<p>Heard on NPR today that the problem is much worse in China. Kids work very hard to make it into college and then just goof off once they get there. And, the professors allow them to do it.</p>
<p>I think there have always been problems like this - everything just gets exaggerated now because there are more students going to college. 18 is hardly a mature age. There will always be kids who are born to be students and there will always be slackers. Maybe, you just don’t hear about the true students because they aren’t controversial and sensational enough for the news. I can tell you that I know plenty good students. The son of one of my friends is pursuing math and computer science to the nth degree. He loves it and is sailing through MIT with straight A’s while working on his own research problems in his spare time. Another son of a friend is doing the same thing at UCSB (thus disproving the “party school” image of that school).</p>
<p>So what? Are you going to tell them they can’t go to college? Kids come out of high school at age 17 or 18. Doesn’t that strike you as a little young for this new “equilibrium” of yours to be dooming many of them to life in the uneducated work force and reserving college for only the chosen few who meet your standards of self-knowledge and motivation?</p>
<p>And is there any course of learning or any process of establishing a career that doesn’t have some flunk outs? The military, apprenticeships, business ventures, colleges, and just plain old employment all have a certain percentage of wash-outs and failures - particularly among people who were unmotivated, ill-prepared, or otherwise unsuited to the endeavor. How do you propose to sort everyone into their proper slots coming out of high school? Can we find enough clairvoyants to perceive for us in advance each student’s true and proper calling? What sort of government powers would it take to enforce such a sorting process?</p>
<p>Instead of limiting choices and pushing everyone into some assigned role (based on some standardized measurement of aptitude I suppose), wouldn’t a better system be one where members of society are presented with a wide variety of options and choices and let them more or less freely try things they think they might like and move on to something else if they find they don’t? Oh wait, that’s the current system…</p>
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<p>Why not? Because it’s a free market out there; that’s why not. If these people wish to write new literature and some organization is willing to pay them to do so, then it is obviously worth something to that organization. Likewise, if these people wish to perpetually argue over the subtext of works of literature for their entire careers and some organization is willing to pay them to do so, then it is obviously worth something to that organization. Either option is currently open. </p>
<p>It’s so easy to condemn arcane and obscure research, especially research that you don’t understand. I don’t understand a lot of it myself. But I wouldn’t presume to personally dictate what gets funded and what doesn’t (that’s what peer review is for), because you never know from which remote corner of research the Next Big Thing is going to arise.</p>
<p>Take the example of recombinant DNA/genetic engineering. That’s a multi-billion dollar industry that every day medically saves lives, solves crimes, sorts out thorny legal questions, and produces a greater bounty of food, just to name a few advantages. Yet that whole enterprise arose from a few key discoveries made by professors, unknown to anyone outside their narrow research field, who toiled away for years in the late 50s through the late 60s teasing out the secrets of bacterial plasmids. At the time it was impossible to imagine a more obscure and apparently useless corner of biological research than bacterial plasmids. Only in later decades, after much more obscure research, did the promise become apparent. If we had restricted research funding only areas that looked “useful” or at least promising, we never would have made it. Genes would have remained uncloned to this day. </p>
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<p>Again, so what? “Not all of its activities do, and not all individuals benefit” is a pretty good description of EVERY worthwhile human activity. Again, the military, apprenticeships, business ventures, colleges, and just plain old employment all have some activities that do not confer added value and not all benefit from them.</p>
<p>This whole thread has that cranky “these kids today!” tone you often hear from grumpy old people – and grumpy old academics. </p>
<p>The Chronicle of Higher Education has been running articles like this as long as The Chronicle has existed. One would think there existed a golden age of education when everyone was brilliant, worked hard, and gained not just a degree but actual wisdom upon graduation. </p>
<p>Higher education wasn’t as good then - and isn’t as bad now as sakky and warbler86 want us to believe.</p>
<p>“In addition, many students arrive believing that professors, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are mostly political radicals who will try to convert them to some outlandish belief system from another era.”</p>
<p>@tenisghs: It’s not just today that this happens. I can tell you that when I was in college going back several decades I still vividly remember a social anthropology teacher’s lecture which stated (almost verbatim) that if the proletariat class does not get the change it wants by peaceful means the only recourse was “violent revolution” [here she raised her arm, fist at apex in a Che Guavara-like pose]. All I wanted to do was learn about minority non-western cultures, polyandry, cross cousin marriages, etc. and I got slapped in the head with this.</p>
I’m working on my third degree and (counting cross-enrollment and study abroad) have attended five different universities. I plan to teach college when I’m done with my PhD. Obviously I don’t believe higher education is useless or irreparably damaged. I do, however, believe that it currently has significant flaws that demand to be addressed. </p>
<p>For example, take the recent study “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” done by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley. Here’s what several scholars said about teaching and tenure in astronomy:
It’s not just in the sciences. One scholar said the same about political science.
There is an important difference between today and 1970, or 1940. </p>
<p>Today, a college degree is a de facto requirement for 95% of $50,00 salary and up (clerical, customer service, and middle-management) jobs. Entrepreneurs and sales people do not need a college degree, but just about every other job that pays north of $50,000 per year does require one.</p>
<p>This forces 18 year old adolescents and their parent advisors into a choice for 1) college, 2) learning a non-academic trade, or 3) starting their own business, 4) staying at home and mooching of the parents. Inasmuch as the trades of plumbing, electrical work, machining, construction, etc. are difficult to break into, starting a business is something that perhaps 5% of the population is drawn to, and many/most parents are unwilling to continue to support high school graduates, entering college is the normal choice — not becasue Jr. has any intellectual curiosity or desire to learn, but because there is no other viable choice for a person who wants to earn a good income. It is simply an expectation now inthe way that high school was 50 years ago. It is primarily a four to six year, extension of high school in order to meet future employment requirements.</p>
<p>The result of this is that the same intellectually/scholastically unmotivated high school students simply extend that experience 4-6 additional years on either the government’s dime, or their parents’.</p>
<p>The ‘so what’ is that those people still had to pay for college - both in terms of tuition but also in terms of opportunity costs. Hence, they’re arguably worse off than if they had never gone to college at all and hence never incurred those extra costs. </p>
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<p>The major difference is that all of those options save starting your own business (usually) do not incur costs. Rather, you are paid to train in the military, even if you wash out. You (usually) are paid on a professional apprenticeship. You are paid at least minimum wage to take a low-end McJob right out of high school. </p>
<p>But in college - barring those rare few on full rides, who generally speaking tend to be motivated enough to graduate - you are not paid. Rather, you have to pay. </p>
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<p>But again, like I said, you don’t really get to move on to something else if you find out that you don’t like it. Student debt does not disappear just because you find out that you’re not suited for college. I can think of numerous people who dropped out of college, but are nevertheless encumbered with thousands of dollars of debt that they are forced to work off. They are surely worse off than if they had never gone to college at all. {Heck, I know plenty of other people who did graduate from college but are also encumbered with thousands of dollars in debt while having earned unmarketable degrees and hence are arguably worse off than if they had never gone at all.} </p>
<p>I might agree with a system where you don’t incur student debt until and unless you actually graduate. But that’s not the system we have today. You have to pay whether you graduate or not. </p>
<p>I would draw the analogy to sensible financial regulation of consumer products: something that the country surely rues lacking during the last decade as the continuing financial tribulations continue to poison our economy. If you offer people a particular product with a dubious promise of a financial payoff - whether that be a college education or a balloon payment ‘NINJA’ mortgage - some people who are unsuited for those products will nonetheless take them anyway, risking great harm to not only themselves but also to the rest of the economy. Again, people with student debts are unable to look for the most suitable job that they can find. They have to take whatever they can find because they have to service their debt now. They can’t even (easily) expunge that debt through bankruptcy proceedings, because of the legal protections available to student debt creditors. </p>
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<p>Your premise is absolutely false - academia is the antithesis of a free market because it does not conform to market forces. After all, if academia was truly a free market, then schools such as Harvard should be free to sell each and every one of their admissions seats to the highest bidder, regardless of their academic credentials, in the same way that private enterprises sell at whatever price the market will bear. {Granted, schools surely do sell some of their seats, but only if you are willing to pay multi-millions.} A dirt-poor but highly talented person not only has a chance to go to Harvard, but will even be granted a full ride through financial aid. Will General Motors not only hand out free Cadillacs to poor people, but also pay them to drive (as long as those poor people are superstar drivers)? </p>
<p>Rather, what you seem to be saying is that people should be free to make choices according to the non-free market diktats of academia. But then if that is the case, then you have no inherent objection to organizations changing their incentives to foster different types of behavior. For example, what if university Literature departments stopped funding scholars to endlessly debate various literary works and instead started funding scholars to actually create new works? In either case, people are simply doing what organizations incentivize them to do, so what is the problem? </p>
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<p>Then let’s take the example of academic literary analysis. Exactly what clear value-add has that ever provided to society? I struggle to think of a single instance, nor do I think the prospects of one to be bright for the future. </p>
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<p>Again, the ‘so what’, is that many people are actually hurt by the college experience because they actually have to pay to attend, as opposed to joining the military or just plain old employment, where they get paid. Even the debt incurred by starting a failed business venture can potentially be extinguished through a bankruptcy proceeding. But not student debt. Student debt is a burden that you have to carry until paid off.</p>
<p>Let’s also remember that we don’t live in the utopia of academic free choice that you claim to support. For example, you asked me: “Are you going to tell them they can’t go to college?..Doesn’t that strike you as a little young for this new “equilibrium” of yours to be dooming many of them to life in the uneducated work force and reserving college for only the chosen few who meet your standards of self-knowledge and motivation?”</p>
<p>But restriction of choice happens now. Barring the open-admissions community colleges (few of which offer bachelor’s degrees), the vast majority of colleges run some sort of admissions process. What that means is that, right now, there are plenty of Americans who are not permitted a chance to earn a bachelor’s degree because they can’t get admitted. Even those who are admitted may not necessarily be admitted to a college that they like for geographic or cultural reasons, or to one that offers an academic program that interests them. I can’t just wake up one fine day and decide that I want to study Electrical Engineering at MIT. I have to be admitted to MIT first, and I probably won’t be. </p>
<p>So unless you’re advocating the extreme position that every single college should offer open admissions to everybody, then we have to live with the current system where choices are restricted, as just because you want to earn a bachelor’s degree doesn’t mean that some 4-year school is automatically going to admit you. And since choices are already restricted anyway, what’s so outrageous about restricting them in a different way? Either way, we’re going to have restricted choices.</p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not blaming the kids. Rather, I’m blaming the system. </p>
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<p>DunningLA’s latest post was brilliantly stated. The key difference between then and now is that in the old days, you didn’t really need to go to college to obtain most decent jobs. Hence, colleges would disproportionately draw upon that subset of people who actually cared about academics, leaving those who don’t care to head for the workforce that is more suited for them.</p>
<p>But nowadays, the ‘arms race’ of college degrees forces people to attend college whether they are academically inclined or not, simply to avoid sending the ‘negative signal’ to the labor market that they lack a degree. College graduates abound aplenty, which means that employers are free to discriminate in favor of degree holders. Why not - I as a employer would do the same - because doing so is costless to me. After all, I as the employer am not the one paying for the degrees (except perhaps partially and indirectly through higher corporate taxes to support public universities). That expense has to be borne almost exclusively by the students themselves, perhaps leavened with some financial aid from the university. Employers are therefore offloading a tremendous cost upon job applicants to even be considered for a decent job. </p>
<p>Imagine instead a world where employers who choose to screen for college degrees amongst job applicants had to reimburse the entire tuitions of those degree-holders (or at least, the tuitions of those that they choose to hire). I suspect that the vast majority of employers would then choose to stop screening for degrees. That strongly indicates that employers are only screening for degrees because they currently don’t have to pay for them, and so they attach less worth to that screening function than what colleges choose to charge their students. </p>
<p>The upshot is that more and more students who are otherwise unsuited for college are heading there anyway for the sole purpose of keeping up with the academic ‘arms race’. Nobody wants to be the outlier who sends out the negative market signal by lacking a degree. We may therefore be moving towards a Prisoner’s Dilemma where every individual actor is behaving rationally, but towards an equilibrium point that is clearly suboptimal for society as a whole. The more people who spend to obtain college degrees, the more that a degree becomes necessary to remain competitive in the labor market, thereby inducing still more people to spend still more to obtain degrees. A PhD may someday become an entry-level requirement just to answer phones and make coffee.</p>
<p>Sakky - so is your solution to this “problem” merely to complain about it on CC, or do you have an actual solution in mind? If so what do you specifically propose? What is this “new equilibrium” you speak of? Exactly what are you going to insist people do and/or not do, and most importantly, what is the legal basis for enforcing it?</p>
<p>barrons: I probably text about 50 times a day and socialize plenty…how? I can text really fast! A quarter of the time, I’m using text messages to plan where to meet people to hang out in real life. I think you have a very dramatic view of things today.</p>
<p>One solution that I alluded to before may have great potential - * colleges would only charge tuition/housing to students who actually graduate*. In other words, those students who don’t graduate don’t have to incur a mountain of debt that will hinder their freedom. Some minor modifications might have to be made for those students who may not graduate from one particular school but simply transfer their credits to another school from which they graduate, hence one could imagine a pro-rated tuition system where a college would not provide an official grade transcript that a student could use to apply for transfer admissions to another school unless that student paid his outstanding fees. But nevertheless, the guiding principle would be that schools would not be paid unless students graduated.</p>
<p>Schools would then immediately become far more careful about who they admit, knowing that they will lose money on admitted students who never graduate. We would then have to be vigilant about schools weakening graduation requirements to push out more graduated students (and hence be paid), but, frankly, many schools have already weakened their graduation requirements through grade inflation and creampuff majors. </p>
<p>But right now, a fundamental problem is that schools have little incentive beyond indirect reputational and selectivity concerns to not admit students who probably should not be admitted because they are unlikely to graduate. After all the school is paid for all of the terms that a student is there regardless of whether he graduates or not, so the school has little financial incentive to be careful about who it admits. If the student accumulates a mountain of student debt while leaving without a degree, hey, that’s not the school’s problem. But perhaps it should be.</p>
<p>By the same token, public universities should perhaps redirect their state tuition subsidies towards those topics of study that actually foster the most economic growth. Students may be allowed to study whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean that the state taxpayers should necessarily have to subsidize whatever they want to study. Perhaps subsidies should flow only to those majors such as engineering or business that contribute the most to the economy and hence replenish state tax coffers. If somebody really wants to major in American Studies, they are free to do so, but they won’t receive a taxpayer subsidy for doing so. A modified version of this system would be to have that subsidy be contingent upon finding a high-paying job within the state in question. </p>
<p>Would that be outrageous? I think not. Let’s keep in mind that many state universities already in effect choose to subsidize or not subsidize certain courses of study by simply offering or not offering them in the first place. A highly disproportionate percentage of the top engineering programs are at public universities, often times as part of their charter as official Morrill Land-grant universities specifically to stoke the development of agriculture, science, and engineering (but notably not the humanities). By the same token, not every liberal arts major is offered at every public university. I don’t see much practical difference between a school that offers the panoply of majors but preferentially subsidizes certain majors rather than others, vs. a school that doesn’t even offer the unsubsidized majors at all. Either way, you’re steering students towards certain majors and away from others. </p>
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<p>I don’t see why there would be any legal problems. After all, I don’t think anybody is arguing that the Morrill Land Grant Acts are somehow “illegal” because they foster and promote certain courses of study such as engineering and science over others. </p>
<p>You also talk about how academics should have the freedom to research whatever they want because we never know what the future fruits of research might be. But the truth is, that freedom is currently a mirage. Academics cannot research literally anything they want. They have to obtain funding - often times extensive amounts of funding - and if nobody is willing to provide the appropriate grants, they can’t really research that topic. On the other hand, those academics who propose to conduct research with, say, clear military applications will be able to access a large pot of grant money from the Department of Defense. I don’t think anybody questions the legality of that arrangement, or is proposing that the DoD ought to reallocate all its grant funding towards funding literary analysis of Elizabethan poetry. President Barack Obama (and President Bush before him) proposed that grant money be allocated specifically towards sparking research in green energy technologies (but not so much in the humanities). Is that illegal too? </p>
<p>Furthermore, for an academic to even conduct research at all means that you had to have been hired by an academic institution. Yet universities don’t just hire anybody - they hire only those who they think will make a worthy contribution to their department, and these decisions are often times highly arbitrary and political. {For example, I know one business PhD who had a rough time on the job market, was rejected for tenure-track positions at plenty of lower-end schools, and garnered only a single tenure-track job offer … at the MIT Sloan School, one of the best B-schools in the world. Of course the fact that his advisor had recently jumped to MIT and strongly endorsed his hiring may have had something to do with it.} Yet the hiring practices of universities are currently heavily influenced by funders, whether individual donors or the government. The government could say that they aim to fund X professorships at the top universities to those who are performing important military research, and nobody would question that legality. Nor would anybody argue that those professorships should be directed towards the humanities.</p>
<p>The point is that right now, we hardly have a system where people are free to study and research whatever they wish. Rather, we have a system where certain topics are heavily preferred. Since nobody has ever questioned the legality of the current arrangement, why would they question another arrangement where different topics are likewise preferred over others? </p>
<p>Academia is not a free market and never will be, but rather is heavily subject to political forces. Those political forces can potentially be redirected to achieve different outcomes. For example, in 2003, the Federal government anointed certain universities (5 so far) as “Sun Grant” universities with the specific mandate to research solar and other renewable energy technologies. That surely means preferentially hiring and promoting more professors and perhaps admitting more students (grad and undergrad) who conduct that type of research. I don’t think anybody questions the legality of that arrangement.</p>
<p>I agree with many of your arguments, Sakky, but not your solution of having schools pay for schooling unless the student graduates. This would only cause them (as you admit) to graduate everyone. This is already the way high school operates which is why you have to be really rebellious or overwhelmed by life to drop out. I do like the idea of having companies fund college for the people they hire. That would place a true market value on it. However, even with no interventions, if college costs continue to out pace inflation fewer will be able to afford college and fewer will attend. The market will correct itself. There will be fewer college graduates and fewer jobs will require the degree. The question is will the world be better off, worse off, or the same? In other words, even for non-serious students who get jobs that don’t require college, is there a benefit to going to college?</p>
<p>Sakky, I also agree that this would actually only cause schools to further limit their academic standards. Making sure that only students that graduate would pay admission would dramatically lower the amount of students that would pay at the current admission, perhaps by 1/3. No school would want to lower tuition by that much. Furthermore, most students who drop out do so because they can’t pay to begin with. Schools would have to be more hesitant to admit them. For public schools who wouldn’t be able to discriminate against them, a huge increase of tuition would be needed.</p>
<p>It also doesn’t account for transfers - which school’s tuition should the student pay?</p>
<p>Currently colleges, especially private schools, are free to charge as much as they want (or as Olin did for several years, nothing at all) and require students to pay according whatever schedule suits the school. Again, by what legal mechanism would you force schools to charge only according to your notions of a good schedule? If some private college wants its students to pay as they go, how are you going to stop them?</p>
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<p>Ah good, you see the huge flaw in your own thinking. You are providing a powerful financial incentive to schools to make absolutely sure everybody gets a degree no matter how dismal their performance. </p>
<p>So how can “we” can make sure they won’t weaken their requirements or simply give everybody at least a C in every class? </p>
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<p>Oh, you already answered my question: we can’t. Within 10 years under that system a college diploma will be worth less academically than a high school diploma is today.</p>
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<p>Right, but I never said said that academics can research literally anything they want. As I referred to in my post, peer-review is the current mechanism that decides the merit of proposed research and thus who gets the available funding. If a prof can’t convince a committee of his/her colleagues of the merit of the research it goes unfunded. That’s the current system and it works quite well.</p>
<p>What I object to is some uninformed person like you deciding in advance which topics or or entire fields of study aren’t worthy of research funding simply because you don’t see any value to them. Peer review committees do it only imperfectly. I’m sure peer committees have made many mistakes. But having people who know nothing about it ban funding for entire fields of scholarship based on some theory of college reform is pure folly.</p>
<p>The likely result would be that there will be students who complete 97% of a bachelor’s degree (all but one course) and then “drop out” to go work at an employer in on the scheme who is willing to hire them.</p>
<p>Good point. Another unintended consequence of this daft theory. But with so much money on the line, I suspect the schools would battle these last minute drop-outs by declaring them “close enough” and awarding them the degree anyway. Just mail them the diploma and an invoice. </p>
<p>But since schools would then be awarding degrees to people who hadn’t actually completed the requirements, it would further weaken the already-sliding academic worth of the degree. Heck, schools might even be tempted to graduate students who had dropped out with a full year of course work yet to go.</p>
<p>I think Sakky’s idea might be more workable if the student’s progress was broken down into more stages rather than “graduate or not”, perhaps year by year, where the student passes from stage 1 to stage 2 when the student has made one year’s progress toward some major.</p>
<p>Each stage would cost a certain amount of money, and, rather than being free, it could be get something like half of your money back for the stage you did not complete. This kind of system would make the college put a strong focus on student progress. Also, the student gets some kind of partial degree, which is better than nothing.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine many colleges doing something like this, though it is fun to dream things up.</p>
<p>I would not force anybody to do anything. Instead, certain colleges could simply implement a policy of not charging tuition unless you graduate, and presumably, many students would then prefer to attend such a school vs. those schools that refuse to provide such a policy. </p>
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<p>That then just raises the question of why employers don’t do that right now, if my theory is so “daft”. Why can’t people today who have currently completed 97% of the degree approach employers and declare that since they ‘almost’ have a degree, they should be eligible to apply for whatever entry-level job they want? </p>
<p>The undeniable fact is that - right now - most good jobs require that you have a degree. Not 97% of a degree, but an actual degree. You can’t even get an interview for such jobs without a degree. I agree that such a policy is indeed ‘daft’ - but regarding currently daft employers. If employers are daft today, I don’t see why they wouldn’t continue to be daft later if you were to implement my reforms. </p>
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<p>Come on, you guys don’t think that’s already happening now?. Right now, plenty of colleges offer creampuff majors in which students can and do easily graduate with practically little effort. Leisure Studies, American Studies, Communications Studies, and the like are actual majors that exist today in which - let’s face it - it’s practically impossible to actually flunk out. </p>
<p>The upshot is that colleges today have, frankly, already sundered their academic standards by offering creampuff majors where students can pass courses with little effort. I therefore don’t see how my reforms would make the situation any worse than what is already happening right now. Like I’ve been saying, right now, plenty of students view the college experience as little more than a 4-year social and dating escapade, where they congregate in easy majors that are practically impossible to fail and that provide them with ample amounts of leisure time. You guys seem to be overly concerned with the notion that colleges will simply lower their standards of graduation, yet ask yourself, exactly what standards are currently being enforced in their creampuff majors? </p>
<p>I do find it interesting that my detractors don’t seem to have a solution for that problem, or perhaps don’t even see it as a problem at all. Do you guys seriously want to defend the status quo? The status quo ain’t that great. </p>
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<p>Which has already happened anyway. Like I said, to even obtain most decent jobs - even one that requires little education on the actual job requirements - you basically need a degree, solely because plenty of your competitors will have degrees as well.</p>
<p>To give you an example, at one of my prior employers, every single receptionist had at least a bachelor’s degree, and many even held master’s degrees. This was a job that required merely mundane secretarial tasks. Nevertheless, if you didn’t have a degree, and preferably a master’s degree, you would not have been competitive for that job. But why? Those degrees, strictly speaking, had little to do with the job at hand. What does having a master’s degree in political science - which one person held - have anything to do with making coffee and answering phones? But as long as the arms race of college degrees goes unchecked, then people will have spend to obtain more degrees to garner even a low-end job, no matter how irrelevant that degree program may be for the job.</p>
<p>How many people who have completed 97% of a bachelor’s degree do not actually complete the whole bachelor’s degree? Those who did not complete an intended bachelor’s degree probably stopped well short of 97%.</p>
<p>But if completing the first 97% were free and the last 3% cost $200,000 (as in your proposal, as opposed to the “pay as you go” system now), both students and employers would catch on to that fact, and there would be a lot more 97%-of-a-bachelor’s-degree people around that employers may be willing to hire.</p>
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<p>Just because someone does not like your proposed change does not mean that s/he likes the status quo, or has a simple sounding solution for the problems of the status quo.</p>