If high school was better, would we need college?

The recent increase in reliance on college as a prerequisite for many office and knowledge worker jobs is more of an indication of the failure of the public K-12 education system than of the beneficial qualities of college. It's no longer feasible to assume that the holder of a high school diploma possesses a basic level of proficiency with the English language (written and verbal), mathematics, reasoning skills, and basic computer systems (use of the internet, email, word processors, etc.). Thus many jobs have increasingly found it beneficial to use the filter of a college degree in order to avoid a flood of unsuitable applicants, even to entry level jobs.

I think about 98% of the population are what I'd call statistically and economically illiterate. Basic economics should be a mandatory lesson at school, but unless you picked the class you can leave without even understanding the law of supply and demand. And then politicians, whose job is mainly to interfere with economic activity, blast these people with statistics (the significance of which they barely understand) about the economy, in order to secure their votes and Run the Fucking Country.<p>Meanwhile, people leave school and, regardless of profession, find themselves doing largely the same thing: sitting in front of a computer in an office. The productivity of virtually every job in the country depends in part on the employee's ability to use a computer. But unless they picked computing as a class (and, hell, even <i>then</i>), they'll have absolutely no clue how to <i>really</i> use a computer to your advantage, ie. to program it.<p>My suggestion: teach maths (which is already a mandatory subject) using computers and scripting languages. Let students practice abstraction to make computation/calculation easier; and then get them to model tougher problems and tackle them. Pick these problems from the realm of economics and finance, thereby building knowledge of another domain simultaneously (the only reason I understand what 'hire purchase' is is because my textbooks used it for exercises).<p>By the time they leave school, these kids will be no strangers to writing macros. In their further education and in their desk jobs, this will prove enormously convenient. Single handedly it could boost the GDP by a % or two (ok, I just made that figure up, but having worked in offices you all must have <i>seen</i> how inefficient the workflows are, and how one whizkid can make a big difference). It would even be useful in totally different disciplines. For instance in the study of literature, textual analysis by computer can prove very useful - finding all the references to a certain thing or instances of a certain word often shows deep patterns in the text. On my literature course only one professor/lecturer was doing this (he said it was particularly useful for Dickens), but he was definitely one of best in the department.

Why is nobody questioning the "need" for college.<p>This is a huge problem too, the idea that college is <i>needed</i>.

If high school <i>were</i> better.<p>Perhaps we still need college?

Perhaps you could cram a liberal arts or business education into a highschool format, but there is no way in hell that you're ever going to be churning out physics or mathematics PhDs from anything that can be realisticly called a "high school".

The editorialized headline might also make for an interesting article, but the actual title is:<p>"Success in These M.&#38;A. Deals Appears on a Report Card"

The TA teaching Calculus at college, learned that and the follow on Calculus II at his (european country I forget) equivalent of HS. He was amazed it was "college level" maths in USA. This was early 90's Univ Kansas.<p>The entire US education system, 1-12 through 4yr, is fucked.

The primary problem is the economics of school and the perverse incentives of public funding / private benefit. People view schooling as an entitlement and when the price becomes 'free' more is demanded than can be supplied, since the essential product of schooling is a piece of paper the quality of inputs can be greatly reduced with out affecting the quality of the final product. Only once people learn to educate themselves will the problem be fixed. We need a much bigger focus on learning and education and much less focus on attempting to make schooling deliver education.<p>Schooling is not designed to educate, it's designed to prepare people for factory work, military service, and obedience to authority via nationalism. Just like startups the whole system works much better when fueled by productivity and bootstrapping (working through school) rather than large capital injections (loans, parents, etc). If you go to school with a mind to be educated you can learn a lot, if you go to school with a mind to graduate you've mostly already lost.

We've needed to restructure the college system for a long time now. It's moved far from it's original goals as being specialized for a small subset of the population while everyone else received a high-school diploma, learned on the job skills and did rather fine for themselves. Unfortunately, there are too many people who benefit from the current system in order to rework it and the rapid change of a system usually causes a lot of chaos.<p>However, I see no reason why we need 12 grades of school. In the European countries, they only have 10 and they seem to do alright. Add in two-years of some type of advanced English, Psychology and classes for a concentration of choice and students can be well-educated by age 18 to go into the workforce. It will require them to gain knowledge through searching and an auto-didactic method rather than being spoonfed, but if they don't learn that skill now, then when?

I think there are probably a lot of fields where the knowledge needed can be covered in a lot less time with the right software designing the curriculum, It always seemed to me that certain course were specified for a program even if you only needed part of what was covered.<p>And then there's the need to make these programs all come out to exactly 2 or 4 years in length. I suspect there's a lot of padding going on.

If our colleges were better, would we need high school?

I think its ridiculous that we think that all brains are on the same development schedule.<p>Some people are ready for college level at 12, some won't be ready until they're 25.

Exactly.