Why doesn't college prepare you for the real world?

The mostly liberal education available today will prepare college graduates for the coming nanny State where government dictates and victim-hood reign supreme.

 

College prepares you by teaching you to speak English properly, for example. Evidently it wasn't your major. "I seen..." I have seen.
"Doing good..." Doing well.

Always happy to educate.

 

Interesting.

 

Feed and cloth and house who? You will never create a scenario in which every single person can adequately feed and cloth and house themselves. 1000 years from now we will have homeless, institutionalized, lower class, middle class, upper class, unemployed, underemployed, in foreclosure, in bankruptcy, and everything in between. The greater the population the greater numbers of people in each category above.

You obviously do not consider the limited capabilities and diversity and cultural influences which are different for every single person. If you have 314 million different people then how can you ever expect 314 million successes based on YOUR definition of success?

What can be done to help guide all people down a better path? How about a better education system? How about a robust economy where people can find work? How about ridding our neighborhoods from rampant and violent crime? How about affordable housing for all levels of income? How about complete medical care? IMO a society must either provide these public programs or society must pay for the result of not providing these programs.

 

In this area I think the Chinese proverb makes a lot of sense; Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day...teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I would prefer our government to stop handing out fish...

 

What our schools are designed to prepare you for:



What our schools need to be preparing us for:

 

hmmmm.

 

Well, it's shifting the subject a bit, but most of the people getting the "government fish" are there because they have too many children and often no support. That makes the situation rather complex. For a while the policy was to just give out the welfare, but that just encouraged people to use illigitimate children as a path to not having to work and was pretty dysfunctional. Now you're seeing things like the government paying for daycare that costs more than the job the mother gets, presumably just to discourage the practice despite the higher cost to the government.

Although more generally the issue with free educations of any type is that, yes, if you teach a man to fish (on a commercial boat in the grand banks) you've fed them for a lifetime, but if you teach them to debate the deeper meanings of the works of Proust, than you just have a very very annoying person who still needs some fish.

I think our schools are really trying to prepare kids for the latter. One could, of course, argue the degree of success, but there is a serious government push to get kids interested in STEM. For example most schools around where I am have robotics competitions.

Actually the discussion I'm having with oldmanonfire is that he thinks schools should stop trying to jam STEM skills down every kids throat and let them take classes for the sorts of jobs in the first pic if they'd like.

You didn't get to pick your classes in high school? I mean there are the core requirements but beyond that I got to pick, and they're more flexible about that now as I understand it, especially in regards to moving through classes faster.

Fair enough...if they're paying.

You still need to push them through at least a certain core of classes in hopes they become something useful. That's good for them as well. I'm all for choice for adults, so long as more responsible individuals are put on the fiscal hook for their choices, but you shouldn't give a kid the option to close a ton of doors in their future by letting them cop out of math just because they don't think it's fun when they're fourteen.

 

It depends on what he is talking about here. We do need more technical training which is really just poor man's STEM. We need to reform the delivery of STEM. Lecture should come from a computer so class time can be spent on the actual practice of learned principals.

 

People who can--do.
People who can not--teach.
How do you expect someone sitting in front of incompetent morons for 4 or more years(not including the 12 before that) and be qualified for anything other than a govt position or meathead service in the military ? The REALLY bright ones get on at Enterprise rent-a-car or Homeless Despot and enter the managers trainee programs........ by age 45 or so.

 

i think people feel they are owed a job after college.

 

errr....no. Working in that field for 30 years tells me it is far from suited to everyone. To me, math is trivial, as a hobby I used to build my own computers from the chip out, I adore diving into the details, and I can read a technical manual as easy as most people read a novel. A child of science fiction and dreamer of science, I always prefer private quiet time that going to a party or sporting event, ( unless I'm in it ), and am generally considered anti-social preferring computers to people. I may be useful in my little corner of the world but you wouldn't want a room full of us unless you are one of us.

I need to have good contracts people to get me work; good techs to fill in the details; craftsmen to actually make anything; and good business managers to kick me off the design and actually go to production. I depend on construction workers to build my house, electricians and plumbers to keep the place going while I shuffle paper, factories to build everything from my car to my toothbrush. Someone has to open the shops where I get my stuff and someone else has to freeze at night in an oil field to get the gas that powers everything.

For every one design engineer, we need a thousand other workers doing different thing just to get me through the day. Everyone is important and needed but they don't all need to be in the staff meeting at 10:00 Sunday morning.

 

Makes sense.

 

Makes sense.

 

WTF is this?

Why would a person argue that a education system designed to create factory workers, when we don't have factories anymore, is a good idea?

No it doesn't!

 

What real world are you talking about? You mean the real world that involves being qualified for menial jobs and making very little money? Yea, that's why people go to college... to avoid that "real world", lol. Stats don't lie, education pays!

 

..sometimes

 

I'm not exactly disagreeing. However you could have more design engineers out of that thousand who could be supported by workers abroad, thus resulting in a net increase in GDP per capita here.

Thus it makes sense to have an education system geared toward such GDP increasing jobs, which includes things other than STEM but certainly very much includes STEM jobs.

The fact that not everyone is ulitmately suited for such jobs only emphasizes the need to provide backgrounds to all such that they can discover their aptitude and persue it. If give the choice in your very young years to opt out of math, perhaps you or someone like you would have taken a different route.

Of course that's more of a high school thing so we're drifting off topic.

While I can't speak to what our education system was like when the steam engine was high tech, I see no indication that our education system is in any way geared towards creating factory workers. And that's even more true for college.

... Maybe we've got a deeper difference in opinions and we're talking past each other. Let me try to feel this out. How would you feel about young adults being given the choice to get other things free instead degrees like that? For example instead of paying for four years to get a french literature degree they could opt to spend four years in France. Or maybe use a similar amoung of funding for a down payment on a house and a Ford Mustang?

 

No they won't but if there are college graduates who would like to sweep the floors versus high school drop outs, I'll take the college graduates any day. Obviously H/R is not going to hire over-qualified workers to this extreme example but my point is I'd rather have an over-educated public than what we have today.

I still think it's a mistake to force education which supposedly can guarantee certain income levels. Becoming an educator can turn out great or horrible. Becoming a medical assistant or nurse can turn out great or horrible. Working in management can be great or horrible. The private economy simply cannot provide middle and upper-middle class paying jobs for everyone! Using your logic, and full knowing the economy cannot provide enough jobs, you would prefer many or most kids to forego a college education because they can't find jobs that will pay back the investment? If we have public education through an under-graduate degree or trade certification there won't be the financial burden on college students.

First, it is very difficult to predict the quantity of jobs that will be available in any careers 3-4 years or more down the road. Maybe some data will say the medical industry will need 300,000 nurses in 2015 but what happens when 500,000 kids obtain the education to qualify for these 300K jobs? And the likelihood of the job being located where the worker is located is iffy. There is no way to match education to available jobs! The ONLY way to solve the problems you are worried about is to greatly grow the economy to the point unemployment is 4%, and/or, to provide public education through an under-graduate degree to avoid the personal debt.

Using your education plans, everything you mention above does not apply whatsoever to a college degree that assures a good income...so why spend inordinate time teaching it? Early on I worked in high-tech and later in farming and never once did I need to know anything you mention above.

If you go to the US education website, you won't find a mission statement or anything that explains the purpose and goals of public education. If we can't define the goals how can we possibly design the education system? What should we teach? How long should we teach subjects? Why do we have K-12; why not K-10? Or K-16? Etc. etc. etc.

So if a kid decides they want to be an astrophysicist, and needs at a minimum a graduate degree and better yet a PhD, and these types of jobs obviously do not grow on trees, what are you going to tell them to do?

Everyone's 'economic reality' is different! All kids know they need to earn some money to pay rent, buy food, a car, etc. Depending how well they do in the available job market will determine how much they participate in the economy.

To be an archaeologist, requires a college degree...a graduate degree preferred. Obtaining this degree is the only way to convince someone to hire the person. This degree might cost $50-$100K. What will you tell this kid when they first decide to be an archaeologist?

 

Spending four years in France, assuming an average person, will not provide the technical education of French literature learned in a university. Sure they would have direct exposure but not as broad as needed. Then you need to believe that employers will review someone's resume who has merely spent time in France versus showing a college degree.

I simply do not believe any of us should be determining what others wish to learn...

 

How about the fact that you know when your break is over when the bell sounds?

Lot of bells telling people to get back to work at your job?

No, well I would think being on time without a bell is perhaps a skill kids should be learning.

Of course, I can also see the value of 12 years of English, when we don't require basic computer maintenance training, or even send kids out with something as simple as Excell knowledge?

To act like we don't have a education system designed for the 1950's, makes you look absurd!!

 

Ok, so now you're mentioning employers reviewing resumes? I'm not sure at all where you're going with this.

Heh. Alright that was clever.

Hmmm *pokes around curiculum page of high school my daughter will go to*. Well they don't mention Excell, but they have an SQL server class, so I bet Excell is covered.

 

Is it required to receive a high school diploma?