In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
I try not to make posts primarily links to articles, but this article about the truth behind America’s “everybody should go to college” mentality is both enveloping and thought-provoking (the author definitely proves his qualifications as a teacher).
Personally, I’m a little split on the subject, though I lean slightly in the direction of the author. On the one hand, I agree that the ideal that everybody should have a college degree is just that, an ideal. Some people are not able to, or have no reason to, obtain a college degree, and encouraging them to do so is a waste of their time, money, and energy.
On the other hand (and this is a tangent “Professor X” doesn’t touch on), I see and interact with people who haven’t had a college education, or have gone to a local community college at night, and it’s often surprisingly difficult. I’m not referring to intellectual differences, but I feel that going away to college gives you a more open view of the world. It not only exposes you to different cultures and ways of thinking, but shoves you into a hot, crowded room with them. It forces you to eat, sleep, and live with them. If that doesn’t broaden your horizons, I don’t know what will. Those who haven’t experienced this part of the education system I find are often much more naive to the world…they see people as more black and white than they really are. I’m not saying that college is the only place where one can learn these shades of gray, but for many who are born, grow up, work, raise a family, and die in the same place all their lives, this is the only opportunity they have to do so.
If it is idealistic to think that everyone should have a college education, it’s downright foolish to think that everyone should go away to college, and while I agree completely, if we don’t work towards ideals and dreams, how else will we make progress?
Tags: college
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Then there is the fact that our pre-college system of public education in the United States doesn’t really educate well. If you expect your coworkers to be able to at least attempt to write a paper, work to deadlines, etc., a college education is often one way to help set a minimum bar.
That isn’t to say that people don’t graduate college with weak skills or without a good general education or that there aren’t people out there that do well in spit of a lack of official education but I’d much rather work with a group of people who had at least a Bachelor’s degree than with a room of high school graduates who hadn’t been educated further.
I’ve also felt that a college degree proved that someone could stick with something for at least a few years to jump through the hoops required for graduation.
I think I’m in agreement with Al.
The requirement for a college education is generally making up for the deficiencies in high school. Sadly people do often graduate HS and still mange to be illiterate (using the standard of being able to read “at a 3rd grade level”, which is pretty much a typical newspaper or AP article). I think everyone knows at least one person who you can’t figure out how they made the cut and graduated.
That said, the real lesson of lower education is to “learn how to learn”, while the purpose of upper education is to “learn how to think”. It’s not so much about world literature, but about being able to read something that was written in a different time and interpret it as the writer intended (a useful skill when trying to figure out what your predecessor was thinking when they did _______). It’s not about the lab science as much as it is about understanding process, research, and writing a good proposal.
A lot of people could do better in a trade school, which really is under valued in the US. People think you need a college degree to repair a refrigerator, when what you really need is good refrigeration repair training. It’s true these degrees are unfairly looked down upon, but that’s partially because they are generally closed commercial institutions which churn out graduates. It’s thought of more as “buying a degree” rather than earning.
The real fix is to make high school much more collegiate in terms of academics and interaction (group work, teacher/student interaction), something that needs to be done to be competitive in the world market anyway. Will this ever happen? I have my doubts.
Trying to push everyone through college is a huge waste of resources and also destructive. If you want to broaden horizons, give everyone who doesn’t go to college a free six-month backpacking trip around the world — it’ll be cheaper and considerably more life-changing.