America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

[Treetopleaf]

I'd be worried about a tracking system that separated students into vocational and college prep based on results of some middle school test, with the quality of the education received by the vocational students being inferior.

Amen. Some schools admit with the philosophy of 'sink or swim' (think 'weedout' courses'). At least they don't gatekeep. Let the HS kids get Cs, Ds and Fs in AP courses - then they know what they're expected of in college, and whether they can/will work hard enough to do better.

[olderstudent]

I've been working as a software developer for 12 years without a degree and have been making over 200k a year for the past 5 years. In the business world, domain knowledge combined with the ability to deliver relatively bug-free software on time while meeting a strict set of requirements is what gets you paid. You know ... all that good stuff: (your integrity, your discipline, your finished product) --> your reputation.

Why am I quitting my job to go back to school then?? The answer is that in the future if I find something new and exciting that catches my interest, I don't want a barrier to entry to be my lack of the appropriate degree. So, I'm going after a Ph.D. I figure that if I don't stop until I get to the top, I'll be fairly set for the next 40 or so years. At the end of the day, money is great -- it buys nice cars, vacations, clothes, food, stuff ... but interesting work is also nice and one of the only ways to get a big company to give you a multi-million dollar budget in something like a silicon valley venture is for one to add an advanced degree to his or her portfolio as well. Fortune 500 companies also love big degrees.

Just be careful not to become an overtrained and overspecialized equivalent of a high-tech assembly line worker. At that point, you become dispensable. My friend has worked "the world's number 1 database" [insert name here] producer for 7 years and has gotten nowhere. He got an advanced degree from one of the best schools in the nation.

Do what you like, and do it well and [most of the time] the money will come. If not, then maybe the rewards aren't pecuniary.

[hikids]

I think that articles like this, and about all sorts of other subjects that show up in the news media, are intended simply to sell the particular medium through shock not real information. Unfortunately, the news media is looking to create news through what amounts to staging media events. It is happening all over the place. School ratings by Bus Week and USNWR are not really intended to provide information but to sell magazines. This requires some turnover in the lists, which magically appears to happen. Could not have same school #1 forever, and worse yet the top ten or twenty.

It is the slavish following of this mis and myth information that creates the uncritical and lemming like behavior that we see as people then rush to adopt the next new thing whatever it is. Or believe the media is correct. The "I saw it on TV or read it in the newspaper" syndrom.

As I said the problem goes beyond articles on education (which pray on parents' and students' anxieties) to pretty much most facits of the media "reporting". Look carefully at the election coverage, the media is shilling pure and simple. A few in the media recognize it an worry, but most are just counting the $$.

I suggest charting your own course, not based on what comes out of the media in the forms of articles. There are many ways to succeed, some are better bets than others, so chose what works for you.

[vossron]

It's all about job competition. On average, those with the best education/training/qualifications will get the best jobs. One or two generations ago a high school diploma was all it took to get a decent job, but that's no longer sufficient. A college degree used to guarantee a decent job, and that's no longer true, either. The rest of the world has been catching up while we neglected education. The government's suppression of science and K-12 science education for the past few years hasn't helped our situation.