TheCatt wrote: More than half of the Republicans surveyed for a Pew Research Center poll released Monday say colleges and universities are hurting the country,
What a bunch of babies. They're wrong. Are colleges perfect? Of course not. Hurting America? Insanity.
They are absolutely wrong to a point, but so are Dems thinking colleges are perfect. In fact, anyone who says "everyone should go to college" is full of shit and they
are hurting the country.
More education is rarely a bad thing. So I would like to think the Repubs taking the survey were responding more to the debt incurred, the worthless degrees being created, the fact that many jobs don't really need degrees to do, the wasted years learning theory based on dated information rather than learning on the job, the liberal leanings of college, etc.
Every labor job in this world does not and should not require a college degree. All the lower tier jobs like receptionist, administrative assistants, filing clerks, customer service reps, etc. don't need college degrees. They just need on the job training. Cops and firefighters don't need degrees as they have special schools for them. IT people, generally, do not need a degree. (Certifications spin our world, except for you programming types?) We're a service based economy, why does everyone need a degree?
Why does everyone need to go into debt right out of high school? Can't we just put a literal shackle on them instead and let them get to work?
There are a LOT of jobs that need degrees, like engineers, programmers (I guess? Aren't there specialized schools for programmers now? Can't someone learn code in their basement and go work at Valve?), lawyers, doctors, HR people (Who are a huge part of the problem of "Everyone needs a degree!"), managers for corporations (do fast food managers really need a degree? No.), etc.
What are we, as a society, getting out of everyone being forced to go to college? Seriously. A more educated populace? Because I'm not seeing that. Better run corporations? I don't know if that's true or not, but I know corporate greed is probably at an all time high? More people in debt? Yes. More people immediately getting jobs in their field out of college? No.
How many tens of thousands of kids will graduate college this year with general education or communications degrees? And before you say, "Well that's their fault", it's not. Shouldn't the colleges be advising them as to where their degrees will take them? What to expect? Nope, they're just taking their money.
GORDON wrote: I still see a basic connection between what amounts to inexperienced kids with bottomless funds to attend school, and schools jacking up their price.
I am currently taking my second college class of the summer. These are online classes. That means no classroom and no overhead for the college to pay for. The instructors send out an email each week, but other than that, they only grade as there are no lectures. I rented a book for $90 for one of the classes, the other didn't have a book. Each assignment was instead a collection of articles from the internet. Each class has 30-40 students. Over $3K for these two online summer classes, which also means they're condensed.
Yeah...
College IS a good thing that's needed, but we need to stop pretending everyone needs it. I worked with a guy who had a masters in ancient Greece history or some shit. He was working nights as an operator making $15/hour. I asked him what he could do with that degree and he said "teach", but he indicated he'd never make back the money he spent on the degree.
So you'd never hear me say that we need to do away with colleges, but I do think we need to scale them back. I don't think everyone needs to go and I don't think they're currently priced fairly.
