Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon...
by Clamchop on Friday July 07, 2023 @03:14PM
(#36636928)
The aforementioned less-useful degrees open a lot more doors than that, particularly administrative and managerial, plus opportunities to make a lateral move into a graduate program or otherwise post-grad training opportunity in a subject with more practical utility.
Any college degree is valuable for getting a higher-paying career but the cost (both direct and opportunity) of going to college paired with bad luck or poor performance afterward may nevertheless make it a bad bet.
More vocational programs (even in STEM and "knowledge worker" domains) are a good idea, better than trying to use universities for that purpose, but the lack of prestige appears to be a problem and many of the current options in this space are borderline or outright scams with low-quality education run by very much for-profit entities.
Re:The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyon...
by cutler on Friday July 07, 2023 @06:05PM
(#36638889)
In the UK polytechnics used to fulfill this role and they did it well as long as the sector was well funded. Once the cost accountancy rot set-in under Thatcher every higher education institution became desperate to be re-classified as a university for fear of losing custom from the new breed of students with loans to spend. As I said, once you tie education to the job market the ideal is lost and there is no place in the world for Literature, Philosophy, Sociology, History etc.
And yet, everyone views education as a means to get a job, with Philosophy, Literature, and History only being good to get a job as a professor or teacher.
The real problem holding back education is that once you finish university, you must get a job to survive, and that everyone who hires a university graduate expects them to know the basics of the job they will be doing, not to require years of training for the base work.
Even if college is free, people who will have to work for a living have to compare three-four years of unproductive higher education to spending those same years in vocational training or working or getting a job-friendly degree. And most will decide that they can't afford to learn what might maybe make them better people, they have to learn something to make them better workers.