President Obama Is Looking To Extend The School Year

Jeff said:
I like to think of college as real world pretend, kinda like prom is a warm up for your wedding, as they say. I'd much rather have someone who had to learn four years of college responsibilities than some kid who commuted from mom's basement to get an associates degree in basket weaving.

I'd rather have the kid who spent that time in the real world.

In the show, not the dress rehearsal, so to speak. :)

If what you study doesn't matter, then it seems to me the best course of study is life.

How does that work, Gonch? What does it look like?

It seems to me that more times than not people do the value analysis of college vs. not in the limitation of the first few years out of college. The studies suggest that while you may not see as much value in those first few years, the earning potential in the long run is far greater with a college degree.

Can someone make it without college? Sure, some of them can. It will take longer and be a harder road and more of a crap shoot.

The rest... well, there are developmental theories that suggest there is way more going on during those college years than just career prep anyway. But the value of that is subjective to each of us, I guess.

I would just want to throw out there, though, if a discussion is going to continue about the value of higher education institutions (and whether money should be "thrown at them" or not) that some institutions are research-based which puts them in another category than just career prep anyway. I don't think it would be wise to cut funding for those endeavors.

I forgot my rule about not repeating myself. Been around long enough that everything discussed has been said before.

I said this six years ago (almost to the date!):

Lord Gonchar said (in part):

It's a scam and more and more it seems to me college has little to do with actual education and is more about money and just being part of the system.

And here we are many moons later discussing the money aspect of what many people view as a necessary step for a decent life within the system.

My views haven't changed much. We're to a point that a college edumacation is pretty much necessary, not an exception. The cost of being just another schlub with a piece of paper that says you're allowed to earn real money now is...well, just read the last few pages of this thread.

Well, I guess there's nothing left to discuss then.

Actually, the necessity of a college degree gets back around to the very point we started with: the general uselessness of a high school diploma. And that uselessness has to do with the failure of our primary and secondary schools, a failure which the colleges and Universities now have to spend the Freshman year fixing in an awful lot of students. And that's the GOOD students!

The actual cost of a college education is kind of hard to pin down, as well. Don't believe everything you read about the cost of attending college, because the costs usually cited are the tuition, room, board and fees. That does not necessarily reflect the actual cost to students. Think of it like the admission rates at the non-Disney amusement parks. When was the last time you paid the gate price at a non-Disney park? There are a lot of numbers games and mostly it has to do with student financial aid subsidy programs. Often external money comes in the form of a matching grant, where the school has to put up as much money as they get. What's an easy way to raise the cash to qualify for the matching grant? Raise tuition, then award it back to the new students in the form of scholarships.

Oh, by the way, I work in the Information Technology department for a small private University. It just so happens that compared with other schools our size in Ohio, in the region, and among the ELCA-affiliated schools (we are affiliated with the ELCA, which basically means we were founded by the congregations of the ALC before the 1988 merger), our staffing and budget are well below average in all of those groups. We're suffering from not a hiring freeze, but a freeze on new positions, and this year was yet another in which we didn't get raises...

--Dave Althoff, Jr

That's the way I see it most of the time. ;)

Jeff said:
Repairing electronic devices is certainly not a service career.

***For consumer electronics that is true (other than for high end stuff). But not true at all for much of industrial/commercial electronics which are not throwaways.

And as for insurance, hello, worked with the .com on the end. The wife trains call center monkeys for a major bank. These are not trades. You train what they need you for, and if you leave, the amount of useful skills that go with you are next to nothing. The educational requirements are low because the expectations are low.

***Too much ignorance/arrogance there to even address. Though I do love the logic that your wife trains low level employees at a bank that experience applies to all positions in all of banking/financial services.

I don't know what the president said, and I don't care that much. I wasn't responding to him.

***That is where context is important as to how his comments were brought up in the first place.

I'm pretty sure people have asked why the cost of college has continued to go up, and one of the reasons is that there isn't as much money to pay for it. The states and feds aren't doing as much as they used to. Ohio State is now up to $17k for tuition, room and board. How does an inner-city welfare kid pay for that? Back in the day, you could get federal and state grants to cover at least half of that and borrow the rest. That's just not the case anymore.

***I already noted earlier today that the cost of 4 years in a state college is approaching double what the average family makes in a year. So its not just the inner-city welfare kid who has problems affording it. And subsidizing certain kids will only make it worse for those not being subsidized.

Your pixie dust nonsense is intended to provoke, and is irrelevant to the discussion.

***The pixie dust reference was a joke. But the concept isn't and its totally relevant to this discussion. Too many people (especially in government) seem to believe that we can put in place certain incentives/subsidize certain behaviors and at the same time be free from the basic economic consequences that follow. We have seen it with housing, healthcare and college education. And if you don't like the pixie dust, here is something that puts it a little more in line with this discussion: those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. And we have a significant debt problem in this country (both currently on the books debt and much larger unfunded obligations in the future). We cannot continue to throw money at every problem that we face without looking at the returns on that money and the consequences our actions will have.

No one suggests paying for kids to go to Disneyland to make them more well rounded. Again, what's your point? Is Disneyland just like living on campus?

***The point is that you listed the benefit of college is that it makes people more well rounded (and dismissed that what classes you actually took in college as having any importance at all). There are other things that make folks more well rounded as well. Should we pay for those things too? And I was thinking that Disneyworld would make folks more well rounded than Disneyland. :)

You aren't listening to me. The experience of living on campus and studying anything rounds you out better than not doing those things. I doubled in journalism and radio/TV. Half of the software engineers I've ever worked with studied other non-related things. That they didn't pursue computer science doesn't matter. I like to think of college as real world pretend, kinda like prom is a warm up for your wedding, as they say. I'd much rather have someone who had to learn four years of college responsibilities than some kid who commuted from mom's basement to get an associates degree in basket weaving.

There is a difference between listening to and agreeing with someone. And there is a lot of arrogance in your last statement. Many kids today going to four year schools live at home in mom's basement and/or are earning 4 year basket weaving degrees. And a lot of community college folks are also working full time and don't live with mom and dad.

Since you can't figure out how to use quotes and you mostly responded with conjecture and ad hominem, I'll just get to the one thing I can pick out and still read.

I assume you've been to college, right? If so, you do recall that half of what you took was general requirements? Yeah, that stuff. Along with the daily process of having work to complete on deadline, playing nice with others and engaging in the hundred different activities like clubs, sports, Greek organizations or whatever, make you far more well rounded. And perhaps the greatest benefit of it is that you're a lot freer to experiment and fail, because the risk is a lot lower.

To Gonch's point, I've supervised early 20-something kids, some who went to four-year schools, others have not. The nots consistently failed to understand the business environment they were working in, how to successfully interact socially with co-workers and clients and engage in the creative thinking to solve difficult problems. They just didn't have the experience. The real world doesn't provide the opportunity to learn in these cases, and I theorize because there's too much at stake (i.e., your job and income) and fear of failure to grow.

My own experience I'm sure does not constitute a comprehensive case study, but my college educated ass suspects these findings will continue. Of course, most places I work won't hire someone without a degree anyway, so it seems to me that alone puts a certain value on obtaining one.

I would be a vastly different and less effective person without college. That's something not open to debate.

Lord Gonchar said:
That's the way I see it most of the time. ;)

And yet, for some reason, you still want to be heard. :)

Carrie M. said:
And yet, for some reason, you still want to be heard. :)

Funny the way that works, isn't it? :)

Jeff said:
Of course, most places I work won't hire someone without a degree anyway, so it seems to me that alone puts a certain value on obtaining one.

Seems almost as silly as not hiring somone because of their hair style, huh? To pass on potentially qualified people based on something so arbitrary. ;) (thinking of the ensuing discussion that happened here)

Seriously though, that's exactly the problem.

So far between you and Carrie, all I've determined is that:

1. You need a degree to get hired at most decent places.

2. It doesn't matter what degree you get, just get any one.

3. Without that degree you'll earn much less over the course of your life.

That's ridiculously absurd on it's own, but even more so when you factor in the generally agreed upon opinions in this thread about prohibitive costs and broken education systems.

Still feels a lot like buying a paper that says you're allowed through the gate to upper-middle class instead of having to stay in the lower-middle class playground. Like so many things in life that used to mean something it feels like we've reduced higher education to something you just do - pay your money, put your time in, it doesn't matter. Just go through the motions, do what we say - what everyone else does - and get your golden ticket.

Recently, the kids of many of my friends, acquaintances, and relatives have started graduating from high school. When I ask what their plans are, without exception, every female said she was going to college to major in Psychology. Really? Has anyone at any point told them what the career prospects are with a bachelor's degree is psychology?

Now while I don't think colleges are responsible for finding every graduate a job, and ultimately each person is responsible for their career choices, like Gonch alluded to above, it's more about being in the system. The college will gladly take their 100K knowing they'll be working as minimum wage social workers or somewhere at the mall.

A person who wants to be "well-rounded" can do so without the cost of 4 years of attending college. Let's face it, those "electives" we were required to take most people probably spent 15 minutes a week outside the classroom doing any kind of work. People took those courses because all majors required electives (now that's an oxymoron) in order to graduate, not because they actually cared about the course material or wanted to be well rounded and engage in sparkling conversation at dinner parties. My gripe was that liberal arts and other non-technical majors were never required to take courses in science or engineering to make them well-rounded as well-- but that's another subject.

Jeff, if college worked for you, that's fine. To say that anyone without a 4-year degree is "inefficient" is flat out wrong if not ignorant. (And please spare me any comments about ad hominem-- you're as good at dishing it out as anyone in this forum.)

Did the guy coming to service my furnace next week need a 4-year degree and courses in literature to be able to do what he does? No, and I'd say he's a productive member of society. I'm sure he pays more into the educational system than the Psychology graduate who's asking people if they want fries with that order.

GoBucks: prepare for service sector jobs? Seriously? The vast bulk of folks working in "the service sector" are somewhere between subsistance and barely middle class.

RGB: for the most part, I agree with Jeff. What you study doesn't matter nearly so much as the experience you gain in studying whatever it is you study. Despite being in a "career-oriented" field, I think most college students are making a mistake "training for a career" rather than building up their general intellectual and personal maturity. Do some college students screw around and waste the time? Yep. But, my first-hand experience is that most students at Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, or Berkeley don't. To be fair, those schools may not be representative of what "college" is for most people, as they are all major research universities.

Gonch: you may not be willing to accept it, but my experience is that the odds are just better going through the college route vs. coming up through the school of hard knocks. Counter-examples exist (and I suspect in many ways you are one), but they are exceptions to the general rule, not exemplars of it. It's possible to build personal maturity that way, but most people are so busy just trying to make ends meet in a job that really won't give them an opportunity to develop as a person that they don't really stretch themselves. I know you won't be convinced by this, so I won't bother trying any further.

Finally, here's my dirty little secret about college. It's not about the classes. It's not about the faculty. In fact, we probably do more harm than good. The value---the real value---of time spent at a major university is that you get to hang out with a large group of people who are all pretty darn smart and many who are pretty darn ambitious.

But, to bring this conversation back around to the point, Dave is right on. The real issue isn't so much post-secondary education, its value, or even the access to it. The real issue is that we are not taking the task of educating our next generation seriously. Here's another NYTimes column from today. I'm not typically a big Herbert fan, but this quote is particularly relevant:

While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, we’ve stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs over the past year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html

Brian Noble said:
The value---the real value---of time spent at a major university is that you get to hang out with a large group of people who are all pretty darn smart and many who are pretty darn ambitious.

But if it's slowly becoming a necessary thing (or already has), then by the nature of the beast, that won't hold up...or at least won't be any more true than it is in any other environment.

Which is kinda part of what I'm touching on. When something as special as additional education becomes a thing of the masses, it's suddenly not so special anymore.

That's true only if you believe that talent is fixed, and cannot be developed. I'm quite convinced that that is not true. Plus, you are thinking parochially. The question isn't just beating out other people in the US. The question is competing on the world stage.

Lord Gonchar said:

So far between you and Carrie, all I've determined is that:

1. You need a degree to get hired at most decent places.

2. It doesn't matter what degree you get, just get any one.

3. Without that degree you'll earn much less over the course of your life.

That's ridiculously absurd on it's own, but even more so when you factor in the generally agreed upon opinions in this thread about prohibitive costs and broken education systems.

Still feels a lot like buying a paper that says you're allowed through the gate to upper-middle class instead of having to stay in the lower-middle class playground. Like so many things in life that used to mean something it feels like we've reduced higher education to something you just do - pay your money, put your time in, it doesn't matter. Just go through the motions, do what we say - what everyone else does - and get your golden ticket.

LOL, Seriously?

As a college grad myself I would not trade anything for those four years of growth. College has taught me a lot more than what I learned in the classroom. Give a kid freedom from parents, cheap booze, fraternities and sororities, wild wanton fornication and dare them to graduate in four years with a decent GPA. That in itself is a challenge. Not to mention juggling classes, a part time job coupled sleepless nights in the lab / library and watching your hair fall out of your text book as you study. You make college sound like a walk in the park....and that my friend..it aint. Now I know that is based on the major you choose or to some extent your institution of learning. But for the most part, no one skates through college, not if they are ambitious and are conscientious about their future.

YOU, Gonchar, are the exception. I am not sure what you do, but you sound successful. If you do a tally of the successful people in this country, I bet there is a disproportionate amount who are college graduates.

That's true only if you believe that talent is fixed, and cannot be developed.

To exapand on this: creating the right environment where kids can express and develop the talent they came in with it is the key. I'll admit that many current colleges don't really do this effectively.

Brian Noble said:
Plus, you are thinking parochially. The question isn't just beating out other people in the US. The question is competing on the world stage.

You're right, I am.

If we're talking world stage then it definitely goes back to what you and Dave are saying - the system is broken way before the kids reach college. The high school diploma is a useless document.

delan said:
Give a kid freedom from parents, cheap booze, fraternities and sororities, wild wanton fornication and dare them to graduate in four years with a decent GPA. That in itself is a challenge.

How about giving a kid all of those things but making the goal to survive, not pass a test? Welcome to the real challenge - enjoy your stay.

YOU, Gonchar, are the exception.

Yes, I get that. I know it.

I'm not doubting that a degree goes a long way. What I doubt is why that is.

If you do a tally of the successful people in this country, I bet there is a disproportionate amount who are college graduates.

Exactly. Because the system has made it that way. Your argument exists within the established rules. I'm saying the rules suck.

Brian -- You have as narrow and distorted a view of the service industry as Jeff. As least with you we can chalk it up to too much time up in the ol' ivory tower. Apparently when you think of service industry jobs you must think of waiters/waitresses, clerks in malls and maybe monkey staffed call centers. But take a look around you. We are predominantly a service economy now. If you are not manufacturing something (something that we do a whole lot less now than we did decades ago), you are in the service industry. Banking, accounting, consulting, advertising, computers (other than the manufacturing part which we do not do any more and the assembly processes we do in this country, is a service), insurance, medical, etc. are all service industry jobs. Repair/maintenance/tech services are service jobs as well. And many folks working for manufacturers have service jobs. Some of those jobs do not pay so well but many do. And the funny thing about average is that 1/2 the people are below it.

The problem with your view of the earning potential of the college degree is that you infer causation. Truth of the matter is that people who are smart and are motivated/driven/willing to work hard will do much better than people who aren't. And whether they have a degree won't change that. And having a degree won't overcome the lack of those things.

I almost threw up on my computer screen when I read that NYT piece. I will respond it later if I have time but now I need to go make some money.

And I apologize to Jeff for not being able to use the quote function. This and pointbuzz are the only boards on which I post anything so I havent't spent any time using quotes. In my real world business life, we respond to what other folks have said the exact same way I did: with asterisks and all caps (sometimes we also use colored text to help set them apart). Its totally common and its what everyone is used to seeing and doing. Though I did laugh about a year ago when I had someone call me out for using all caps to set apart my responses from what she had said because to her I was yelling at her. I have always understood the allcaps=yelling to be a chat room type issue and one that I have never seen brought out in a commercial/business setting.

I find the quote feature easy to figure out, and I never got a higher edumication than High School. ;)

I wonder if that helps to solidify an earlier point.

Banking, accounting, consulting, advertising, computers (other than the manufacturing part which we do not do any more and the assembly processes we do in this country, is a service), insurance, medical, etc. are all service industry jobs.

And almost all of the high-paying jobs in these industries require a college degree, except for positions within each industry such as the paralegals, "medical technicians", office staff, etc. And those all range from subsistence-pay positions to not-quite-middle-class---even the ones with moderate skill requirements.

Repair/maintenance/tech services are service jobs as well.

And as we move further down the path to disposability (thanks to those cheap products from China etc.) those jobs are a lot less common than they used to be. When even Consumer Reports runs articles telling you that it's cheaper to replace your five year old washing machine than repair it, that's bad news for the reapir industry. Pushing more people to compete for those shrinking jobs is asinine.

The problem with your view of the earning potential of the college degree is that you infer causation.

Wrong. I'm not at all saying that getting a college degree means you must therefore make more money. One of our office staffers has an engineering degree from UM. But, he's a secretary. That's what he enjoys doing. A good use of that degree? Probably not.

But, the *odds* of being financially rewarded go way up with a degree, because most jobs that pay well simply require the degree to even consider you. That's not because the degree conveys any acutal skills needed for the job. Rather, the degree is used as a filtering function to (probabilistically) weed out people who won't measure up to the other candidates in the pool when you get down to interviewing. And interviewing takes time and costs money, so if you can find good candidates by interviewing fewer people, you win.

There will always be mechanisms within companies and industries to identify talent that came up through "the streets"---because talent is hard to come by, and expensive to attract and retain. But, it's not the high-odds path.

Now, as Gonch says:

the system has made it that way. Your argument exists within the established rules. I'm saying the rules suck.

I don't dispute that. But, the rules are not going to change in a way that suits Gonch's view. If anything, the rules are going to change in a way directly opposite to Gonch's view as we move forward, because the spread between how people are compensated at the top and bottom of the scale is only growing. That won't change without a fundamental, cultural shift in this country away from our free-market-dominates model, and I put the odds of that happening at just about zero.

I almost threw up on my computer screen when I read that NYT piece.

I'm curious as to know why, unless you focused only on the question of post-secondary education. The article really wasn't about that, in my view. As I wrote earlier, the main point was that, as a society, we need to take education more seriously than we do now, at *all* levels of the educational process, because we have lost our world-dominant position on this score, and are now in danger of truly falling behind.

You're welcome to have the last word on the college question, if you like, GoBucks, because it's clear that you and I won't see eye to eye on it.

I wonder if that helps to solidify an earlier point.

LostKause, FTW!