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Are Edupunks The Cure To The College Cost Crisis?
Girl Talk
New York, 2:32 PM
Mon Nov 9
40 posts in the last 24 hours
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Are Edupunks The Cure To The College Cost Crisis? |
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08/13/09
Another aspect of this discussion is the high price of education. When colleges and universities began they were not inclusive but exclusive a place to prepare young, white, rich men to be broadly educated and to take over the reigns of the family fortune as a gentleman. After the middle of the last century, America found out that it behooved her to give access to higher education for ALL. This meant that higher education had to change and it has in many ways. Colleges and Universities, especially public institutions, were highly funded with state and federal dollars. They still provided a fairly narrow range of majors, ect. Our population of students has continued to boom and have demanded more technical fields of study for these new people. Creating new technical fields of study is expensive, very, very expensive. These technical fields are much more costly than just providing a basic liberal arts degree. In addition to demanding more from higher education, we as a country have decided to provide less for public (and to a lesser extent, private) institutions. We have said, we want you to do more with less. The Republican party (and to an extent everyone in politics) has also said that it wants students to be more financially responsible for their education. Educating more students with less public funds in more technical fields will always lead to higher prices for the students. Europe gives a full University higher education to fewer students and they publicly fund those student's education. The beauty of American higher education is that we have a choice. We won't be funneled into a technical field at a young age because we failed to really understand what we would need as an adult or didn't care enough to study at that time. We can choose where we go and how we spend our money. Students should choose wisely. If you want to make money and have little to no interest in getting an education, don't go to a private university, go to a technical school. We should also choose politicians that will actively support public funding for higher education so access for all is something that we don't just talk about, it should be a reality. That is how we will solve the "College Cost Crisis."
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08/13/09
I have a BS and an MS, and I'm about to go back for a PhD. The only reasons I'm doing this at all is because (1) I'm good at school and (2) I'm in a field where being good at school actually produces very credible experience and rewards. On the other end of the scale are people like my boyfriend, who wasn't so great at school and "only" attended a year of community college. He's also the most brilliant mechanically inclined person I know, but if he tried to go back to school to study mechanical engineering, he'd get all that intuition beat out of him. So where does that leave him, if he wants to pursue a job that makes practical design use of his mechanical skills and experience? Similarly, my brother was never good at school, so he joined the Marine Corps and now has PTSD thanks to two tours in Iraq. He's kicking butt in community college now, but I can't help but think how things could have been different for him if he could have been part of a system that provided more practical options.
Ugh, this issue, I could go on for hours. Grates my bones.
08/13/09
Education needs to be more about study, more about discussion and debate, and less about exams and the rat race. It needs to be more about professor/student discussion, not less. It needs to be more time spent in the library with books that took time and study to write, with historical texts, with peer-reviewed articles, and not less. Every time we take a step away from knowledge and more to applied skills, the worse the overall education system will get. Yes we need people who learn skills at university, but we still need the ones who want to gain knowledge and debate philosophy and stare at the stars and ponder the nature of the heavens.
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08/13/09
1. Really look at the majors that lead to an automatic job. Nursing, teaching, accounting, social work, computer science, engineering, and nutrition majors are often specifically asked for in job announcements. Several of these majors are in serious demand and all of them lead to an obvious career path. Lots of people end up returning to school at 25 to get these degrees.
2. Think about skills. Majoring/minoring in a foreign language can be very marketable, especially if you choose Spanish or Chinese. Majoring or minoring in graphic design also gives you a specific skill set.
3. Be prepared to be someone's admin assistant when you graduate. That doesn't mean your education was a waste, it means you have to learn things you can't learn in a classroom before they'll let you be an editor at Random House.
08/13/09
College is about learning, yeah, but I also think it's about arming yourself with a marketable skill that you can make a living off of and/or pay down the debt you incur during your studies. Yeah, it's FUN to study something you like, but if you have out loans for $30k/y and that FUN thing won't get you a job, it's not a good idea.
And I really can get behind 3. I'm in school now and I run into a lot of women who refuse to work internships ("omg, work for free, ew!) and expect a 6 figure/y job to fall into their lap upon graduation (who needs experience!?). You have to pay your dues. No one unless they have really good connections get 6 figure jobs in their early 20's. One thing I like to do is to look at job postings for the job I eventually want, so I at least know how much experience I'll need and what my skill set should be.
Your post should be published in college guides or something.
08/13/09
One further thing, I actually didn't work for free until I was in grad school and it was basically mandated (I also had skills at that point that mean my free work is one of the best parts of my resume. When you have skills, they let you do a lot for free). There are a lot of part time office jobs that are actually better on your resume than internships (though this depends on the field). Working 20 hours a week in the development office of a non-profit is a better resume builder than volunteering for the same non-profit. I've supervised interns and I think they're often overrated by students.
08/13/09
Also, accounting is a marketable major straight out of undergrad if your school has a decent program.
08/13/09
In cases like this, a visit to the school's career center may be helpful, or being put in touch with someone in the alum network who's in the field and can give you some advice about what to expect.
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08/13/09
I think the bigger mistake students make is leaving college without a few lines on their resume that show they can use a computer in an office setting.
08/13/09
And remember that you don't have to go to grad school right after university, and that even if you only get okay grades even though you work your butt off because you are a bad test taker or have a learning disability, you can still get into grad school. It just a few years of working in your field, and working really hard and taking every opportunity. The rat-race idea of "must get A's, must take major that will get me the most cash the second I graduate" is what is causing the problems in education. More of it will just make it worse.
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08/13/09
Its taught me to wait in lines and predict bureaucratic fuck ups like I expect to take a breath in the next few seconds.
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08/13/09
First, there is a huge disconnect between how people perceive a university and how a university actually functions -- especially when it comes to research universities. There is also a gap between the university's often lofty mission statement of knowledge and criticism...and the capitalist value shift that acknowledges only what can get you paid (ie. "how will this help me get a job?").
This is why SAT frantic parents wave irrelevant US News lists or cling to the Ivy League Branding. This is why administrations increasingly shift hiring/review/tenure requirements onto "prestige" building things like publication and research. And, this explains why students act like upset customers and, on the other side, why harried professors are increasingly unable to teach well.
Despite these problems, I am incredibly troubled by the strange assessment guidelines that this online system proposes. It seems like it simply feeds into the assembly-line image of "education" that over-tested American schools are already propagating...just without the price tag.
08/13/09
08/13/09
But I was a film major, so I did actually learn skills that are easily put on a resume (Final Cut, Photoshop, stuff like that). Although I also moved from the Midwest to the East Coast, basically at the end of the day, I'm not entirely sure the education I got is worth $30k in debt, $10k sure, but $30k is a little steep. But I wouldn't trade the experiences I had there, even if it meant being debt free.
08/13/09
I didn't go to a SUNY but I did apply and I'm pretty sure that 10 years ago the in-state tuition was $2000-2500 + room and board. At the private college I ended up going to tuition + room/board has gone up $10k in less than 10 years (about a 30% increase).
08/13/09
These schools sell their brands to people like me, from wealthy places in the Northeast, as though they are some guarantee for future success and jobs and happiness, when really they are anything but. Since degrees are now all but required for decent jobs and millions more people go to college than 50 years ago, many people end up in academia who really shouldn't be there - and I include myself in that sometimes, because while I consider myself to be an intelligent, well-rounded person, the majority of my university classes have been simply name-dropping academic wankfests that have no bearing on real life, or real jobs. Which would be fine if these institutions made a distinction between the pretentious side of education (which has and always will exist) and the real world side, but they don't - which I see as a huge problem. The fact I am learning that XYZ and ZYX had some intense anthropological debate 75 years ago will not help me land a non-academic job.
It's getting extremely frustrating. You pay so much and get so little in terms of real-world qualifications - these institutions need to start teaching students real-world skills, and fast. Because soon people will stop paying to go into debt for a degree that has no bearing on real life.
08/13/09
To me, my degree (which is extremely "useless") is incredibly valuable, though not in an employment sense.
08/13/09
I don't have one of those obvious career path degrees, but I know I'm much smarter than before I started college. Being forced to read Plato and Decartes improved my reasoning skills and writing hundreds of pages a semester made me a better writer. My Catholic college required religion classes and they came in pretty handy when I was working for a multi-faith group.
I think we probably put too much emphasis on college. There's no reason a salesperson or career admin assistant needs college, but its often required in job postings. But I do think college was worth it for me.
08/13/09
If you wanted a degree that fed you directly into a job, you go to a trade school or you line up internships and job experience while in school. You don't loll around in anthropology theory classes and wait for a 6 figure offer, right? But for most Universities, the mission statement is to educate citizens in a broad way. If you think understanding the hows/whys of racism, sexism, war, poverty, etc has no bearing on real life, I urge you to reconsider what constitutes "real life."
It is simultaneously arrogant and self-deprecating to preach that you learned nothing in college. You are showing people that you know how to complete tasks, engage in research, compile evidence to make arguments, and communicate to a variety of people. Perhaps this is not going to land you a VP position at a large company within the first year after graduating (please), but this is not the university's failing alone. Perhaps you did not know what college was appropriate for you etc. But stop whining about how "useless" education is.
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We talk about people who argued 75 years ago so that you can see the logical progression of archaeological theory over time. It provides a framework for current studies, because without that foreknowledge students would be asking questions that have already been answered - or at least discussed into stalemate. The same with methodology; we talk about (my avatar) Mortimer Wheeler's box grid system so that students understand why archaeologists use different excavation methods today. It may seem irrelevant to your life, but it's certainly not irrelevant to the discipline and is, in fact, central to introductory courses.
Actually, I agree with you in the sense that university is absolutely an inappropriate method for preparing people for the workplace. I blame schools and parents for telling students that they have to go to university to get a good job. The two aren't, in most cases, linked - and nor should they be.
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What you see as her fault, I see as the university failing to do its job. I don't know about you, but my college counselors couldn't stop singing the praises of the humanities "Oh, it's such a flexible degree, you can be a journalist, editor, professor, lawyer, blah blah blah"). Never once was someone honest enough to admit that there was a huge glut of humanities majors on the market; that journalism, publishing, and academia were drying up; that law schools were bursting at the seams; that even unpaid internships were fiercely competitive. It is absolutely part of the university's job to advise students about the paths they will take as adults in the labor force, and most of them are failing at that.
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Now many schools have career centers and smaller schools have mentorship programs, but it is (again) a common but dangerous misconception that a University's role is to lead students to jobs. The OP's complaint sounds like whining because she seems to only value her education for how it can lead her to a paying job.
08/13/09
It made me angry because it was so condescending but looking back, those questions were quite valid.
The other thing is, an internship provides the student with some insight into the day to day grind (and can help them decide if this is the right career). It can also provide them with contacts.
08/14/09
I don't think internships are necessarily a bad thing, but I wouldn't pay for one. I also think a lot of students overestimate their value.
08/14/09
What I've learned has helped me become a more thoughtful, well-rounded *intellectual* person. But another thing is that where I'm from, it's out of the question to go to a technical college - it's not what people in my high school were taught to aspire to, because most of my peers in this town are the children of wealthy professionals like doctors and lawyers and professors - not people who go to community college or trade school. And I have NOTHING against those professions - but when I was a teenager, I was not shown that this was an option for me. And now I'm seeing that is definitely more realistic in the world, and in the job market, than the bachelor of arts degree I will be receiving.
My main problem is simply that I am being sold an expensive education for the wrong reasons - that it would help me get a job. Education for an academic job is fine, which is what I was sold, but not everyone wants to work in academia. I just wish that these different options, with their different costs, were better outlined to me before I came to university. I was not made very aware of the distinction between paying to "expand my knowledge" and getting an education to "get a job". And that's what frustrates me.
08/13/09
I went to UC Santa Cruz from 1994-1998. At that time (and since its inception in 1969), UCSC did not give grades for classes. Instead, students received narrative evaluations from their instructors--basically, a paragraph to a page describing the class content and the student's performance. If you think this sounds candy-ass, keep in mind that evals usually included the student's midterm and final score, a detailed list of assignments turned in (including papers and topics), and often scathing analyses of attendance records. A C+ sounds a lot better than "Student got a 95% on the midterm and final, but I don't know what she looks like."
Narrative evaluations provided better feedback for the students and a *much* better assessment tool for grad schools than the letter grade system. If you did well in all of your classes, you basically got automatic letters of recommendation from all of your professors. I went to UCSC largely because of the eval system, and I still feel that I got a tremendous amount out of it.
Under pressure from irate parents (most of whom were mad that they didn't get copies of evals and had no objective way of knowing how their kids were doing), the rest of the UC system (which is big on conformity), and a new set of Regents (who were desperate to escape the nickname of "Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp" stuck on my beloved alma mater), the eval system was gradually phased out, beginning in 1999. Hardly anyone in any higher education system now remembers that UCSC used to give out these weird descriptions of performance in lieu of grades. Instead, my transcript is now strictly Pass/Fail, and it took some major effort to get another university to even acknowledge that I had done well in my classes. (I went back for another bachelor's degree and had to send in my transcript so that I could get out of a lot of core classes.) One of my professors stated in an eval that I was the best student he'd had in 25 years of teaching, and the transfer office wanted to call that equivalent to a C grade.
It gets even better when I have to prove that I do have a bachelor's degree. UCSC sends over whatever confirmation, and when an employer requests my GPA, they send all my evals. This has led to some potential employers assuming that I got a degree from the University of Phoenix or a diploma mill, not the University of California. It's only going to get worse as time goes on.
Yeah, my evals were valuable and useful at the time. I learned a lot through them. It's hard to prove it objectively, though.
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08/13/09
colleges and universities owe them much more than credentials. but when a truly well-rounded education got right-sided so that schools could invest in their "brand" (emphasis on profit) in recent years, the consumer lost big time...and often has little but staggering debt to show for it.
if we really wanted to be a brighter, more innovative nation, we'd work to help everyone be well-educated, instead of being trained to be test-takers.
i recommend a good book on the subject, called "jefferson's children".
08/13/09
The extremely snarky, jaded part of me wants to say "what labor?" I have students who think showing up to class and handing in mediocre work constitutes A-level effort.
More seriously, this is a problem that is endemic and, I believe, extremely complicated. Students go to colleges and universities to get credentials, because they want a good job; universities, wanting to attract students and keep up their enrollment (and, subsequently, the pool of alumni donors), have a tremendous incentive to grade-weight and let standards slide--an incentive made attractive to some extent by student sense of entitlement and parental demand that good grades be handed out (rather than earned) in exchange for thousands of dollars in tuition.
To some extent, these are fairly ridiculous inflations of reasonable concerns. Students should expect a college degree to mean something (but, I should add, not per se; it only means something if a student can do justice to the degree and make an employer willing to hire from that school again), and parents should expect some return (but should not put all the weight on the university; the university can provide information, but only the student is capable of doing anything with it). Solving these problems is going to take a concerted effort on all sides: universities pledging themselves to provide curricula and instruction that can back up the prestige of their degrees, students agreeing to shed entitlement and trying to think outside the multiple-choice mindset, and parents recognizing that their kids are of an age that entails them being responsible adults.
08/13/09
I went back to school eventually but am still paying off my college loans - as I get my son ready to start college next month. Boo.