Is college becoming an ever increasing scam?

Cant watch the videos as i am at work and computers cant access youtube. But i think i can add something to the discussion.

I posted on one of the sub forums on here (western europe) the story of a girl who graduated in 2010 and hasnt been able to find work. She is now taking the goverment to court because in order to continue recieving social security she has to do some unpaid work as a way of helping get into the job market.

Now, what was interesting is that she trained as a geologist. A discpline that is in huge demand and graduates are receiving very high starting salaries. But she doesnt want to work as a geologist so she is claiming benefits.

Now the bit that relates to this article. On another forum, a poster from the USA pointed out that there were lots of unemployed geology graduates in the USA and gave some evidence.

As someone currently trying to fill vacanies i asked my co workers about this. It seems that 1. American grads never think to apply for jobs outside of the USA, which as a brit, living in Oz and working in Africa i can not understand. 2. There qualifacations are not up to scratch. I hadnt realised that a very large part of the degree course there requires studying non geological areas. Yet, uni's around the world say that it is very hard to fit in the subject doing 3/4 years of nothing but geology. So is the US system broke. Does it turn out well rounded grads but whom have little specialisation skills?

 

I see discounting anything by calling it a "conspiracy" is a world wide issue.

 

Getting back to the actual Thead question ...

Is college becoming an ever increasing scam?

I say education is the ultimate equalizer for "everyone"; and the greatest "fear" for "anyone"! You decide what side of the equation you would like to be on.

It's that choice that many of our politicians fear ... because both Knowledge and ignorance is powerful and exploited.

Knowledgeable Voters are a Great threat to dishonest Politicians.

 

It's not that college itself is a scam.

Certain degrees are a scam. You can't get a good job from an art history degree, for example.

Students should be more practical in what fields of study they pick. That's really the biggest problem here.

 

Formal education is overrated. One needs to know how to manipulate people. Schmooz, schmooz, schmooz. One needs to know how to make a dead woman cum.

 

I guess a couple semesters of Biology would help.

 

It depends where you attend. All those internet colleges are pretty much scams. Take the good ones like William and Mary, Princeton, Harvard, Yale etc, they make you work to achieve a decent grade...education isn't a scam per-se, but places like Pheonix Univeristy, well, would you hire someone from there over one of the places I mentioned?

 

Old widows are often loaded. They need advice on financial management and personal care. You seem like a candidate for assisted living.

 

Where to start?

There are undoubtedly a lot of courses taught that are of no market value. Spare me the drivel about “critical thinking.” Critical thinking (if it can indeed be taught) without a solid knowledge of fundamentals is a recipe for a troublemaker. I cannot fathom what kind of job wants a holder of a degree in queer studies, peace studies, (name-your-aggrieved group) studies, or squishy sciences like psychology or sociology.

But maybe we ought to attack the other end of the high costs of college. Students rack up a lot of debt just taking remedial courses because they not able to hack college-level stuff coming out of high school.

Back in the day (Nixon was popular) engineering freshmen took rigorous classes in calculus and chemistry. Chemistry is useful, but calculus was not. In decades of professional practice, I cannot remember EVER doing a single integration. But those courses were “gatekeepers.” Their rigor weeded out the dilettantes. Every meaningful discipline has “gatekeeper” courses. The classes were tough but eventual graduates struggled through – right out of high school. Not true today. Even choosy elite engineering schools like Purdue, Rose-Hulman, Renssalaer, etc make freshmen take remedial math and science classes, because even the best hand-picked elite public high school graduates don’t seem to be able to hack college-level calculus and chemistry. This bespeaks massive failure in the secondary school system. College students have to lose a year of their lives (and rack up more student debt) taking “remedial butt-wiping” because the high schools are so worthless.

BTW, most graduates of even middle-of-the-road private high schools can go right into rigorous math and science courses.

Today’s colleges and universities scam off more money by discouraging heavy course loads. Heavy course loads – if you can handle them – get you out of college sooner and spending less money. Students today are discouraged from taking more than twelve hours per semester. This pretty much guarantees that they will spend at least five years in school AFTER they spend a year of remedial classes. So a “four year degree” now takes six. Result: 50% more student debt. Back in the Nixon days, passing less than eighteen hours a semester marked you as a slacker – and you got out in four years and maybe less.

And some of it is the students’ own fault. When given the choice of four years of grinding or six years of partying, all too many opt for the latter.

 

why do you keep capitalizing words that shouldn't be capitalized? your style leads me to believe that you should be asking the schools you graduated from for a refund.

 

Actually, there are plenty of people who do that. Emily Dickinson often capitalized words in her poems. I still do it when I type and then have to go back through and try and catch them. My capitalizations are because I feel that the word should be seen as more important than the surrounding words. I had an English professor who asked me to keep the Caps in because she wanted to compare my writing to that of one or two other students who also did it. By the way, all of us went on to major in English.

 

I think its more of the bad economy instead of college being a scam.
Few employers are hiring and college graduates are for the first time not able to find jobs; its not because college is a scam its because the economy blows.

 

Well, since I started college three and a half years ago, tuition has increased every year I have been in school. First it was the tuition rates at the community college and then there have been tuition hikes in the UNC system (of which NC State is part of) every year. Students are beginning to protest the constant hikes and some of the former UNC System board members have protested the continual increases.

 

Education is like Wall Street. So you say you don't like how we invest your money? Where else are you gonna invest your money? So you don't like how we provide higher education? Where else are you going to get an education?

 

What is considered 'education' these days at the university level is a scam! If you can take a credited course on the Simpsons or some other pop culture garbage we need to rethink what we are doing.

 

that's why i called it a question of style. i rarely capitalize anything on the net other than proper nouns. that itself is way more formal than what you typically see in an email.

 

The cost of college is obscene. Going into debt for a college education is obscene.

I have a kid going through college. It's a state college so even though it's still way expensive, it's more affordable than private college.

A college education is a necessary and desirable for any kid that wants to have a higher education. It is for the good of society to have a well educated citizenry.

 

You are wrong, the cost has to be obscene, lest we allow trash into our schools, oh wait, we do allow trash, and they lower our standards, huh, seems the conundrum is the liberal wasteland that demanded such... you sowed what you reaped, and then you have the audacity to whine about it? ha! that's funny

 

I don't understand why do some posters here saying that some people don't deserve to go to college? And the way to prevent them to go to college is to increase the cost of college.......that's like saying only the Rich deserve education and better life.

 

I am 10 mins in on the video, quite interesting, it mention the college bubble that is coming.

Once students graduated, they are in debt for life, their student loans are the house loans those days, but they don't even get the house.

I think the question here is that why do the government allow this to happen?

On one hand, the government promote no one left behind, everyone will get the student loans, so that they get the education to purse better life later on, but on the other hand, the government allow the tuitions to go up to the students will be in debt for life, which make their future life actually worst.

What's with that?

 

This shows that the government is not our government. It is the banks'/lenders'/insurers' government. The government is only a tool to create a market out of our physical bodies. Student loans are specially legislated to not wipe out in a bankruptcy, so it is literally indenturing your skin, physically. The current propaganda that defines our lives is simple: let me take some student loans so that I can advance in life and become like Paris Hilton or the Kardashians. I am the only student in the Universe who sees through this, to the point of letting the English language go, and study in Germany, France, or the Netherlands, where this process is not in full swing yet. How many English speakers are timid enough not to know that their "countries" are history?

 

Here's the deal -- letting everyone who graduates high school does no one any favors. If you're a good student who worked his butt off to get into a good school, it lowers the value of that education by making your degree commonplace. College degrees used to get you a good job -- because -- they were rare. The second way they hurt the deserving kids is that is raises the cost. When lots of colleges are chasing a few students they have every incentive to keep costs low -- when everyone goes, you have no reason to hold down costs because there isn't as much competition between schools.

As for the undeserving kids -- they get the worst of all worlds. They spend themselves into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. They essentially get a piece of paper, but since 95% of all job aplicants have the SAME PAPER, what happens is that the paper doesn't get them anywhere. Secondly, most of them end up doing minimum wage because they don't learn a trade. It's sad to see kids graduate from a 4-year in 5-6 years with no skills and $100K in debt and realize that they're still only qualified to make a cup of coffee at starbucks, which they could have started doing $100K and 4 years ago and perhaps have gotten a few raises in the meantime.

My kids will probably not be going to college unless they have straight As and perfect SATs because unless you have an advanced degree, it doesn't matter if you go to college -- you still won't get anywhere unless you prove that you're the elite.

 

I think in every region there is an economic balance between the various skills in the statistics of economic activities. The skills differ in levels, but if someone spends a lot of time and money to get a skill that too many others have too, then he just priced himself out of another market where he could have been a player with different and lesser skills. For example, in many western countries car mechanics do better than degreed professionals, especially if you consider the extra time and money spent on getting degrees.

 

I know a woman who grew up in communist east Europe. She said that college was FREE, but you had to be in the top 1 % of your country at the entry exam to make the minimum academic mark to become eligible for entry. So much for liberalism and communism!

I guess we just have too many colleges to sell too many skills for too few economic need for those skills, so the government and the lenders came up with designing the college bubble.

I postulate, that ever since the western world got financially skewed by legislating various private retirement investment arrangements, the only way western money can survive is to move from bubble to bubble. (1970's = 3rd world debt bubble, 1980's = 401k/IRA "employer efficiency" bubble, 1990's = dotcom bubble, 2000's = housing/credit bubble, 2010's = gold/studentloan bubble, ... .) With every bubble, more and more people get cornered out of economic resources, in every country, west and 3rd world alike.

 

There are accredited online colleges now. I have taken courses online and my experience is that they are equal to, if not better than, sitting my butt in a classroom.