Does Everybody Need College?

~ Clarissa

First there was some completely idiotic study that said students didn’t learn to think critically in college. Everybody talked about this stupid study because, apparently, people who criticize the analytical skills of others are incapable of realizing the simple truth that critical thinking cannot be quantified.

Now there is a competing study that says students do learn to think critically in college. Since this claim is as unprovable as the competing one, the study is just as worthless. Still, the debate rages on.

It is hilarious that people are still debating whether college is useful. It’s like they are collectively stuck in the reality of 30 years ago and are stupidly repeating the mantras that worked then. It is really cute, for instance, to see how often some particularly clueless person is repeating the adage of “Not everybody needs to go to college, of course. Some people can just start businesses right out of high school.” This statement is as outdated as shoulder pads in women’s business suits, yet many people are passionately devoted to it.

Given that today’s high school graduates overwhelmingly

– don’t know how to attach a file to an email;

– have no idea how to organize business correspondence;

– have never seen Microsoft Excel;

– do not speak any foreign language;

– are not sure what countries border the US;

– believe, at best, that “save the file with the .rtf extension” means “write the letters rtf in the file’s name.” At worst, they just refuse to do the assignment altogether because the instructions confuse them;

– cannot format a simple Word document;

– have the communication skills and the emotional maturity level of petulant kindergartners;

– think that the language and format of text messaging are appropriate in all contexts;

– can’t spell worth a damn;

– can barely focus on a single task for more than five minutes;

– believe that it is a duty of everybody older than them to adopt them emotionally on the spot;

– and so on and so forth*,

I have to ask, what kind of businesses will they be opening with this impressive skill set?

The world has changed in the past 30 years and, in case nobody noticed, there is no employment left for people who can only provide manual labor. We are moving to the kind of society where at least one college degree will be needed to have a semi-decent job. Since the secondary education is not doing its job and parents like to infantilize their children to impossible degrees, this moment will be here sooner. It would have arrived either way (because of the technological revolution) but the lousy quality of secondary education makes it happen much sooner.

* Yes, I know you are not like this, otherwise you would not be reading this blog. Even though you have managed to become a very special and highly literate young person (and kudos to you), the sad truth is that the secondary education system and the fashionable parenting strategies do not prepare today’s young people to negotiate the job market successfully at the age of 18.

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Published by Clarissa

81 thoughts on “Does Everybody Need College?”

  3. Maybe we should focus on how can we make the college relevant for all intelligent students who like to go to college instead to make college digestible for all idiots who hate school forever…

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  4. You say, I think accurately, Given that today’s high school graduates overwhelmingly. . . . followed by a long list of many things they are unable to do, what benefit would those with such deficiencies derive from college attendance resulting in a degree? Are those deficiencies of the type with which colleges — allegedly institutions of higher education — should deal? Can they?

    Perhaps of greater importance, what detriments would those colleges, the credibility of their degrees and the more competent students they try to teach suffer?

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    1. ” what benefit would those with such deficiencies derive from college attendance resulting in a degree?”

      – The students become employable instead of just sitting there waiting for their unemployment checks. I think this i a great benefit to all involved.

      “Are those deficiencies of the type with which colleges — allegedly institutions of higher education — should deal? Can they?”

      – It isn’t like we have a choice any longer. This is what we have to do and things will only get worse from now on.

      “Perhaps of greater importance, what detriments would those colleges, the credibility of their degrees and the more competent students they try to teach suffer?”

      – We can, of course, discuss all this. But the reality is what it is, and we have to adapt to it.

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      2. – The students become employable instead of just sitting there waiting for their unemployment checks. I think this i[s] a great benefit to all involved.

        That assumes a fact not in evidence, as far as I am aware, that pieces of parchment paper with the words “college degree” on them enable otherwise unemployable college graduates to get jobs. I do hope that their college degrees are written in something resembling English, rather than Latin (as mine was; embarrassingly, I was not equipped to read it).

        We seem to disagree on whether giving making “educations” available to those grossly unprepared for them is useful and therefore reasonable use of college resources. Still, if “something” has to be done, this is something.

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        1. We teach them all of the skills that I listed in the post. Of course, I’d much rather teach them something else than how to change a font in a Word document, but if nobody else is willing to do that, I have to. 🙂 (This is a sad smiley face.)

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      4. You seem to forget that there are many outside-of-qualification issues and over-qualification issues in employment. For example, I have a Master’s degree in Statistics and I’m unemployable.

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  5. Random unfocused thoughts”

    In terms of education and temprement and life goals, no, not everybody needs college. There’s no good reason that most of the lacking skills you mention can’t be taught in high school.

    One reason people are encouraged to go to college now in many countries is to keep them off the unemployment rolls. The problem isn’t that people can’t get good jobs without a college diploma, the problem is the good jobs are shrinking, leaving and they’re not coming back unless something unplanned and massive happens. I’m more or less convinced that we’ve hit “peak jobs” and marking time until somebody figures out how to reconfigure societies around not working.

    I have no idea how it will turn out, but I’m not real optimistic…

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    1. “There’s no good reason that most of the lacking skills you mention can’t be taught in high school.’

      – Of course. But they still aren’t taught. And the range of skills needed in contemporary world is growing every day.

      “The problem isn’t that people can’t get good jobs without a college diploma, the problem is the good jobs are shrinking, leaving and they’re not coming back unless something unplanned and massive happens.”

      – Exactly. What used to be considered “a good job” is dead and gone. The mentality needs to change completely. Those of us who don;t manage to catch up with this new reality soon enough will come out losing.

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      1. “What used to be considered “a good job” is dead and gone.The mentality needs to change completely.”

        Yes, the old mentality of “you should go to college to have an “old-styled” good job” needs to change completely.

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    2. I’m more or less convinced that we’ve hit “peak jobs” and marking time until somebody figures out how to reconfigure societies around not working.

      I’ve come to believe this, too.

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        1. My ancestors were slaves. Real slaves. Bought and sold, raped and tortured. This is why I resent the whining of the pampered, spoiled Westerners who have the gall to refer to their cushy office jobs as slavery.

          Let’s keep this verbiage away from my blog.

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      6. Okay, I’ll reformulate.

        Work and its compulsory wagism are dehumanizing, but we have to as much passionnate activities as possible to nourish a healthy human life

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        1. According to this logic, housewives who passionately control and exploit their family members as well as billionnaires who passionately collect antique cars should be the healthiest people around. How strange that, in reality, these are groups that suffer the most from depression, psychosis and mental disorders.

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          1. There actually was a society organized around not working. A place where most people didn’t work and got pretty much an equal amount of money, enough for basic living expenses, from the government. Should I say what that country’s name was or can everybody guess?

            This was not a successful social experiment, by the way.

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  6. I think this is all subjective. It really depends on the person, their motivation and most of all, what they choose to study and how much due diligence that they do themselves before getting into massive debt. Some people have gone very well financially without finishing college at all, but that doesn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t benefit. Others might do okay by going to a trade school for a year. Everyone’s different I guess.

    I heard the main reason employers are skeptical about hiring new college grads is because of spelling and grammar errors on the resumes of these graduates! The other reason is that they often lack the skills that they require, especially when it comes to knowledge of math and science.

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    1. Hell, maybe there are even people who decided to work at McDonald’s or WalMart and somehow worked their way up to their own franchises! Who knows? Not that I would recommend going that route anyway, but I hate how high school counselors and others have done a poor job in preparing people for the harsh realities of the labor market. Asking whether college is useful or not is too much of a vague, broad question.

      I know some people in the animation business who didn’t really go to college but took animation classes on their own time and just got the internships they were looking for or they were self taught. Going to a school like Cal Arts supposedly helps with “connections” and networking on certain shows, but at what cost?

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    2. “It really depends on the person, their motivation and most of all, what they choose to study and how much due diligence that they do themselves before getting into massive debt. ”

      – First of all, let’s abandon “the massive debt” myth of higher education. Every state has at least one very good and very affordable university for in-state students.

      “Some people have gone very well financially without finishing college at all”

      – As the world becomes more complex and the quality of higher education deteriorates, the number of such people decreases. Look at the dying little towns of the Rust Belt. The people who worked in manufacturing jobs there are suddenly out of employment and the chances their labor will be needed by anybody full-time are non-existent. Every day, tons of jobs disappear. Even check-out counters at grocery stores are now operated by machines. We are getting to the place where manual labor will all be done either overseas or by machines.

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      1. “Look at the dying little towns of the Rust Belt. The people who worked in manufacturing jobs there are suddenly out of employment and the chances their labor will be needed by anybody full-time are non-existent. Every day, tons of jobs disappear. Even check-out counters at grocery stores are now operated by machines. We are getting to the place where manual labor will all be done either overseas or by machines.”

        Yes, that why we should offer a post-HS professional education alternative to those. Having more idiots in Sociology, in Economics, in Statistics and in Mathematics will not solve (in fact, it would be aggravated) this problem!

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      2. “Look at the dying little towns of the Rust Belt. The people who worked in manufacturing jobs there are suddenly out of employment and the chances their labor will be needed by anybody full-time are non-existent. Every day, tons of jobs disappear. Even check-out counters at grocery stores are now operated by machines. We are getting to the place where manual labor will all be done either overseas or by machines.”

        Yes, and that’s why we should offer a post-HS professional education alternative to those who don’t want to go to college. Having more idiots in Sociology, in Economics, in Statistics and in Mathematics will not solve (in fact, it would be aggravated) this problem!

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      3. “- First of all, let’s abandon “the massive debt” myth of higher education. Every state has at least one very good and very affordable university for in-state students.”

        You’re completely right in the case of my state. There’s a program here called the HOPE Scholarship that covers about 90% of tuition if I keep my GPA above a 3.0 and the debt problem won’t affect me much because of all the financial aid I’d get anyway. I was talking about in general.

        If I had gone to college in say New Jersey, I would have been already completely screwed over and drowning in debt. That’s what I was really referring to. Wasn’t trying to perpetuate any myths. That in itself also depends on the college, etc. Sorry I didn’t reply promptly.

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        1. “There’s a program here called the HOPE Scholarship that covers about 90% of tuition if I keep my GPA above a 3.0 and the debt problem won’t affect me much because of all the financial aid I’d get anyway.”

          – This sounds really great! I’m sure that many people could avoid massive debt if they just approached the issue intelligently and realistically.

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      4. “- As the world becomes more complex and the quality of higher education deteriorates, the number of such people decreases. Look at the dying little towns of the Rust Belt. The people who worked in manufacturing jobs there are suddenly out of employment and the chances their labor will be needed by anybody full-time are non-existent. Every day, tons of jobs disappear. Even check-out counters at grocery stores are now operated by machines. We are getting to the place where manual labor will all be done either overseas or by machines.”

        I think that’s been a common concern among many, but I immediately think of the situation with the Luddites and how that turned out in the end. With all the new technology being created now, other job opportunities are going to be inevitably created. It’s not the jobs or labor are exactly going away, but it’s just that these types of jobs are evolving and changing, sometimes for the better. In the short run, it probably won’t be an easy transition, but I’m pretty hopeful when it comes to or cleaner energy sources (solar panels, wind, nuclear, etc.) Like I’ve said elsewhere, we’re not exactly in a decline. Some things have gotten better and other things have gotten worse. I hope you understand what I’m trying to get at here.

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  7. The world has changed in the past 30 years and, in case nobody noticed, there is no employment left for people who can only provide manual labor.(Clarissa)

    There are many who start by providing the manual labor and then end up running the business without having to go to college. I have friends and family and clients who live in both worlds. The formally educated and the life experience educated. Both quite successful I might add.

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  8. What should have been done before college?

    -don’t know how to attach a file to an email; (should have been done in HS)

    – have no idea how to organize business correspondence; (should have been done in HS)

    – have never seen Microsoft Excel; (should have been done in HS)

    – do not speak any foreign language; (should have been done partly in HS)

    – are not sure what countries border the US; (should have been done before HS)

    – believe, at best, that “save the file with the .rtf extension” means “write the letters rtf in the file’s name.” At worst, they just refuse to do the assignment altogether because the instructions confuse them; (should have been done in HS)

    – cannot format a simple Word document; (should have been done in HS)

    – have the communication skills (should have been done in HS) and the emotional maturity level (not a school thing, and many tenured professors have this same problem, so this is irrelevant) of petulant kindergartners;

    – think that the language and format of text messaging are appropriate in all contexts; (should have been done in HS and even partly before)

    – can’t spell worth a damn; (should have been done in HS and even partly before)

    – can barely focus on a single task for more than five minutes; (not a school thing, college students should all have this quality)

    – believe that it is a duty of everybody older than them to adopt them emotionally on the spot; (not a school thing, and as a college teacher, you should dismiss these attempts)

    So the vast majority of those things should have been donne before college and if the vast majority of your students are that kind of idiots, they should not be in your classrooms right now. The post-modern concept of the University ruled by idiots is not my style of University.

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  9. There is a joke that says “All the PHD’s work for Bill Gates”
    I believe he dropped out to start his business. There are several young individuals today who are following similar models. Not all entrepreneurs go to college or university. In fact, some don’t even finish high school.

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    1. However, entrepreneurship does require a much more solve-my-own-problems kind of person than the highschool graduates Clarissa describes. Just because a small number of young people will be capable of starting their own business doesn’t mean that this is a feasible plan for the majority, who would be better served by gaining more skills in the far gentler environment of an university. All the PhDs might work for Bill Gates, but had they dropped out of college, there wouldn’t necessarily be more Bill Gateses around.

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      1. All the PhDs might work for Bill Gates, but had they dropped out of college, there wouldn’t necessarily be more Bill Gateses around.(Stille)

        Youre right, but there may be more skilled labourers that we are sorely lacking presently. 🙂
        We several different types to run a successful economy. College for everyone is not a good remedy. I wonder how many indivduals who have a degree wish they had an actual skill someone would pay them for. 😦

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      2. Agreed, Titfortat. The trick, however, is to choose a skill that is both not easily transferable to someone in India or China and has a small chance of becoming unnecessary in humans in the forthcoming decades. Nursing is a good one, I’d guess, though I think in America it requires a college education as well.

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        1. ” Nursing is a good one, I’d guess, though I think in America it requires a college education as well.’

          – Of course, it does. My university offers a very intensive and very high quality nursing program. But it is a college degree. Otherwise, nobody would even consider hiring one.

          “The trick, however, is to choose a skill that is both not easily transferable to someone in India or China and has a small chance of becoming unnecessary in humans in the forthcoming decades.”

          – Yes, precisely. Also, these have to be jobs where the crowds of illegal immigrants will not push out the American citizens. And can anybody think of any such professions? I can only think of plumbers. Anything else?

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      3. Nursing is a trade school in here (and, I presume, the rest of the EU, since our nurses are in quite high demand in other European countries), so that’s why I was thinking of it as a no-college-required occupation.

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  10. I think college is definitely useful. The problem I see is that in the US is that tuition fees are ridiculously expensive. I’m not sure it’s always worthwhile. There are always technical jobs that might be a better deal than having to pay those huge credits students take in the US.

    “Not everybody needs to go to college, of course. Some people can just start businesses right out of high school.” This is not outdated, but it’s reserved for a handful of exceptional individuals not your average high school student.

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    1. “The problem I see is that in the US is that tuition fees are ridiculously expensive.”

      – That’s not really true, though. Of course, if one is dead set on going to Harvard, that is expensive. But there is a multitude of state schools where one can go for very modest amounts of money. And those schools offer scholarships, awards, and financial aid.

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        1. The problem is that if you are from such a family, you will get enough emotional and psychological trauma at an Ivy school that you will then need a fortune to spend on psychiatrists.

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      7. Could you give an idea? I’ve always thought it rounded 20k a year, so for 3 or 4 years that’d be a whopping 80k. From where I come that sounds astronomic!

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        1. At my university, the top amount you pay if both of your parents work and make over $50K per year, is $4,500 per semester. That includes textbooks. People who don’t have parents who can help pay a lot less than that. Most people pay about $1,500 – $2,000 per semester. I don’t think that’s very expensive.

          This means, of course, that one will have to work while in school to meet housing and living expenses. The people who pay the amounts you name are the ones who want to live on campus and not work. This, of course, is a luxury for the few.

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      8. Rutgers was originally the school I was going to go to. They did give out financial aid, but I commonly heard stories about how shady they were with their financial aid practices and how many fees they added on top of the expenses. Even people with parents that didn’t make much money were complaining about tuition increases and New Jersey’s utter corruption in education. Look up the Rutgers Screw.

        I would have still needed to take out somewhere between 12-14 grand for the whole year as a loan if I had been stupid enough to go there and pay out of state expenses and that’s even with financial aid.

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  11. It all depends on what one means by higher education. A real gap in college education concerns training individuals to be plumbers, electricians, graphics design, computer languages, etc., all highly remunerative skills deemed below the intellectual level of elitist academicians. Germany caters for these skills. That is one reason it it carrying continental Europe. Only a small subsection of any age cohort is intellectually gifted and emotionally prepared for high level intellectual pursuits. I am thinking no more than 20 per cent. Most of the rest can be motivated and educated into technical and professional skills. And access remunerative occupations, including small businesses, which are the real engine-houses of economic growth. Most graduates who come out with history, languages, sociology, social studies,philosophy degrees are educated out of any willingness to dirty their hands on real jobs that require technical skills.

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    2. Wait, graphics design and computer programming are not college skills nowadays? Not going to continue with graphics design since it’s not my field, but where computer programming is concerned, a college education really, really helps. A good programmer can easily do more useful work than 100 mediocre ones, and while getting the mathematical and theoretical background you need to properly use the “computer languages” won’t turn a mediocre programmer into a good one by itself, it’s still a necessary step and one that many people won’t do by themselves. Gods know the planet has enough code monkeys and, since code doesn’t need to travel by boat, the ones with the best chances of being employed live in the poorer areas of the globe being paid a couple hundred dollars per month. Which is a fair wage in Romania but I honestly doubt we’ll be the target of a mass migration of young Americans.

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    3. “A real gap in college education concerns training individuals to be plumbers, electricians, graphics design, computer languages, etc., all highly remunerative skills deemed below the intellectual level of elitist academicians. Germany caters for these skills. That is one reason it it carrying continental Europe. Only a small subsection of any age cohort is intellectually gifted and emotionally prepared for high level intellectual pursuits. I am thinking no more than 20 per cent.”

      – This is all true. But as long as American high schools are churning out graduates with no computer or interpersonal skills, we don’t get a choice. Don’t you think I’d love to be able to come to work and only talk to students about the novelistic production of Goytisolo and the peculiar nature of the Spanish Enlightenment? Of course, I’d love to. Instead, I spent the day today explaining to one student after another how to open a gmail account, access a blog, and leave comments on it. Next week I will be explaining what “a meaningful and original title of an essay” means. I don’t like this, but I don’t have choice.

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  12. I think only about half of my students are prepared for college — mentally, emotionally, intellectually, etc. Everyone should have the opportunity to go to college, but we should encourage people to discern whether or not they are ready for it so that we don’t waste their time and money.

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    1. Yes, this is an enormous problem. We need to do so much remediation that it’s truly onerous. I don’t see an alternative, however. Where would these students go otherwise? There aren’t enough McDonald’s jobs for everybody.

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      1. The alternative is to offer a post-HS (or intra-HS) professional education. We have that in Québec in our CEGEPs (and we have even intra-HS-professional diplomas that work very well)…..and this is not even enough.

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        1. Until they do that, my opinion on the subject stands.

          The problem is that soon just a Bachelor’s degree will also not be enough to get employable. Technology is developing very very fast.

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      3. “The problem is that soon just a Bachelor’s degree will also not be enough to get employable. Technology is developing very very fast.”

        This is almost the case right now, not because of the technology, but because of needs.

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  14. A simple solution consists to implement CEGEPs in America, which would be a good start. But beware, because in Québec, HS has become even more ludicrous after the CEGEPs implementation.

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  15. And if we have less jobs, why not reducing the working time. With this, we could have even more time to….get a stronger education or masturbating more often. 😉

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  16. And if we have less jobs, why not reducing the working time? With this, we could have even more time to….get a stronger education or masturbating more often.

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    1. Yup. If you’re going to go that route, make sure the school is accredited and that the credits will transfer to other schools in case that person wants to go ahead and get a bachelor’s degree. Avoid anything that screams Art Institute of fill-in-the-blank, University of Phoenix, DeVry University, Everest, Le Cordon Bleu, or ITT Tech. Basically any “college” that advertises themselves during network broadcasts of Jery Springer are to be highly avoided.

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  17. Trade schools are the answer for many individuals. Unfortunately, many trade schools are for-profit rip-offs. A local example of a highly regarded two-year post-secondary trade school is Ranken Technical College. One gets a degree in automotive, IT, construction, electrical, or other specialty. Their graduates used to be 90% employed within a month after graduation (well organized hiring fairs during the school years, good contacts with employers, long track record). Face it, you can’t outsource skilled labor services on your car or home. Bangalore Bob isn’t going to be doing an engine overhaul on a St. Louis truck anytime soon.

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    1. Bangalore Bob will make most things – including cars – so cheap soon that it will be easier to ditch them than to repair them. we have already seen this happen to all household appliances, TVs, computers, etc. Nobody repairs them any more. All that’s left is cars and that provides for a minimal number of jobs.

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