College becoming the new High School?

Shoot, you cannot even see the motor of most of the cars these days.

I have always changed my own oil, but I recently bought a new car and it took so damn long to get to the motor, I just take it to the dealer now. All these covers and whatever else is over the motor.

mobile9 wrote:

Who is going to do carpentry, fix your car or fix your pipes when your toilet's broken?

I can speak to this: immigrants (and not necessarily ILLEGAL immigrants).

I am having some work done to my house: I hired Americans--and then fired them; why? What a bunch of A-holes! Came to the job smelling of alcohol; smoked on the job; left at 3 p.m.; denigrated aloud their lot in life; and, most importantly, did a so-so job.

I replaced them with a company run by (legal, so far as I could tell) immigrants (Greeks and Brazilians): AMAZING! They would do ANYTHING, do it WELL, do it QUIETLY, do it FAST, do it CHEAP! They were so impressive that I kept giving them more and more jobs.

Basically, if you are a lower-echelon, maleducated, lazy-assed Amuhrikan, you are (or are soon to be) SOL. Luckily, technology allows such people to run registers at the local grocery store (although self-serv is replacing them there) and other oddish jobs.

I used to be anti-immigrant, but I now understand the reason behind it (at least behind LEGAL immigration): it is not just that immigrants do the jobs euro-Americans are no longer willing to do, it is that they do them faster, cheaper, and BETTER.

But that, of course, is just one man's biased opinion.

i agree

I agree - college is not for everybody. And in essence, that is related to the thread's original ideas (partially). So many people are going to college, it is like an extension of high school. Instead of going into vocational jobs, many go on to college without a clue as to what they want to do simply because they "need a college education."

Many also do not go on to use the degree they earned in college and wind up doing something else. There was a girl on the women's XC team at my university who had a 3.98gpa as a double major in biochem and something else and after graduation she was working as a cashier in a Russian grocery store. A student I know completed a degree in exercise science full well knowing he would be joining his father's insurance company after graduation. So, in some cases people get a college degree just to get a college degree. Not everybody, and some change their minds, but some just go to college for the sake of it.

On the opposite end, in some sectors the market is flooded with people that have advanced degrees. Again, this is the necessity of the post-doc for people that have PhD's in the life sciences, etc. There are so many out there, that it is sometimes hard for somebody just out of school to land a job in their field after 10+ years of school.

It's just interesting to see how the system works and how it has changed.

Bill Gates didn't finish college. Steve Jobs dropped out, too.

The dumbing of college (from affirmative action, mostly), has led to the rise of alternative opportunities and channels--especially in business and tech. Kids are starting their own business in high school. On the other hand, the "skills gap," which translates into an "earnings gap," will only get worse in the more traditional fields.

With regard to mechanics: dealerships (as opposed to repair shops) seem to hire non-English speakers for a slew of jobs, this given that most "repairs" these days are merely component swap-outs (that said, actual repairs seem to be done by highly trained--but not necessarily highly skilled--technicians).

How long have there been business programs? I went to a *bad* liberal arts school and over half of the students were business, communications or management majors. I doesn't seem like these majors are going to very difficult no matter what school you go to. I would guess that the rise of students entering into business (and other bullshit) programs coincides directly with this idea that college is the new high school.

What about those that never finished college, are they now the equivalent of a high school drop out 30 years ago ?

When I was a freshman in college (quite a while ago) I had an english prof who made this statement in class:

"All a BS degree means is you were willing to put up with all the crap."

All through undergrad, I hated that line, but I lived to learn that he was right. The "real" education starts when you get into grad school or a career path. The BS or BA is simply a meaningless certificate of employability. Outside of perhaps math ability, the knowledge gained is rather minimal given the cost.

Look at all the 1990's tech workers with college and even grad degrees that have had a difficult time. A degree does not guarantee success and there are certainly people with lesser education that have done better.

It would make sense that a person in Grad School would see "most" or "all" people going to college. Your peer group and background would put you around like minded people. You are wrong to assume that going to college after HS is the norm. There are large numbers of people not going to college (minorities and poor whites). It's even scarier to look at the urban HS dropout rates. Many young urban kids are dreaming the good life of hip-hop videos and not even graduating HS.

I agree with the OP one this issue. i'll throw out my story for anyone who is interested (and i think there will be several people reading this thread who had similar aspirations as i did in college).

December '04: graduate with a degree in Kinesiology. applied myself more than other students. some students were able to skate by and get the degree, but didn't learn anything. example: cannot explain the difference between aerobic energy system and phospho creatine energy system.

May '07: graduate with a master's in Education. thesis took 1 year. 8-9 months of research with the remainder spent writing. 3 revisions (completely started the writing over in january). worked approx 30 hours/ week. i probably worked harder than most.

August '07: accept a position as Head XC coach and asst track coach for NCAA Division III school. i'm 25 and have my dream job.

education in the US has strayed from where it all began. it was started by Christians in the north-east with the aim of teaching people how to read, so they could read the Bible. today, education is about business. the US government has a monopoly on education, with benefits going to text book companies, construction companies, etc (who put $ back into politician's hands). secondary schools water down their standards to increase enrollment--means more $ for the people at the top. there are school scattered across the US that still care about the graduation rate of their students more than the freshman enrollment, but not many. Sadly, universities have become havens for the red-diaper-doper-babies who care more about pushing their own political agenda, rather than educating students.

bottom line--education is a good place to land a secure job. most universities with federal funding will not go bankrupt and are corporations unto themselves. you can choose to work hard and see your students lives improve, or you can kick back and relax, let the $ come in, without having a boss question your progress. it does not allow the opportunity to get rich like a business would, but job security is a benefit unto itself.

I agree. I used to have a small side business rehabbing houses. The best quality workers were mexicans and other hispanics, who would show up ready to work at 7:00 am, bust their humps until 5:00 or even 6:00, and I paid them a fair wage.

In the future, low-class white rednecks are truly in a world of hurt. Ghetto blacks are also in for a rude awakening.

I'd agree with that. The most important feature of a bachelor's degree is that it demonstrates that the person in question did "something" for 4+/- yrs. I learned a lot in school, (I believe) because I chosed good interesting fields of study (nothing business oriented or directly related to my current work) and I had good professors.

Still, for me it mattered zero where I went to school, and much more who I knew and what I could do for them.

It does matter where you did undergrad if you want to go to MIT or somewhere like Kellogg where they get a lot of applications, because they will likely only consider you if you went to a school they know and respect (i.e., not everyone gets in). Also, from my days working for a Fortune 100 company, the school name at the top of your meaningless certificate of employability did not matter that much to hiring managers, but it did matter to people in HR deciding on which resumes to forward to which hiring managers. Form over substance.

But the other side of this... My wife's sister is a hydrogeologist. She has a MS from the University of Nevada and is a member of the technical advisory board for the well respected School of Mines there. SHE is long term unemployed, and basically a soccer mom (not by choice). Her brother had a speach and learning disability, could not and did not finish college, but has had a long career as a technician working for companies like Intel and presently working for a large hospital.

Yep, I absolutely agree. It wasn't until I got to college that I was exposed to the fact that there were many, many students there (myself included) who didn't really belong there. Standards have really been dumbed down, and high school had the same problem. It's probably even worse now, 15+ years later.

I too grew up with my dad (an engineer who hired many others) telling me that a degree doesn't prove that you know anything, it just proves you can stick with something for a while.

And I think he's spot on. I also agree with everyone else for the most part. I go to a major FL public university and I see tons of kids that are dumber than dirt and really make you wonder.

But I think if you want to improve the quality of people, you gotta improve the programs. I don't think college is a good indicator of the kind of "worker" you are at all. I am applying to professional school with what's considered a sub par GPA, yet I have way more professional references than all my friends with good GPA's. The part that angers me is that my degree has so little to do with the professional field I want to go into. All the classes required for a Bachelors these days are ridiculous. A BA/BS is an extension of high school because Universities make it that way. All your Gen Ed classes are EXACT repeats of high school, nothing more.

I say we drop the whole bachelors degree, or at least the 2 years of Gen Ed classes, and let kids apply directly to the grad programs they want to get into. Stop wasting everyone's time, and you might see the students taking it more seriously as well.

At least when HS was the baseline, you (or your parents) didn't have to invest a serious amount of money. No wonder the debt load of the average American has skyrocketed these past 20 years...

you're an idiot. I'll make more during a housing glut, buying land, building homes on it, and buying more land to ranch on, than you will in some posh job with a degree.

if you're so smart, you should know why. idiot.

Some random thoughts:

It's highly unlikely that I would have been able to study math, physics and engineering on my own and learned as much as I did in college. Even though I don't currently use a lot of math beyond calculus in my job, I'm glad that I have the knowledge. Mentioning things that I've studied does improve my professional image with contacts who may want to work with me in the future.

If I had gone right to work out of high school, there's a good chance that I would have found myself "too busy" or not motivated enough to study literature, history, econ., psychology, etc. Even though I thought that some of these were junk classes at the time, they're helpful not in just knowing the subject matter, but knowing what other people believe about these subjects. I can better follow and learn from what an educated person has to say about these subjects because I had exposure to them. So in general, I'm glad for my college education.

There are less good jobs for a stereotypical woman without a college education than for a stereotypical man- at least what I would consider a good job.

There are less and less students who are able to handle college level work. It's hard to blame the college for this. Even in my high school, I've talked to my old physics teacher and he's said that he has to make the class partly remedial because kids are coming into his class without the necessary math skills. He doesn't want to turn them away, because they passed the necessary classes (sometimes with good grades) and they think they're good students, but they've been failed by their primary and middle school teachers. An attempt to fail a lot of kids who can't handle the class would result in an uprising- not against their high school but against the college and the "mean" professors.

Out of curiosity, Scat, what industry do you work in?