In reply to Wombat as well. It’s a good discussion. But by ‘turning out well rounded people’ I feel you are essentially reinforcing that a four year arts degree is the new high school diploma. Also not to get into the point that a four year program still doesn’t teach important work/life skills like constructive criticism or personal finance or nutrition, so it’s arguably not that well rounded.
Those BA’s you’ve worked with probably didn’t get helped into the door of their current jobs by their degree much either. So it’s pretty much a minor personal asset at best, a debt albatross more typically. The language angle is interesting but a second language can be a big asset regardless.
Anyway it came across too negative but I feel that the tens of millions of arts graduates each year have essentially devalued the degree. Also entry requirements are in some cases the ability to consume oxygen.
I guess if a BA is the new high school diploma after which you decide what to do, that’s fine. Then its time to elect a government that wants to bring the cost down…
That’s not true. Without a degree they would have been scrubbed out immediately without 5-10 years experience in the industry. That’s the two paths to this kind of work. You have to have years of experience in the industry which will usually limit you to one specific application for that department, or you have the college degree which gets you the interview. At the interview, you will be evaluated on your communication skills, critical thinking ability and other standard soft-skills. Some sites will actually run you through a logic/critical test. Most high school grads would never get past that test. Many adults with college degrees couldn’t get past it either. Critical thinking is a skill students should be picking up in college. Sometimes they get that ability sooner but not as often as you’d think.
You might think well just replace the BA with the BS and they’re golden… except almost every individual in IT with a CS couldn’t pass the test. I don’t think that means anything other than they were not well-suited to these positions. They still do and did fine with the tradition IT roles.
I don’t think college degrees are worthless even the ones which lack in practical skills. For employers, they are reasonably good screening device for measuring three important things. Is the person intelligent? Have they learned how to learn? and do they have a good work ethic in being able to meet a deadline?. Early on in college, I was told that important skill was learning how to do learn on my own. Now I suppose not every person picks that up, but I think most do at least at the top universities.
On the other hand, it is clear that many colleges have priced their degrees that their cost exceeds their value to most students. It is also true that for most average or below average high school students sending them to a four college to essentially redo high school is a waste of everyone’s time and money. These students typically lack the maturity, brains, and/or interest in college.
It is not like we don’t know how to train these students. The US military does a fine job of training average high school kids to become productive members of society with valuable jobs skills and a good work ethic. Now the military is an expensive jobs training program, but there is lesson to learn from them and the German apprenticeship program.
I find it ironic that the whole premise of this thread from Guap started with “we were given money to pay off our student loans and I am upset that other people may be given money to pay off their student loans”.
Oh, true enough. We have to decide, though; what is the role of higher (post K-12) education? Do we really want colleges to be teaching personal finance and nutrition as life skills? Shouldn’t that be done somewhere else? The reason we even ask these questions is largely because colleges were democratized, which was pretty much a good thing, in the period particularly after WWII. They used to be only for the elite, as they continued to be in Europe (and to some extent perhaps still are, at the highest levels). With the democratization of college–meaning, only a bare minimum of qualifications and the ability to scrounge the tuition being necessary to enroll–naturally many, many people took advantage of the opportunity, because up to that point, the number of people with college degrees was relatively low, and exclusive, so that they all had good jobs, more or less. This led to a huge expansion of people on the market with degrees, an expansion not driven by economic need but by social dynamics. This led to a shift in hiring. Once you start to shift your hiring priorities to expect college degrees, regardless of whether those degrees are really necessary, you create a market for churning out diplomas as credentials. And, in turn, you pretty much require people to go to college, which then becomes the new high school…and the “old” high school doesn’t end up doing squat.
It seems reasonable to actually discuss the current state of tuition, school costs, for profit failures and student debt which are factors behind the reason these programs exist. IBR didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
This doesn’t ring true in my experience at all. Quite the opposite, I found the US system far, far less democratized, specially in grad school, but those undergrads didn’t seem to come from a diverse background either in general. Are you mistaking the UK system with that of Europe as a whole (the UK system is an exception) ??
Certainly I’m no expert on European higher education. In the American context, the democratization I’m talking about is primarily a market sort of democratization. That is, in the USA, if you can find the money to pay for it, there are pretty much no barriers to going to college, in terms of any real academic or intellectual requirements. My understanding, which could be outdated, wrong, or both, is that in places like Germany, for instance, if you qualify for university it’s paid for, so there is economic democratization, but only a small-ish portion of the population actually qualifies intellectually/academically to go to university. So it’s sort of the inverse of the US approach.
In the USA, even graduate schools are full of people whose only real qualification to be there is that they can pay the tuition. Some schools even rely on terrible students who can pay full tuition to subsidize the scholarships they give to really well qualified but not so wealthy students (the NYT had a great feature story in their Sunday magazine a while back on Valparaiso Law School about exactly this).
What I’m referring to in terms of democratization here is the change from the pre-WWII American higher education system, which was primarily open to and of interest to only the elites, and the post-WWII system, particularly as it changed in the 1960s with the baby boom, which developed the concept that everyone needed to and could go to college. While it was, and remains, segregated and firewalled by economic level–and at many schools, diversity in many categories lags society at large, though some schools are much better than others–conceptually it’s far more normalized and democratized than it ever was before, in that “going to college” is a normal goal, even expected, for most.
I see. It’s interesting, because here, if you talk about democratization, you are indeed talking mostly about economic democratization. That is, everybody should afford to go to college. And everybody should be able to gain the right to go. But not everybody should attain that right (in the sense that everybody should be able to run for public office, but not everybody should have to be earned, but it’s not undemocratic to have that limit).
There’s certainly some limits to the offer and demand equation (getting into medical undergrad in Spain forces you to be in the top 0.5% academically, or even higher, for example). I’m not sure I’d call this undemocratic, though. Everybody has the option to try to attain high grades (most medical school incoming students come from the public free educational system), while not everybody has the option to get enough money to be able to afford expensive education.
I know we’ve talked about this before, but an “art” degree and an “Arts” degree are different. Technically speaking, I have a BA in Computer Science. I’ve never had an employer get bent out of shape because my CS degree was a BA instead of a BS. The BA and BS classes mirror each-other when it comes to the CS classes themselves, but slants more towards math as opposed to engineering when it comes to the sub-classes. I ended up getting the BA because I started my first 3 semesters as a physics major. By going with a BA, I was able to apply more of those first classes towards my new major. There was also the fact that I found the physics and math classes more engaging.
All that being said, a push back towards trade-schools and community colleges would go a long way in helping to blunt some of the crushing student loan issues. The negative views towards these schools seemed to start in the 80’s and reach fruition in the 90’s. The propaganda was that a “trade-school” was where you went if you were too dumb to make it in a real college. Some of this push was due to the massive spike in wealth in Japan when they lept forward in the tech realm. The U.S. needed to catch up, and that wasn’t going to happen by having a bunch of mechanics and plumbers. We needed computer nerds and engineers. So there was a concerted effort to push kids towards those majors.
It’s still going on today. This press that if you aren’t in STEM, you are going to have a bad life. Telling a kid who loves to work on cars and has a real shot at owning his own shop that he is a loser if he doesn’t go in to computers instead is both bad for the kid and bad for society. That kid is going to end up with a pile of student loans for a career he never wanted in the first place, when he could have gone with a cheaper up-front education that resulted in him still being able to make a good living.
I tell my students, look,; no one ever calls me up in the middle of the night and says, “Hey, quick, come tell me about Andrew Jackson and the Bank War!” I have, however, made emergency calls to my plumber, and he’s worth every penny when he responds. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, “soft” skills and disciplines are essential for many reasons, but the idea that somehow “trade” skills are less valuable is ludicrous. Give me a kick-ass mechanic, electrician, plumber, or the equivalent over someone with a college degree who can’t do the work. You can also make damn fine money in the trades. It’s hard work, but rewarding, and useful as all get out to everyone.
Telling a kid that it’s a mistake to go into a trade and instead insist that they go to college doesn’t seem to be a thing that actually happens out in the wild. There are 37,000 public and private high schools in the US, and I bet that if you dug really hard you might be able to find two - maybe three - guidance counselors that tell their kids that trade school is a terrible idea and college is the only solution. The other 36,997 of them would give you a pitying look for thinking that… and probably wonder if your counselor was one of those two or three.
In my county, about 80% of our graduating seniors go to college; either the highest in the nation or else up in the top three. And yet they push trade school very heavily here and they are very careful not to denigrate it (or military service or whatever) as a viable option.
Now as for pushing STEM, yeah that’s a thing that happens. But mostly because they want the kids to know that in terms of job security and pay rates, it’s one of their best bets. Every model out there says that the US will not be able to fill the STEM positions that will arise in the next decade, and that new STEM jobs (which don’t always require a degree) will occur at a rate almost double that of other occupations.
Pressuring little Susie - with her passion for cooking French cuisine - into petroleum engineering would be cruel and probably do her no favors. But on the other hand, any guidance counselor who (looking at Susie’s high marks in chemistry and math) didn’t also point out that a STEM career path would likely pay far better and be more stable than that of a cook would be frankly negligent.
Where are the trade schools now? Locally none of the school districts offer the kinds of stuff they did 40-50 years ago, the auto and wood shop type stuff. The JC’s have some of it. But beyond that I think you need to join a union apprenticeship program.
Community Colleges in our area are filling this gap. I went to a few night welding classes so I can fix some things and was overwhelmed at the shop our community college has. They must have had 60-80 work areas (little 5x5 curtained areas) with a little welding table, and machines to basically handle almost any kind of metal fabrication.
The Unions do have the jobs locked down though - so even though you can get into welding school, it can take 2 years or more to get a job. It’s a really long waiting list. Is that a good thing or a bad thing is the question.
My high school offered minimal trade type classes and zero guidance towards any sort of trade school. I’m pretty sure here trade school was just code for community college which was code for the place kids went who couldn’t make it in 4 year college or messed up their credits enough to probably need to take a few of those first.
The only other trade schools i knew about were the for profit ones that are folding one by one because they seem like little more than scams.
Yes this sounds about right to me. Like I said, a limited slate of trade classes. Hell, that was mostly handled by the community college even! There was a special program where they would bus off the kids for half a day to do those type of classes. It was largely the bottom performing kids whom getting even an 800 on the SAT was a pipe dream.
From what I can tell from the first-year college students I see every fall, they don’t even think about not going to college, even if they really want to do something that is, in reality, a trade. The school systems as a rule just take it as a default that college is what you would aspire to after graduation. As Scuzz points out, there are few “trade school” options any more. It’s apprenticeships, often with unions, which can be very good and lucrative but are very hard to get and very competitive, or community college programs that sometimes have agreements with local trades, or, well, take your chances pretty much.
Unlike a lot of technical colleges, they haven’t succumbed to the easy money of shifting into a fly-by-night diploma mill for online students. They still primarily specialize in aircraft and auto mechanical trades with some medical courses.
