Despite the author's 40 years in education he still doesn't get it. Education is an end in itself not a job qualification. You can only grok this if you have lived in a country in which higher education is/was fully funded by the state. As soon as it becomes a cost/benefit exercise the original ideal behind education is lost and subjects such as Philosophy, Literature and History appear to be a waste of time and money. Ironically, when higher education in the UK was fully-funded by the state the resulting degrees, regardless of the subject(s) studied, were far more valuable in the job market than the more vocational degrees which today saddle students with £50k of debt. A society which doesn't value education as an investment is a society in decline. The same can also be said about a nation's health service.
College as the base line assumption for getting a job is really bad, but there are a lot of other good effects that a year of college can give you that high school can't.<p>1) Since it's a lot bigger you will tend to mix with a much larger (and more diverse) number of people in an adult setting.<p>2) Since you get to choose your own subjects you can experience gaining knowledge that you actually want to gain, rather than knowledge as a means to an end (this would be even more true if again college wasn't a base requirement for jobs).<p>3) Most people will need to move at least a little way to go to college, which can help stop them forming a rut that they settle into after school and never get out of again.
I attempted to finish college five times, and I fell short of my goal five times as well. This transpired over the course of 30 years.<p>Having washed out of college twice by 1992, I landed my first job due to networking with my classmates, at a very college-adjacent employer. I then went on to ride the dot-com bubble for years, and I was able to capitalize on my natural talents and the generally hungriness of employers for system admins. I was utterly incompetent and ill-suited for the corporate world at that point.<p>I was homeless a lot and I was unemployed a lot, and I couldn't really succeed at anything, even if I tried. Eventually I got used to volunteering a lot, developed a better work ethic, and then I went back to school. Several times. The first time I completed a two-year course for a certification that simply made me a better volunteer. Then I went to community college to try for an Associate of Applied Science. Unable to complete this degree, I did achieve my more realistic goals of brushing up on modern tech, and achieving the correct certifications.<p>I then landed a great job in academia, and perhaps the recruiter found me because community college was on my LinkedIn profile. At any rate, they didn't give a fig about my relevant certifications (and they wouldn't pay to earn/maintain them either) and so here I sit, 3 years later, with a great part-time job, no degree, and two CompTIA certifications.<p>College didn't matter for me. Unless it did. I definitely benefited in tangential ways from mingling and mixing in the halls of academia for so many years. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Having taught college students off and on for 15 years, the only part of the headline I disagree with is the word "might." <a href="https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos...</a>
Credentialism and signalling are well established. At a broader level it's the old 'correlation vs causation' chestnut. Policymakers notice that people with education earn more, and decide that people should do more education so they too can earn more, but it mostly fails because it wasn't just the education that holds them back. Meanwhile, in a world where everyone is forced to see high school through to graduation the value of a diploma is diminished.<p>In tech, some companies are increasingly willing to captialise on this by expanding their hiring pool and benefiting from snapping up workers that other companies don't want to hire. So there's some hope it seems that we can break free from the credentialist world that we're in right now.
Education is the way we teach people to think. There are other ways. I actually prefer the apprenticeship model.<p>I’ve learned a staggering amount just by showing up and helping smarter people with their work.<p>I went to college, got a useless degree (but maybe learned to think and gained some work skills through work study). But really the valuable things I learned I learned on the job with fantastic mentors.<p>The standard model of education is not the only one, but yes some processes or system for leveling people up is certainly required.
I think there is insight to be gleaned from how learning used to be done through an academy vs what became to be known as college or education post-industrialization.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school</a>
Interesting to think we inherited this structure for human knowledge from the Catholic Church.<p>Also I don't think reasonable people want College for Everyone™ when they defend public higher education. Entrance exams for public universities in the third world are brutal.
The “everyone goes to college” mantra has caused educational inflation caused by misaligned incentives created from a misunderstood effect.<p>In the past, wealthy people self selected to go to college because they could afford to live and pay for college at the same time, all of their life, they liked had a lot of educational privilege because they likely were able to focus on studies and not menial work.<p>Post WWII, college was the hip thing to do that any good middle class young adult could do. They could go to a school that taught you almost exclusively what you wanted to know as everyone motivated enough to go likely had the background to succeed. College moved from a intellectual play grand for the rich to something closer to a vocational school.<p>Because these the new college grads were going into new and specialized industries and earning way higher than average, lawmakers in the US took notice and instead of paying for college for all, they created the worst class of loan in history, one that cannot be discharged, subsidized by the federal government, and under minimal oversight. Colleges noticed this and raised tuition gradually until about 2000-2005 where it rose sharply out of control because they realized that every year that the fed just increased the loan cap, so now you have this loan cap tracking the cost of college in a case of perverse incentives where the most vulnerable people in this arrangement lose. I’m not even going to mention the FAFSA and what a steaming pile of horseshit the “estimated family contribution” is and how to this day condemns millions of students to take on ridiculous private loans just to be able to qualify for a job that maybe pays above minimum wage.<p>Meanwhile, colleges are finding out that the “everyone goes to college” push made enrollment skyrocket but the quality of students has plummeted. Students are no longer self selecting, where in the past only the best and the brightest wanted to continue schooling, everyone from your high school valedictorian to the room-temperature-IQ nose picker was applying. They had to be more selective thereby creating more elite institutions, the rest of them had to deal with the problem of unqualified students filling up their ranks and wanted to find a way to extract more value so they lobbied for additional, comprehensive general education requirements which kept students in college, spending money on classes, because a ton of kids entering can’t do math or write coherently.<p>Now, college is simply an extra few years of high school that ends up being very expensive and it’s returns are questionable with the best results achieved by those actually interested in the material but their 4-year degree looks exactly the same as the other person who skirted through class doing the bare minimum. What’s next? A masters degree.<p>I cannot imagine a more machiavellian, insane, and hostile system for students. The current college system represents a fall from grace where students carried this increasing burden and we <i>just</i> let it happen.