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Too Many College Graduates?
The AP reports on a growing sense among policy wonks that too many Americans are going to four-year colleges, to the detriment of society as a whole: "The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows." "The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts, and academics. They say more Americans should consider other options, such as technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades. As evidence, experts cite rising student debt, stagnant graduation rates, and a struggling job market flooded with overqualified degree-holders. ... The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200 — a nearly $5,000 increase over five years. Two-thirds of students graduating from four-year schools owe money on student loans. ... [A university economist said,] 'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.'"
Where are these technical schools that the economists refer to?
The simple fact of the matter is that after decades of short sighted budget cuts, the US education system is geared for college prep, whether you want to go or not. The vocational classes have been slowly cut out of the system, usually perceived as expendable programs. School administrators realized long ago that they can't improve the ranking of their school by having the best automotive class - the only thing that counts is English & Math scores, so why bother fund anything else?
In other countries, you make a choice on whether you choose to learn a trade or go to college, and then spend your high school years towards that goal. The repercussion for the US system is that students who are interested in a trade aren't being educated towards their dreams, and spend their time in school either frustrated or years behind.
The whole concept of "No Child Left Behind" only works when there is an unlimited budget, and it presses everyone to a standardized education that may not actually help serve them towards what they really want to do in life. Instead of trying to get every child the same cookie cutter education, we'd be far better off giving more specialized education (whether it's vocational or college prep) by the high school level, help them take advantage of the skills they have, remove the blue collar stigma of trade work, and stop trying to make every kid be a perfect college graduate that the state wants them to be.
I got a job as a software developer at a large Fortune 500 company about a year ago. It's more or less a financial institution, but the need for software developers is high. In this company, developers are treated more like business partners rather than IT grunts, and that's mostly due to the fact that we are so influential in determining how the business is run. Even though we primarily develop software, we have to know the business in and out in order to function.
With that said, I have a 4-year degree in Computer Science. Having the degree was definitely key to getting a job in my case, since I was a raw graduate when they hired me. However, I've learned that experience in the field is by far the preferred rating factor. There are guys on my team working along side me who have 4-year degrees in Business Management and even English, but they happened to gain some (5+ years) programming experience somewhere along the way. There's also a new guy who got his 2-year degree from a local community college. That's okay, but his real selling point was the amount of experience he had, which he gained while I was finishing up the other half of my education.
In a way, this annoys me, because I'd really like to think that my degree choice sets me apart from people who made different choices. I guess if I chose to work for an actual software business or found a job that utilized more advanced CS techniques, I might have the upper hand. However, in the real world where software usually plays a support role, I have to come to terms with my place in the business world. In another respect, the possibility of gaining experience in another field and being able to potentially change career paths without getting a new degree (within reason) is a rather freeing thought.
Well, ignoring the cost of the (apparently private) school you went to, since many public universities offer CS programs, should a CS program teach you the details of a language? Or should it teach you overall concepts about computer science? I mean, truly, you went for a Computer Science degree, not a Computer Programming degree (arguably that would be a cert, not a degree, and be cheaper and shorter as well).
I think the best programmers are those who are motivated to self-teach, because it shows that they really love programming. But I also think there is important stuff taught in computer science classes. It might not be for everyone, but I think it can turn people who just write code without thinking about what actually happens with what they write into better programmers.
I think the problem lies in that more and more people are going to college, because getting a higher education usually means a better job, because people don't want to be working the minimum wage jobs, or they don't aspire to be a lumberjack, or they don't want to work on an oil rig, or they don't want to be a trucker.
It's because the society has grown to glorify jobs that require an education, that now nobody wants the jobs that don't require an education. Go figure.
It's not that there's too many college graduates, its that some college graduates won't end up in the job markets they trained for. So don't be surprised if your CS degree lands you in construction for a year till a job opens up.
There really isn't much use for a bachelors in many fields except to please hiring managers who think you must be pig ignorant and stupid if you don't have one.
I think that's half the problem. People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.
Personally (as a person working on a PhD in science) I don't think a lot of people need to be going to college. I grew up in a car town, and a lot of my friends knew they were going to be doing manufacturing, but they went to college anyway. A bunch of them (well some, manufacturing jobs aren't so plentiful these days) did just go on to work in the plants, but they racked up huge debt that is just stopping them from being able to do things like afford a nice place to live. And they didn't get much out of college except alcohol tolerance. No joke, I know one guy who took out an $8,000 student loan basically to spend at bars. Now he has a degree in something or another, but spends his days inserting tab a into slot b so that he can pay off that debt. If he had just gone to work in the first place, he'd be doing the same job and have more money. And he could still go to bars.
The whole education system upsets me. I think we're failing in so many places it's hard to figure out where to start trying to fix it. I'm not saying you can't get anything out of it, but that comes much more from personal motivation than any basic qualities of the set up.
Employers started raising the bar on a living wage a long time ago. From "high school diploma" to "some college" and now "four year degree" are bare minimums just to get the resume past HR into the manager's hands. Hell, we just hired people with four year degrees into operator apprentice slots. I know a professional welder working on a BA on the side just so that he can't be fired for NOT having a degree.
And all that debt, gee employers really LOVE them some college debt. They know their new hires won't be striking out on their own to compete with them anytime soon. Same logic for why Silicon Valley corps love them their H1-Bs.
You want two-year schools to come back, find some freaking employers willing to hire the graduates.
That voids the rest of your post. To show competency by working you have to a actually be able to get into a job that lets you do that. You could do it 20 years ago, these days its a crapshot. Few, if any, places will hire you for a job that lets you demonstrate any competence without experience or a degree and since the only way to get that experience is to get the job in the first place...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Yeah, if you think C# was better than anything you learned in college, I'm going to have to agree with you and say you didn't learn anything either. In most decent CS programs, they don't teach programming languages (except maybe in the entry level class) because they are simple to learn compared to the more complex stuff they teach in a CS degree. If you didn't learn all that stuff, you were wasting your money.
Businesses require it because it establishes a minimum level of competency. It shows that at least one time in your life you were capable of finishing something without quitting, even though it wasn't always fun. It shows you have a basic level of reading and writing capability. That is worth something.
Just a quick anecdote: we once hired a programmer who didn't have a degree, because he seemed really smart. And he was, he got a lot done. But then we had a big project (not too big, four months or so), and crunch time came along, and he couldn't handle it. He said he felt miserable, so he quit. Had he gone through college, he would have had a lot of experience dealing with crunch time, managing projects that got out of control etc. So college is definitely worth something.
Qxe4
He didn't say there should be limits on education. He said that there should be limits on how much education the Government will subsidize.
Lots of people say that kind of thing. Why did this guy's statement get reported? Probably because he's a professor of economics ... at a state-supported school, and who most likely got his own education with various types of government assistance. Yeah, I'd say "fuck you with a chainsaw" is pretty much an appropriate response. People who want to pull the ladder up after themselves are scum.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
that Jesus will return within their lifetimes (which fosters a lack of work ethic, since they think God is coming to take away their problems soon)
That certainly sounds familiar. Growing up in the Bible Belt (and before anyone accuses me of not being familiar with religion - I went to church nearly every Sunday from birth to the age of 18. In that span I may have missed a dozen services tops), I heard "I choose to store my treasures in Heaven rather than on Earth." until I was sick. It fostered an attitude that they shouldn't even bother worrying about life now because this is just a blip.
And our preacher was absolutely convinced that rather than being about research, NASA's space program was REALLY them trying to find an alternate way into Heaven so that they could avoid "serving da Lord".
Overall though, yes, my story largely mimics your own.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The article is of dubious value, but you have some interesting points. I don't think we suffer from an "Overabundance of qualified, educated people". I'm risking getting blasted here, BUT, I think we have an overabundance of mediocre people with a degree. The difference is that we're producing fewer and fewer people with degrees in science and technology fields and more people with degrees which have little direct applicability in the workforce. Further, we're "forcing" people into 4 year programs who have more potential in vocational-type programs.
And I'm NOT being condescending regarding vocational programs. There's talent, skill, and dedication required for those jobs which I do NOT possess. I am a menace with any kind of carpentry tool and when doing anything an electrician probably should have touched live wires (120v, thankfully) more often than I'd like to remember.
But I absolutely agree with your point that we're falling behind in the US. We've been content to let other people do the "hard work" and encouraged many of our smartest and most talented people to pursue "quick-and-easy" money in areas like the financial industry to the ultimate detriment of other industries. This is anecdotal to a degree, but as a hiring manager, it was VERY difficult to find people of reasonable intelligence and talent. A friend who's a recruiter runs into similar problems finding programmers in SF for the rates companies are willing to pay. Yes, the bay area is expensive, but the salaries offered were reasonable for what I considered mid-tier and lower-end senior folks. The company was very flexible (including allowing varying degrees of remote work). Still he has a tremendous ongoing challenge to find, and place (before they get snatched) good people
The bottom line is that we need to encourage people to get education in areas where they can succeed AND which are in demand by the market. If someone wants to get a degree in a field not in demand, that's their business, but I don't think merely "getting a degree" should be the end goal nor encouraged.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
I say this as a business owner with no education over a GED (tech solutions consulting firm). My job postings always ask for experience or demonstrated knowledge, never a degree.
In the US, that same selection process happens all right, but instead of being tied to the child's ability to pass exams it's tied to the child's parent's ability to pay for the child's education.
It also starts much younger than you think, because the child of wealthy parents will be in a top-notch pre-school that provides that child with a good grounding in basic language and mathematical skills, whereas the child of poor parents will most likely be in a low-quality day care that does little more than keep the kids from dying while the parent(s) work. Even of those children end up going to exactly the same public school system (unlikely - wealthier kids live in wealthier school districts and thus get better school systems), the rich kid will be starting about 1-2 years ahead of the poor kid. His academic ability will be recognized quickly, and as a result they will be tracked into gifted-and-talented programs as quickly as possible, so that by the time he's in 6th grade he's about 3-4 years head of his typical poorer counterpart.
By the time you get into high school, poorer kids who have demonstrated real academic talent are consistently tracked lower than rich kids who are good students but not particularly outstanding. And for the other poor kids, they are either encouraged to go to vocational schools, or (much more likely) ignored until they drop out of school.
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The only thing we have a dearth of is free time. Instead of focusing on making more, lets take the time we would have used to produce excess and enjoy life instead. If we have too many people and not enough work, distribute the work around equitably. We could all work 20 hour weeks if our society weren't so focused on production as the only measure of value.
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That article is worth a read. The elephant in the room is that real income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973. Real income per capita doubled from 1947 to 1973; it's only gone up 20% since then, and that gain is only because there are more two-income families and longer hours.
Think about that. All the progress since 1973, and there's no payoff. Nobody talks about that much. Until the 1970s, annual improvements in per-capital real median income were trumpeted in the press. Today, it's tough to find those numbers in Department of Labor tables.
Until the 1980s, the US had very few homeless people. Now that's accepted as normal.
There's an illusion that things are getting better, because one of the classic measures is whether income is increasing for an individual. Income increases with age, but today's thirtysomething makes less than the thirtysomething of twenty years ago.
So doing better with your life requires getting ahead of someone else. That's where a college education comes in. It's not so much the useful skills; it's a product differentiator for people.
This really isn't true. I live on a comfortable upper-middle-class income. My wife stays home with the kids, so they don't get sent to day care. Our oldest daughter went to a sort of neighborhood pre-school where the moms just took turns teaching the group. She was never in GT Kindergarten (seriously---why do we need GT Kindergarten?) But she's in third grade now, and she's one of the best students in her class. She's well ahead of some of the kids who got shoved into "top-notch" pre-schools when they should have just been playing with toys.
Our second daughter didn't go to any pre-school. She didn't want to, and we didn't see any reason to force a four-year-old to do it. But she had a lousy Kindergarten teacher who basically assumed that all the kids had gone to pre-school (which meant she didn't have to teach---just "review" what they're already supposed to know, and then shove worksheets at them). She treated our daughter like she was dumb because we had dared to let her just be a little kid, and that shot her confidence. We spent the whole year basically trying to mitigate the damage formal education was doing to both her emotional and intellectual development. That year, she learned despite her schooling, not because of it. Then this year she's had a really good first grade teacher, and like the older one, she's pretty much caught up with her friends who went to "top notch" pre schools.
This "get an early start" mentality is stupid. Kids that little don't need to be learning vector calculus. They need to be playing. Sure, teach them things while they play. Our youngest son likes to watch the Leapfrog alphabet video, and then he'll find the letters on his alphabet puzzle and tell us what sound they make. We're even thinking about letting him join a little twice-a-week pre-school this fall, but only because he seemed to really enjoy it when we checked it out. We don't stress him about academics. He's going to have plenty of academic stress the rest of his life. No point in starting it early.
Basically, this mad rush for early academic excellence is a way for people to feel a vicarious sense of achievement at their children's expense. It's stupid, and it doesn't help the kids. By the time they're in second or third grade, you'd never know which ones went to pre-school and which ones didn't. The ones who are going to excel will excel. The ones who are going to flounder will flounder. The really big difference is not what they were doing when they were three. It's what's going on at home right now.
If you really want your kids to be successful, let them be kids while they're young, fill your home with lots and lots of books, make education a priority, and spend time with them. Eat dinner together, for crying out loud and then sit down and read with them and help them with homework. Kids who associate reading with spending time with their parents will love books. Kids who do nothing but melt their brains playing video games all afternoon---while Dad surfs porn and Mom gossips on Facebook, and everyone munches on greasy delivery pizza and flat Dr. Pepper---are not going to become the next Stephen Hawking just because they had a year or two of pre-school.
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And with limits on education, you get limits on job opportunities. Fine, as long as it it the person who chooses such.
If it is someone else who is already making decent money at a decent job arguing that too many people are advancing their educations ... fuck you. With a chainsaw.
It's clear from your diction and your lack of analytical ability that if you ever attended college, you derived little benefit from it. In that case, you would be evidence in favor of the position held by "some experts" in the article. If you were prevented from obtaining an education (and decent manners) by extreme poverty, or are a recent immigrant who has an incomplete acquaintance with English and civilized modes of argumentation, I do apologize.
The argument (the one you attempted to address that is contained in the article that you evidently wouldn't—or couldn't—read) isn't that we should arbitrarily limit people's freedom to pursue academic learning, but that getting a four year college degree doesn't benefit everyone, and that some people would be happier and more productive if they were allowed and encouraged to attend a more practical course of studies. For example, a young person such as the Ms. Hodges mentioned at the start of the article, who ardently desires to attend welding school faces an uphill battle against the expectations of parents and of the prejudices of our educational system. Why shouldn't she be encouraged to become a welder if that's what she wants to do?
In my experience, there is a disadvantage to not having a four year college degree. It has nothing to do with the actual capabilities of the people in question, and everything to do with the baseless but widespread prejudice that if you don't have a college degree, then you shouldn't be promoted or well-paid. I've known very capable people who didn't have that "sheepskin", and were denied promotion for that reason. Some of the most intelligent and informed people I've met had no formal education beyond high school, and some of them led very successful lives despite having to combat the stigma of not having a four year degree.
My own kids taught me a lot about the limitations of the U.S. educational system.
One of my daughters hated high school. When we spoke to her about going to college, it was clear that she regarded this about as favorably as a proposal that she should spend four years in jail. She was getting poor grades in her academic high school courses, and had a low opinion of her own abilities and worth. She did like to mess around with make-up and hair...so we (her parental units) got her into a trade school program that taught her how to do whatever it is that professional beauticians do. In six months, her attitude and self-image improved by about a thousand percent. She now works happily in a top-flight shop, and makes scads of money. I'm proud of her—not because of the money, but because of the determination and intelligence she's shown in mastering her trade.
Another daughter is (tomorrow) graduating from a good public university. She hopes to get a public school position teaching science. I think her education was suitable for her ambitions, and she'll do fine.
Yet another daughter isn't doing as well as she'd like. She got a baccalaureate in psychology, and now works for the technical support group of a major telecom—a job she hates. I'm proud of her also, but I think she would be happier if she had found a more concrete interest, and pursued that instead of the essentially worthless degree in psychology. I think she was poorly served by the notion that a college degree—any college degree—is better than not having one. If she hadn't been put on those fixed academic rails, she might have discovered her own unique path.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I'm not suggesting that 3-year-olds should learn vector calculus. I'm suggesting that wealthier parents (which whether you know it or not, you are one) got to their first day of school knowing how to read, write a bit, count to 10 or 20, and possibly do some basic arithmetic. A lot of wealthier kids get that at preschool, but they could also get it from an attentive adult in other settings. In your case, your advantage was that you could afford to have your wife stay home and/or work with the neighborhood to start giving kids those basic skills.
By comparison, most poor kids (who didn't have access to Head Start and similar programs) start learning to read when they're 5 or 6. For instance, I was bored senseless in first grade because most of the time was spent trying to get my classmates capable of handling reading "See Spot run." Most of them couldn't do it the first day.
Oh, and what poorer parents are doing with their time at home - mostly mentally and physically resting from their jobs. If you really want to understand the life of a poor person, ideally talk to some of them and get to know them, or at the very least read about or watch smart capable and educated people try to live under the pressures that poor people do.
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Read "The Spirit Level", then get back to me.
Never mind. You won't. So let me summarize: within the industrialized world, there is almost no correlation between average income and positive social goods like long life, good health, good education, low teen pregnancy rates, and social trust. But there is a strong correlation between income equality and those same goods. Societies with little income inequality (Japan, Norway, France, etc.) do very well, while countries with huge income inequality (U.S., Singapore, etc.) do very poorly. And absolute income does almost nothing to protect a country from those ill effects.
Do you think that Americans' uniquely high levels of obesity come about because none of the other countries can afford to fill their stomachs? That's absurd. In every industrialized nation, food accounts for a small fraction of the average person's budget. They could eat much, much more if they wanted. No, Americans are obese because an unequal society is a society full of stressors, and food is a natural coping mechanism. The idea of "comfort food" is a reality, proven by numerous studies. Also, stressed out people are more sedentary.
Let me pose a question, to see just how well your right-wing model of reality is calibrated:
Take two wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is no reason to fear poverty because the government provides generous welfare benefits.
In society A, the wealthiest people make ten to twenty times as much as the poorest people do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In society B, the wealthiest members of society only make a few times what the poorest do, so there is little financial incentive to do well in school.
In society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school.
No surprise, society A is the U.S., society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin (a gap that is even wider for the poorest kids).
It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.
If it were just a measure of life expectancy, then you might have made a showing with your arguments. But how do you explain why "impoverished" Europe outperforms us in:
* Life expectancy
* infant mortality
* educational outcomes
* obesity
* crime rate
* teen pregnancy
* measures of social trust
* measures of life satisfaction
* homelessness rates
* the status of women and minorities
Further, why are differences in income inequality between the fifty states also predictive of their performance on these same benchmarks?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!