Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Before you send your child to college

Read this. As this site noted a while back, sending a subpar student to college doesn't guarantee them a good job. The opposite--high debt, wasted years of life, and the failure to learn a trade--is statistically speaking closer to the truth.

Yes, there are those who will find their calling later in life--let's just not throw good money after bad winnowing them out in the "Animal House" right after high school, OK?

7 comments:

Gino said...

i dont know how it got started, but somehow america thinks the road to a good future includes college.
so much so, that our school system is desigend with college as the goal.
its to the point where schools rarely offer, and never encourage,the vocational arts.

this needs to change.

a good mechanic is every bit as valuable as another lawyer, and much more valuable to society than another sociology major or harvard grad.

Bike Bubba said...

Gino, I think it got started with the Morrill Act of 1870 or so, that established land grant colleges and allocated one section of each township to schools. (and is also why farm country looks like a grid until you get into areas settled before the Civil War, or until you get into the far west)

Then it got another boost with the GI Bill, and an even bigger boost with the Great Society.

And like you say, it's not entirely clear to me either why it's more important to generate 100 more lawyers or performance artists than it is to get five decent mechanics and a couple of good finish carpenters.

W.B. Picklesworth said...

Yup, that GI Bill was huge. I did my senior thesis on the vets going to college and post-secondary education exploded based on this subsidy. Schools needed to find some way to keep the numbers up after that wave... and now we have this.

I'm glad I went to college because it ended up working out for me, but it was a big old illusion wrapped in a pretty huge burden for awhile there.

Shawn said...

hmm...so, lower prices equal higher consumption? Strange.

And I tried to have this conversation the other day, and was hit with "oh, so you don't like children!?"

*headslap*

Yep. That's exactly it.

Anonymous said...

At this point, though, you have the issue of bachelor's-degree-as-entry-level-credential. We can talk all day long about why it shouldn't be that way, but it is. And, while there are always the great examples of people who didn't need the degree to make it in the professional world, not everyone will be that kind of self-starter.

Having said that, I thoroughly agree with not pushing your kids toward "college degree no matter what." There are still good options out there that don't require it -- it's just that there are so many now that require it, even if they don't strictly "need" it.

Bike Bubba said...

True. I'd love to be in the room, though, to watch somebody's HR telling Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Steve Wozniak that they were not capable of contributing to a high tech organization because they didn't have a sheepskin.

Actually, I HAVE seen a lot of good people kept out because of that--including some of the best engineers I've known in my life. yeesh.

Gino said...

my buddy and his younger bro worked together as engineers.
buddy got his degree on time.
his bro took a while, but in the meantime, like 10yrs, he was working as an engineer.

when he finally finished up the non-egineering courses required to get his degree, they gave him a good raise.
his work didnt change at all, but i guess having that last music class made him a better engineer of aeronautics worthy of a good raise.