years, I'd agree. If we were talking 3 years, I could probably agree that there would probably be some tension. But one year? Really? You think a complete stunting of intellectual growth by making the student retake a more shallow version of of what he already knows simply because of some assumed inability to socialize with kids one year older? That's an inane argument.

The other side of that coin is "we need to promote people, even though they failed every class simply because they HAVE to be with children their age." Could you make a rational justification of that? I know I can't, and I think I'm a pretty good bullshitter when I put effort into it.

Back to the issue, look at how the age is set. If you're a September baby, you can be one year ahead of an October baby. That's a 30 day difference in age allotting to a one year difference in education. You can't assume that the September baby would then be better equipped to handle kids born the prior than an October baby simply because he's a few days older. Age has very little to do with social skills. Experience and personality are better indicators, and that one month of age difference doesn't guarantee better experience. You shouldn't hold back the October baby simply because of an asinine assumption that a few days younger means totally inept social skills.

Wouldn't have made a bit of difference to me, simply because I'm somewhat of an introvert, and couldn't care less about how old someone is.