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Thursday, April 14. 2011

College for all?

Do you think we could first try serious high school for all? From Does the Academic Left Understand Human Nature?:



If you have college for all but don’t dumb down the standards, the dropout rate will stagger the imagination. If you have college for all and lower standards so that most can earn a degree, then you devalue college by transforming it into something more like a longer and (much) more expensive high school. So then the high-achievers will feel an even greater imperative to go to the next level. High school becomes middle school, college becomes high school, graduate school becomes college, and our prolonged adolescence continues and worsens.


Much of college has already become glorified and expensive high school. See An Academic Hit Man Brings More Bad News.

Posted by The Barrister at 15:42 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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The demise of the competent, perfectly capable, high-school graduate able to put his or her mind and hands to constructive, challenging work in society is one of the great disgraces of our "modern" era where you almost need a Ph.D. just to become a police constable.
#1 JJM on 2011-04-14 16:56 (Reply)
Degree creep, that. Even in my field, IT, you need a 4-year just to work in a Help Desk queue. Weird, since, when I first started, all you needed was to think fast on your feet, customer service skills, and able to leaf fast through a quick-fix loose leaf binder.

Now, for higher work, you need a masters. Thank goodness I got in before all the HR/MBA types inflated it - those whom cannot do, dictate...
#1.1 Fred Zeppelin on 2011-04-14 18:52 (Reply)
My degree was a total justification payment. For many of the Tech classes, the students were teaching the Facilitators (whatever happened to 'Professor'?) what it was like in the real world opposed to what was being taught. And, we'd get the "this is not the real world - we teach the subject, but the real world is different" meme. Constantly. Only classes that were straightforward was the business writing and math classes.

Makes you think of the waste of money paid for stuff you already knew, that directly opposed what was in the syllabus/books. Overpaid, actually.
I'm beginning to believe that apprenticeship and career-warding are a far better 'teacher' than what constitutes a College degree these days- Overpriced, ancient, and no more than a ticket-punching exercise. OJT, so to speak...
#2 Fred Zeppelin on 2011-04-14 19:01 (Reply)
There are competent, perfectly capable high-shool graduates. It's just that now hiring is controlled by HR people with useless Masters degrees and spreadsheets. Their spreadsheets don't have cells for capable or competent so they stick with credentials. They up the required credentials and it is hard to reason with them, at least in government.

But the greatest error was killing shop classes so that high school graduates now come without manual skills to put their mind to.
#3 JKB on 2011-04-14 20:28 (Reply)
The notion that everyone will meet a standard is what has destroyed or education system. When you have a standard that everyone meets, you really don't have much of a standard.
#4 Dose Amigo (Link) on 2011-04-15 10:45 (Reply)
When you have a standard that everyone meets, you really don't have much of a standard.

That is a money quote.
#4.1 Gringo on 2011-04-15 11:09 (Reply)

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