patrick.net

I think a good university education has a wide range of facets with some facets being stressed more depending upon the focus and degree.

1) Graduates should have competent reading, writing, and mathmatics skills.
2) Graduates should have developed analytical and critical thinking skills.
3) Graduates should have applicable knowledge of the field studied.
4) Graduates should have life skills proficiency to be a good citizen of the United States.

Earning power is irrelevant to some and of critical importance to others. Someone majoring in 19th Century English Literature probably doesn't care about making a lot of money out of college while a chemical engineer who is fluent in English and Chinese can pull in serious bank upon graduation.

We are currently living in a climate of anti-education in the United States. The practice of homeschooling has steadily risen along with the cost barriers of graduating college. More students are now working their way through school with full time jobs than ever before as scholarships are cut across the country.

Our nation is suffering from this climate of anti-education. Year after year we slip further behind industrialized and developing nations. China has more Honor Students than the United States has students! Think about that for a moment when we consider the globalization of the world and the competition Americans will face in the global marketplace.

Edit: Prior to World War 2, Germany was the undisputed scientific learning center of the world. All of the best universities were in Germany. Thankfully for the world, Germany as rediscovered their scientific leadership and now holds more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology, and medicine than any other nation in the world. Let's hope America can do the same.

@SoCal Renter

Thanks. This is an important thing to think about.

@mdovell said:

"It can be argued that private colleges/universities often can have lower standards than public. What gets students in the door is grades and money. So in a economic downturn what does a private school do to increase enrollement? Lower the price? nope..raise the price? probably not..they lower the standards. It also can be interesting to see how some majors do in different graduate schools because it can be fire and brimstone. The very mission statement of some private schools isn’t even education but other intents. Religious schools are fine but that teaches more to be a better Christian, Jew, Moslem etc. In addition if someone transfers from those schools into a non religious one there is only so many credits that can be taken. I’ve overheard a conversation by one that is a full year behind because religious classes cannot be accepted for anything other than electives."

http://patrick.net/?p=654426#comment-727105

This good comment applies here too!

I am still connected with some people I went to college with. I think there is some assistance factor in whatever degree program you went to, that you KNOW other people in the same field later in life. This is not true so much with high school. The people you were crammed into high school with have little connection with your adult life and career. I went to my 20-year high school reunion and it was boring as hell and I'm not doing that again. This is probably true with trade schools as well. My point being that high school is not enough.

For everyone who thinks a college education is worthless, bzzt wrong. The only question is it worth the "investment" to gain future earning power. Bachelors and higher aren't getting MUCH for all their increased productivity over the decades, but they are getting something. It's clear however that high-school or less are on the losing end of the wage arbitration game by the plutocracy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/05/us-inequality-infographic_n_845042.html#s261411&title=Wage_Inequality

Vincente that graph is just a single statistic, it can't really prove anything. It's an equivalent to pointing out that more English speaking people have cancer, therefore speaking English causes cancer. People that end up going to college or etc are more often motivated and financially well off in order to succeed than those who do not have either luxury of such or desire to attend which is why you see a trend.

Graph doesn't show the fact that people like Bill Gates for example dropped out, or many people who doing really well in business are doing nothing related to what they learned back in college/university.

College as a structure isn't necessary for that, all it takes is personal desire to be good at something and taking time to learn that trade. There are books, internet, and work experience which for most part surpass what professors teach. A lot of professors from my experience were stuck somewhere in the 60's / 70's (since only really old guys are professors) and curriculum becomes very outdated.

Colleges are an old dated way of learning. Information age technology is superior to old expensive structures IMO for learning.

ChrisLA,

The FACT of the matter is that engaging in structured learning is some kind of assistance.

This is not an exact comparison, but you take any random group of workers, and measure their productivity. Then assign them to work from home, and watch their productivity drop. The whole "I'll learn college from the internet" idea just doesn't work out generally. Anecdotes to the contrary, it just doesn't work out for the population. People who are entire self-motivated and bound to succeed are few and far between. Those people as you already know, can and do bypass university, good for them but there are not enough of them to run our industries and businesses.

You do have a good point there. However, I really see college as a dated standard, one that is falling behind.

College is all about providing information to the students in a standardized way. Especially since for years that was the only way to do it. Today, however, college education information is years behind. New ideas, standards come out daily. Yet college curriculum's are years behind that.

I think in the next 10 to 20 years we'll see more colleges change over to "online" types where students will no longer show up to specific classes and learn from the web via flexible schedule.

I went to college, I feel like it was wasted time for most part, other than some social skills. A lot of classes were irrelevant, and granted it's good to be well rounded... I rather learn rounded stuff on my own time not paying for it. Learning anthropology of Africa or how movies came around? That's a pretty useless topic for me on a daily basis that I could have learned by watching a PBS special for 30 minutes.

At the end I'm doing nothing related to what I learned in college anyway. And I ended up being self taught.

ChrisLA says

I think in the next 10 to 20 years we’ll see more colleges change over to “online” types where students will no longer show up to specific classes and learn from the web via flexible schedule.

I disagree. Human interaction is key. We are social monkeys, and we learn best a broad series of topics when surrounded by peers and encouraged to pay attention to even things we don't see as immediately useful.

How's home schooling working out? Is it leading to throngs of home-schooled kids taking over all our businesses and rising to the top? We've got what a million or two of them who are now adults, how many are tops in their career fields?

Home schooling leads to diverse results. In the best case it is better than most public schools..but in the worst case (as Vincent says). I am concerned most about homeschooled children learning science (labwork especially )

Home schooling here is the American Christian version of Madrasah. Think Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge 1995. Teaching his children to hate the government and read mainly the Bible. That didn't end well of course. The greatest success story I can ever find attributed to home schooling is one Nobel prize winner, who was only home schooled up to 8th grade. After that he attended regular schools and University of course. I'm perfectly OK with experiments, however the promise of home schooling producing hordes of little Einsteins just hasn't panned out, and it's had plenty of time to deliver. In other realms we'd mark it as a failure and move on, but this is a religious issue for some people and they'll cling to it no matter what.

I know it is getting off the university education a bit but,
How common is the above case? His version of the Bible is unorthodox if he hates the government...
I would like to see more studies. The jury is out for me.

2007 National Center for Education Statistics survey, 83% of parents said that providing "religious or moral instruction" was a reason for their choice to homeschool. I'm certain that is not the whole story as home schooling is not well tracked or studied. Are they all Weavers afraid the gubmint might cause their young clones to doubt the world was made 6,000 years ago? I think not, but that sort of component apparently plays a MUCH larger role than claims of public school inadequacy.

Thanks for the good comments so far, especially from Vicente and SouthernCal Renter.

Speaking for myself and my close friends, the main things we got out of college was the chance to engage in intellectual pursuits with other smart people, and a network of other smart people who can be career resources for each other. In particular, one guy I know went to MIT and has gotten most of his jobs from people he knew from college.

thunderlips11 says

The skilled trades cannot be performed by unskilled immigrants, either. They require training and certifications and often a good command of English and Math, something that poor rural immigrants from third world countries don’t have and can’t quickly get.

I wouldn't be too sure of that. At the peak of the boom I saw job sites in Oregon with illegals doing wiring, plumbing, brick/block work, and framing pretty much unsupervised. Whether they were skilled or not is an open question, but obviously they were skilled enough to get through building inspection.

thunderlips11 says

Do those same networking opportunities exist at State College, where Jeremy Rockbottom whose dad is a carpenter, will get job leads from Jenny Mittlestand whose mother is an office assistant in the DMV where she has little hiring influence?

Again, from my own experience, its kind of a yes and no thing. I went to a state university myself although one with strong engineering/cs programs. I've gotten some professional networking opportunities as a result although not as good as some others...on the other hand, if I ever wanted a job back in my home state (Indiana), I have quite a few contacts there who could help me. So obviously the networking opportunities are not the same, and I think this could be one of the big differences between the most elite schools and merely good schools.

thunderlips11 says

If somebody wants a rubber stamp to get a job, then they shouldn’t be in college, in my opinion. We are wasting resources on somebody who isn’t interested and will get nothing out of it. They might get one or two things out of it “by accident”, but they can do that watching Nova, PBS, or the History Channel. They will learn better on the job

I agree somewhat - the actual curriculum could be duplicated at a much lower cost. Again, what really made it a uniquely enriching experience for me was the interaction with other interested and smart students (and interactions with faculty). But if you don't give a toss about enrichment and just want a job you'd be better off doing an apprenticeship or some such thing.

thunderlips11 says

Here’s another philosophical question. Isn’t networking a nice, modernistic way to say “Nepotism” or “Patronage” - the reward of family and friends as opposed to Merit? Is going to college for networking purposes not really much different than “introducing young Werther von Hordschact VIII into high society?” Not making a judgement here, but are we fooling ourselves in terms of meritocracy?

Oh, yes! But how else could it be? Humans are social animals and companies are (among other things) social organizations. When my department is making hiring decisions, there isn't any way that we could make it a totally objective process because we're not robots and neither are the people we are interviewing. So if someone recommended a former co-worker, or a friend from college that would be taken very seriously.