http://www.educar.org/prehistoria/fosiles/brontosaurus.jpg
Our university system is a dinosaur; and it’s getting awfully expensive to feed this dinosaur. Is it time for college to die out?
In a word–yes.
With over $1 trillion in student debt weighing down our economy, with kids sitting in college classrooms for five years, maybe six, and coming out with degrees in Gender Studies and $200,000 in the hole, what are we getting out of our university system?
According to the Education Testing Service, the outfit that administers the SATs, precious little ( http://fortune.com/2015/03/10/american-millennials-are-among-the-worlds-least-skilled/ ). ETS tested for job skills among persons 16 to 65 years old, in 23 countries; and the scores posted by American “millenials” (born after 1980) were described by ETS as “abysmal.”
What can’t our college students and recent graduates do? ETS found they really stink at literacy (including the ability to follow simple instructions), practical math, and “problem-solving in a technology-rich environment.”
Look, folks, this is what happens when you decide that everybody–yes, everybody–has to go to college and get some kind of degree. So the college system expands enormously to take in millions of students who have no bent for scholarship and really need to be out in the real world, getting work experience. You know they’re not going to be able to earn degrees in engineering or Renaissance poetry or physics, so you keep ’em sitting in the classroom for four or five years of prolonged adolescence until they are rewarded with altogether useless degrees in altogether useless pseudo-subjects.
The university was originally set up for scholarship, and scholarship is not for everybody. Many are desperately bored by it.
So you wind up with these millions of young people who can’t do bupkus, who’ll never get out of debt, who live at home and occasionally work part-time.
You also wind up with a whole class of nudnicks who are good for absolutely nothing but “teaching” useless subjects to students who turn out to be useless.
Please don’t argue that someone needs a college degree to get started in a career in any field, you just gotta have one…
ETS has proved you wrong.