America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree - Chronicle.com: "Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.
Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate."
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OK, but a great deal depends on how you spend your years in college. The escalator theory doesn't work anymore. You don't end up four years later on a higher floor in the building of life. And the humanities' claim that you are getting some mystical "learning how to think" experience that will translate into being incredibly valuable to any employer? Pure BS.
But lots of students set themselves up very nicely for jobs, careers, and graduate education. You need a goal and a plan, and you need to understand that you are in the real world already, not getting prepared for it.
And don't forget the other option.
2 comments:
Amen to this post. College students also need to focus on learning something, not on getting grades. Learning = work. Sadly, it's entirely possible to graduate with a B average and have learned little to nothing.
Exactly. The key to benefiting from college is learning how to do something that somebody else will pay you to do, or make something that people will buy. If you are independently wealthy, just going there for the learning alone is a great thing, but if you have to make your own way in the world you have to think about learning how to do or make something.
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