I came from a really good high school that offered a breadth of knowledge across fields. When I went to college (granted in 1998) to become a "web designer" the curriculum and training was just not there. My first year was taking variations of the same math courses, the same english courses and a couple comp sci courses (teaching Java). It was heartbreaking. Anything design related involved drawing classes.
I dropped out mostly because I was too disheartened by what college was and didn't end up going to class. I was instead hacking in my dorm room on HTML, CSS and Photoshop. When I dropped out it led to immense guilt in relation to my family, who very lovingly had done everything they could to set me up to succeed. It was only a year later when I had a surprisingly decent pay check to show my parents that they didn't consider me unmotivated.
College isn't for everyone. It's especially not good if you know what you want to do and have mastered some manner of self-learning. For those of us that figure that stuff early, it's much better to just jump into the work and figure it out. In those ways I somewhat value a good high school as more important to college. It was there that I learned to learn and could explore my interests in a well-rounded curriculum.
I'm conflicted about how I'll deal with the scenario when my own kids grow up. I married a teacher, and speaking for myself I do very much value liberal arts educations. I just think a lot of those introductions need to be provided in High School, with secondary education focused more towards whatever your career is. If you don't know what that career is yet, I think potentially waiting a couple years to go to secondary education (be it college or trade school) till you know is a better bet.
My big takeaway is there isn't some magic formula for this. Everyone is different and we shouldn't pressure certain paths.
It might seem wasteful, but gateway classes are what allow upper level courses to assume basic competency and move much faster. I had a computer architecture class where one assignment was to write a fairly simple program in x86 ASM and the handholding was a recommended book to get you started.
That said, a lot of collages had real issues teaching computers in the 90’s. Competent staff was hard to retain and enrollment was skyrocketing. So many schools tried to shuffle students into other departments.
And, from my experience being part of that skyrocketing enrollment, quite a lot of them wanted to learn to "make stuff" and were complaining well into their third and fourth years that they weren't learning how to "do anything" in their computer science classes, since it was mostly theory.
The thing is, they were teaching theory because that's the harder stuff to pick up on your own. Want to learn a specific language? Just do it. It's not that hard, and there are online resources and plenty of books. Want to learn how to make some particular thing? harder, but also mostly doable from self study. But what would spur someone to learn theory of computation topics, or how to do algorithm complexity and runtime assessment? That's the sort of stuff that really benefits from a knowledgeable instructor, and only a small percentage of self-taught people will likely stumble into learning. Computer science is a science, and that's what they teach in school. It also makes you a better programmer, but it pays off in small ways over many years through more intricate knowledge, instead of front-loading all the gains into making you passable right now. That the better solution for some people, but not all.
This is why I always find myself skeptical of boot camp type programs. So many of them seem focused on specific tools: node plus react! rails plus angular! etc. On the other hand getting a top down view of things is also useful. But I think this is what I enjoyed about my college program; there was time for both. Bottom up theory can seem pointless and unmotivated, and top down practicum can be hard to extend and generalize. The combination is powerful.
You can look up the required courses for your major/minor to get a listing, then look up corse descriptions in a course catalog, and even look up the books associated with each class.
If that’s to hard talk to seniors with the major you’re considering to get an idea what’s ahead. I even sat through an upper level class in high school to see if I wanted to get an engendering or CS degree.
Quite the opposite. The barrier to entry of being required to spend 10s of thousands of dollars per year is extremely high and has only been increasing over the last 2 decades.
Perhaps college would have been the best option for getting a "well rounded education" at it's price point a couple decades ago, when it was 1/4th the cost.
But at current prices? I strongly doubt it is the most cost effective way of acquiring that service.
If you have to go 100K into debt, this is a huge barrier to entry. It means that only rich people, or those who are willing to shackle themselves into debt, can afford to go to college.
I think there's a lot of value in learning to work. And you can have ambition and grow yourself with or without college. For my kids, I'd be perfectly happy if they want to go to a trade school or to do something entirely different (like being a stay at home mom, or serving overseas for the peace corp, or whatever). What matters more to me is that they approach life from a perspective of learning and growing, that they have ambitions, and that they are kind and loving people.
Many people learn to do that from college, and that's great for them. For me, I really wanted to learn, but in the end was for a piece of paper. Like many hyped things in life, it seems overrated. Still good...but if you're the type that is already constantly learning, growing, reading, and self motivated, college doesn't offer a lot that you can't get outside of it.
My college also offered two flavors of popular intro courses... like there was Intro to Biology for people who wanted a taste of it, and a different Intro to Biology for people who intended to major in biology.
How about before you beat the curiosity and sense of wonder out of 5-8 year olds with times tables, memorizing the dates presidents were born, and repeating the word "prepositional phrase" a thousand times - that would be a good time to start.
They give them (the kindergarteners) twenty minutes of recess. Indoor recess, if the weather's bad, is often (part of) a movie. This is all day kindergarten, mind you, none of that half-day stuff.
Since school's largely in the Winter when the sun's up late and down early, and they're getting outside only about 20min a day, best guess is these kids are gonna have a lot of "ADHD" misdiagnoses and they're all gonna be badly nearsighted due to insufficient exposure to sunlight. The low-recess crap is incredibly unhealthy, in ways that will permanently harm many of these kids. Plus, you know, the whole obesity epidemic thing.
The school food's terrible, too. I think they've just done the same thing a lot of parents do and gone for whatever hyper-palatable crap they know the kids will eat (hungry or not) to reduce complaints (from parents—"my Sally just won't eat vegetables! She's going to starve!").
[EDIT] point being yes, schools' priorities—even the "good" ones—are totally messed up starting the very first year they have the kids.
History in the elementary school level seems near useless, aside from building reading comprehension skills.
I'm pretty sure in my own first grade experience that was the point where half the class started drifting towards the "I hate math" camp of now-adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Also, math education in general has a huge problem around teaching solutions without teaching the problem. (Hence the pervasive question of what will I ever need this for...) I will always know what a limit does, because my precalculus teacher taught it by finding the area under a curve using rectangles. We started with large rectangles, were shown the error. Cut the rectangles in half, hey error goes down. Make them really really small, error goes down even more! What happens if we make them zero? Oops, equation explodes because zero-width rectangles also have zero area... The function is discontinuous at zero. So let's learn limits to work around discontinuous points of a function!
It isn’t the elementary school’s child.
If society wants universal capability instead of depending on parent ability and inclination (rather scattershot) the answer is yes they do have a responsibility.
There are also weekends of course. But ultimately kids spend about as much time in school as they do with a (working) parent.
Parenting is the same. Not everyone is good at it, and it's in the best interests of society to raise kids to be as productive as possible even if (and especially when) their parents don't do a good job.
Public education has been a huge net positive for society over the last few hundred years. It used to be that most people couldn't even read; such people in the modern information economy would just be total drags on public resources. Better to have the state educate everyone as much as possible to ensure a talented, capable, intelligent workforce and society.
2. Too much schooling is detrimental to learning.
3. Most parents aren't trained in teaching. If we expect a parent to teach a child formal stuff, perhaps we should train the parents on how to do these things.
It is of course a conversation one could have on if parents should be held responsible.
Schools are the only force in childhood held even remotely accountable for the success of those children entering adulthood. Which is kind of where the desolation of inner city schools come from - the schools are punished for bad parenting, but have no real capacity (especially once punished via funding cuts) to do anything about it.
An absurd percentage of people can't properly learn the simple task of driving even after taking classes and passing a state exam. How do you imagine these people to perform in the task of raising a human being, from an objective perspective? The answer is they suck. Terribly.
Why wouldn't a linesman, electrician or carpenter be able to self educate? We live in the day and age of the internet, the largest store of human knowledge ever to exist is a few clicks and an inquisitive mind away.
I understand that college exposes you to things you might not have otherwise been exposed to, and provides teachers and mentors to facilitate the learning of that material. But if you attend college with the end goal of getting a degree to cash in for a paycheck like so many college age people do and you're not motivated to actually learn the material you're exposed to in any meaningful way and that information isn't retained then what's the point? Certainly that's not all college kids but I'd argue the vast majority are only there because they believe it to be a ticket to the middle class.
I'm a self-taught software engineer who never finished college, so the trade school stigma hits home. I certainly strive to be as educated and productive as possible in my life and career - and so far that path hasn't held me back at all. I'm employed, highly paid and fairly happy, I just chose not to receive that education in the confines of the classroom
Not because college is wonderful, but more because you cant get unsecured loans to sit at home and read.
(Also, pet peeve: these conversations often compare highly motivated and indepenhdent people who take the no college route to slackers who attend college.
I never see anyone pointing out the fact that highly motivated and independent people who do opt for college often do much better than they could've without the degree. Often in tippy top status/comp finance, medicine, and tech poaitions.
College doesn't make sense for everyone, but IMO it paradoxically makes the most sense for people who don't need it to enter technical fields like SWE. Because those are the ones who will end up on fast tracks after graduating that would be difficult to get on without the degree)
This is only true for situations where you live on campus, and your parents give you an allowance for anything not included in tuition. Many, many students have to work while going to school.
Classes + part-time work can easily add up to the same amount of time one spends on a full time job.
Also, there's a qualitative difference between a job and a part time gig. my part time jobs in early college were trivial and required no mental, no emotional effort, and no outside of work skills development. My part time jobs in late college were mostly tutoring, which was doubly good becayse I reviewed material and also I could do less of it because it paid well.
In any case, at the very least the combo of part time and no mental/emotional/professional devlopment effort makes a huge difference. At least IME.
- Had parents who instilled strong academic achievement at an early age.
- are between the ages of 18 and 22 with no family to take care of, no serious medical conditions, and really no major financial obligations.
- are interested enough and have the mental aptitude to study a major that can justify sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
- are sound enough to make it through a sometimes very rough and volatile period of young adulthood and stay focused enough to actually learn the material.
College is a privilege, historically that's what college was, only recently did college become a ticket to the middle class in the minds of most people. I really think that attitude needs to change. In all honesty, I make more than enough money now to go back and finish my degree and I'd probably get a lot more out of college a second time around - because I'd be there to learn, not to try to get the biggest paycheck. The incentives for college these days are all wrong. We need more young people spending their earlier years learning how to actually provide concrete value for the market, once they earn the money, then they can go and get that foundational and expansive education - most of which will certainly better you as a person but you'll never actually use in any concrete way in your day to day life.
Sure. But don't you think that there could hypothetically be better ways of doing this, without spending 10s of thousands of dollars per year?
Maybe there is a better "not a college" - college type experience that is more effective at achieving these started goals, for less money.
If I had time now to learn and do whatever I wanted, it'd probably be a huge time of growth with or without college. I guess that combination of taking courses of what you're interested in, and then also being able to study as a hobby, could be really useful.
In college I could sit with a group of 5, 10, or more people who have the background and interest to discuss a wide variety of topics at a high level, from world history to Shakespeare to calculus.
Online isn’t the same, and finding such a peer group outside school is much harder.
I'm not even sure this is the case. We (Americans) don't allow an 18 year old to have any sort of alcohol without potentially ruining their adult lives. We didn't let folks vote until 21, but there was an issue with drafts and things. My mother remembers being excited that she was going to vote at 18 instead of 21 - my mother is almost 60. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't allow women to get loans without a spouse, brother, or father signing for it. Women were never really proper adults.
American parents can still be pretty decisive on a college student's ability to go to college simply by refusing to release tax returns to the student. I'm not even sure folks can go to school without them. They certainly won't get loans.
A young person's life is just barely their own at 18, and they don't have full rights of adulthood.
My humanities courses in college were bona fide mind-expanding. The problem is many colleges run their programs more like trade schools, with zero emphasis on balance between the arts and sciences.
I tutored a few people who took the sophomore level "world history" classes that most kids took to satisfy the requirements. Those sounded like little more than brutal rote memorization exercises.
And you don’t get an expansive view of human knowledge in “general studies courses,” you get it by taking a broad array of specialized courses. Again: takes time.
Trade schools are great for learning a trade but there is a lot more to life than a trade. There’s more to a society than who has a higher salary.
High school is becoming more dumbed down so that people can pass state exams and graduate rather than teaching the knowledge that we used to consider foundational. We've lowered expectations and extended adolescence so much that we no longer expect 18 year olds to be mature and capable adults, which shouldn't be the case.
Your view of trade schools is severely skewed though, and is really indicative of the problem discussed in the article. Most trade schools do not turn you into a worker on a production line, they teach you to be a skilled worker or artisan in a trade. You don't go to a trade school to be an assembly line worker, those are jobs that are taught on the job and are typically low paying. You go to a trade school to be an electrician, mechanic, carpenter, welder, etc. These are skilled jobs that are difficult and challenging. They are also jobs that have a greatly accelerated pay scale, and often lead to jobs that pay as high or higher than the large majority of college degrees (maybe STEM excluded), particularly if you are able to start your own business in the trade.