The Great College Degree Scam, Quantified

[Jocassee]

That's another pet peeve of mine. The creation of "general humanities" , "general"  etc. degrees that end up providing no education at all.

Are you referencing my post? Can't speak to other schools, but I got an excellent education. Foreign languages, history, psychology, philosophy, logic, and English. I was certainly educated. Just not very skilled.

[MicroBalrog]

Are you referencing my post? Can't speak to other schools, but I got an excellent education. Foreign languages, history, psychology, philosophy, logic, and English. I was certainly educated. Just not very skilled.

You also got a better job than most people have.

I refer to all the people who end up neither.

[Jocassee]

You also got a better job than most people have.

I refer to all the people who end up neither.

Got ya.

And to affirm--some of those same Humanities and History majors I graduated with are, yes, in food service or doing stuff like trimming trees.

[Tallpine]

Got ya.

And to affirm--some of those same Humanities and History majors I graduated with are, yes, in food service or doing stuff like trimming trees.

Too bad they didn't get a physics degree so they could calculate the trajectory of the falling branches. 

[MicroBalrog]

Got ya.

And to affirm--some of those same Humanities and History majors I graduated with are, yes, in food service or doing stuff like trimming trees.

Do you think Humanities majors are as likely to end up trimming trees or food service as people who didn't go to college at all?

[SADShooter]

Not necessarily. But they will generally have more debt and often less work experience.

[Jocassee]

Do you think Humanities majors are as likely to end up trimming trees or food service as people who didn't go to college at all?

On the whole I'd no. But I think that's a correlation, not causation. I could be biased. Most of the people I went to school with were WASP. Not over-achievers but not losers either. Just typical middle class white kids with a good work ethic.

Outside of my circle it would be hard to say.

[Fitz]

I have never read the authors that some have mentioned in here, and I'm not smarter than most people, I don't think. I have a B.S, and am working on an MS largely for my own enrichment, not because I think it'll help me get job prospects.

What got me my current job is my ability to communicate well, and my leadership experience from the .mil.

The degree didn't matter.

I think college is good for two things: occupying your mind and your wallet. Beyond that, real-world experience and the ability to communicate not only clearly but confidently will win every time.

Most students are up a creek, because they don't get genuinely engaged in what they're studying, and as a result they do a total brain dump each semester. In a job interview, that means they're every bit as blithering and thoughtless as they were in high school.

The people who go to college to enrich their minds, and are genuinely engaged in their studies, tend to retain more and spend more time going outside of coursework.

This translates into a thoughtful, intelligent job interview.

[mtnbkr]

I have never read the authors that some have mentioned in here, and I'm not smarter than most people, I don't think. I have a B.S, and am working on an MS largely for my own enrichment, not because I think it'll help me get job prospects.

What got me my current job is my ability to communicate well, and my leadership experience from the .mil.

The degree didn't matter.

I think college is good for two things: occupying your mind and your wallet. Beyond that, real-world experience and the ability to communicate not only clearly but confidently will win every time.

In IT, yes, but I'm not sure that will be the case in all fields.  I know lots of highly achieving people in various IT fields that have little or not formal schooling in the subject.  Some only have GEDs, yet are management or SME employees making 6 figures. 

Most students are up a creek, because they don't get genuinely engaged in what they're studying, and as a result they do a total brain dump each semester. In a job interview, that means they're every bit as blithering and thoughtless as they were in high school.

The people who go to college to enrich their minds, and are genuinely engaged in their studies, tend to retain more and spend more time going outside of coursework.

This translates into a thoughtful, intelligent job interview.

This is true.  Passion and drive are the key in and out of school. 

Chris

[MicroBalrog]

I truly dislike people who get a degree just to get 'a degree', without any interest in the subject.

[Fitz]

I agree. I chose my degree based on my interests... it was VERY important not to just "Get a degree" in whatever the hell.

[MechAg94]

Regarding interest, I would say you need to have interest, but some aptitude for the subject helps also. 

That said, there are a lot of engineers who get their BS degree, but go into sales and other areas especially where a more detailed understanding of the engineering concepts helps a lot.  One of my friends from college got his law degree and was working on becoming a patent lawyer last I talked to him.

[RevDisk]

I truly dislike people who get a degree just to get 'a degree', without any interest in the subject.

I have no problems with people who just want the paper.  If lower degrees (Masters and higher are somewhat more meaningful) were WORTH the cash, I'd say they'd be worthy of an ounce of respect.  As it is, they're worth exactly "X hundreds of hours of your life and a very very minimal pool of knowledge" which should never be confused with competency.

School has always been a hindrance to my education.  "Let's make you take plenty of courses you don't want, don't need, won't use and will never remember" is the motto of virtually all colleges and universities. 

[mtnbkr]

School has always been a hindrance to my education.  "Let's make you take plenty of courses you don't want, don't need, won't use and will never remember" is the motto of virtually all colleges and universities. 

I got my BBA and MBA in 5 years because my school had a program where you take grad school classes for undergrad electives.  You still had to apply to and be accepted to the B-school, but they waived the Bachelor's requirement since you were an active student.

I took 2 electives not directly related to my degree: Jazz Band and Pascal Programming.  Everything else was a BBA or MBA course.  Because this was just before the Internet took off and my perception of IT at the time was the mainframe in the glass room and Cobol, I took Marketing, Econ, and Management classes (minors in Marketing and Management, just a couple classes away from minor in Econ).

By the time I graduated (1996), it was clear the IT industry was not what I originally thought (or it had changed in that 5 years).  I had some self-taught experience, a semi IT related Internship, and a year working in the Computer Lab.  I leveraged that and my degrees to get a job in an IT and Business consulting/services firm.  It has been downhill since.

Now I'm getting out of day to day IT work and getting more into service delivery and management.  IT is a dying industry unless you want to work for peanuts or have wizard-like skills.  I don't want the former and don't have time to maintain the skills (which require approaching IT like a hobby).

Chris

[Physics]

I didn't even start learning until grad school.  That's about when head is removed from rectum for most students.  Granted, I see a few good undergrads every once in awhile, but most of them are flaky and never deliver what they promise. 
 

School has always been a hindrance to my education.  "Let's make you take plenty of courses you don't want, don't need, won't use and will never remember" is the motto of virtually all colleges and universities. 

This is actually a joke within my lab; classes just get in the way of learning. 

[MicroBalrog]

I have no problems with people who just want the paper. 

I have a problem with it because they are the sorts that often don't care to do the least bit of effort for it, and sometimes try to leech off *my* effort.

[280plus]

Hee, I remember walking down a corridor late in the day with my old guitar prof and on the way there was another prof teaching a post grad course we bumped into that guitar prof knew. He had told his class of about 8 to arrange the 8' tables in a "U" shape. Apparently there was much discussion of how to approach this and not a lot of progress. So he says to us. "The question today is, how many grad students does it take to arrange the tables in a "U"?"   

[sanglant]

"The question today is, how many grad students does it take to arrange the tables in a "U"?"   

42, .gov workers and it's 84!

[KD5NRH]

This is true.  Passion and drive are the key in and out of school.

Exactly.  As an example, my wife is (still) finishing up her MA in French.  She actively seeks out French speakers even in our little town, as well as ways that French can be used in business.  As a result of that, and her sourcing skills and certifications, she has managed to land two good international procurement jobs in the past, and is currently teaching French at the local University and waiting for a response from an interview for yet another sourcing job.  She's only a few credits away from a Marketing degree as well, if she decides to finish that up, but she took a degree that most people wouldn't expect to be much use in a rural Texas town of <20,000 people, and added the skills needed to make jobs available to her that would allow her to use her degree effectively.

Now I've got to get my butt back in school.  Anybody got any tips on catching up on algebra skills that have been rusting for 16 years?

[KD5NRH]

Part of a stricter set of requirements IS failing students. Many more are capable of understanding in the way we teach than those who ultimately do learn. These don't learn because they know they don't have to try. Failing people is necessary to encourage learning.

That needs to be applied a lot earlier, though.  There is no reason anyone who can't function at a sixth grade level should have made it past the sixth grade.  If that means they drop out of sixth grade at 18 and go dig ditches for a living, then at least they're not devaluing education for everyone else.

[280plus]

I think it's called "no child left behind" 

[Phantom Warrior]

That needs to be applied a lot earlier, though.  There is no reason anyone who can't function at a sixth grade level should have made it past the sixth grade.  If that means they drop out of sixth grade at 18 and go dig ditches for a living, then at least they're not devaluing education for everyone else.

More pragmatically, it means they aren't wasting tens of thousands of dollars or going into debt just to get that degree and still end up digging ditches because they have no real knowledge or skills.

[KD5NRH]

I think it's called "no child left behind" 

That's a large part of the problem, but even before it was given a name, a lot of teachers were reluctant to fail students who really needed to repeat a grade.

Not to say that I feel a student should be held back for a problem in a single subject; small, focused remedial classes should be able to advance a student two grade levels in one year, but not meeting expectations in two or more subjects should result in being held back.

It goes without saying that reducing expectations as a means of getting more students to meet them is also a serious problem, but has been going on for quite some time.

[MicroBalrog]

Not to say that I feel a student should be held back for a problem in a single subject; small, focused remedial classes should be able to advance a student two grade levels in one year, but not meeting expectations in two or more subjects should result in being held back.

And THIS is the problem I referred to earlier in the thread. Instead of giving HELP to a student who needs help, educators often simply give discounts'.

[280plus]

It goes without saying that reducing expectations as a means of getting more students to meet them is also a serious problem, but has been going on for quite some time.

Yup, grade on the curve. That's the way it was in the 80's anyways. Take the highest mark, make it 100, add the same number of points to the rest. That's why the kid (though he was a bit older) asked me to get a few more wrong than usual on the final. I see, I'm supposed to devalue myself so that you can compete with me more readily. Hmmm, nothing wrong with that picture.