06-28-2019, 02:27 PM
(06-28-2019, 02:07 PM)Dill Wrote: Well I respect the creativity you guys show in paying for college. Sounds like you are throwing up serious proposals.
But we part company at your assumption that market demand should be the single or dominant factor in determining whether a degree is "necessary" or "worthless."
You are assuming that vocational training is the point of schooling beyond HS, getting the knowledge and skills that employers want you to have.
I am assuming that education is important, and that it should not be solely or even predominately determined by constantly shifting market demands. It concerns a kind of knowledge and values supposed to span generations and link learners to past and present as citizens. It is not directly for employers, nor determined by them. It less about getting a job than about the life for which one gets a job.
This point would not apply to trade schools, whose goal is and has always been training, not education.
The real issue in terms of businesses impact on the college crisis is that they turned college degrees into check boxes in the application process. Jobs that should require no degree do for no real reason. You will see jobs that simply say you need a degree of some sort, but they don't even care what it is, why? The original intent of college and the cultural use of it today have splintered and that is why I proposed options that tie employment to the degree because that is the relevance to a large majority of those who attend college today.
A college degree is not needed to have knowledge of a subject. If I want to go to college to learn about something I most likely can acquire that same knowledge from the internet, the main difference being I won't pay someone to then test me on my understanding of the knowledge I have gained. College today has essentially become a service for vetting knowledge for potential future employers.
In the past college was required to acquire knowledge for many because of the limited access to some of the more detailed nuances of a subject and those who possessed it, however that information today is easier to acquire then ever because of the internet. Colleges themselves already price themselves based on the value of their degree in terms of clout, which in turn improves employment prospects. If this wasn't the case you wouldn't see employment statistics plastered on EVERY college's recruitment literature.
