OT: Student loan default rate in USA higher than reported.

[ChichiriMuyo]

mrstickball said:

ChichiriMuyo said:

mrstickball said:

Not surprising. There are a glut of college students with degrees, but no jobs to put them at.

I'll throw my hat in concerning the issue of paying for college education via taxation:

The issue with this is that not all jobs need college education. Yes, many of the good ones do, but not all do. Therefore, if you provide everyone with a free college education, many of them will not use it due to lower-skilled jobs that are filled via trade school or no college education at all. In such instances, it would be unfair to both the tax payer subsidizing useless education, and the person that doesn't need the college education.

College is optional, not mandatory. The best way to deal with it is to promote scholarships and philanthropy that can ensure that those with the desire to go to college will have apt funding for it. Unfortunately, in America, every youth has the notion that college is a must to succeed, which is absolutely false. Yes, many good careers need it, but I've met and know tons of kids that went t college and don't work in their initial field of study because they either stopped caring or simply couldn't find a job where they wanted to work.

 

Going further, the entire structure of college education is a sham, IMO. We need to go back to on the job training, and apprenticeships more than what we do now. We throw kids into education with no promise of a job, or inclination that they'll stay in that field. Rather, companies should work to hire bottom-level interns, see if they have merit (good work ethic, smart, willing to work, ect), then pay their way through school. There are companies that do this, and I applaud them for it.

The problem with your argument is that colleges, even if they are teaching "useless" material, are actually proving the people that attend them with the tools necessary to "get" the on-the-job training that will be provided for them when they switch to a new vocation.  A person can graduate with a history degree as an undergrad and excel at middle-level managment simply because the communication skills necessary to do the job were taught in college.

And you assume these skills are only available at college. They are not. You give an example of a person spending tens of thousands of dollars on a major he doesn't use. If he excels at middle level management, why not simply get the skills needed for management without pursuing a BA in history?

This is most important considering the fact that often businesses complain that college grads lack the communication skills necessary to do their jobs, let alone those who never go.  For the businesses that make the most money it's about how you collect information (research), how you analyze information, and how you relate that information to others (paper writing).  You know, the crap you do in college.  The crap that's woefully under-represented in high school because most kids don't want to do it if the subject doesn't interest them.

And yet....You could easily learn those things outside of college. I know I did.

Yes, you can succeed without college.  Yes, you can even fail with it.  But the results speak for themselves - college grads are much more productive regardless of what they studied and in turn they earn far more money.  We can have any old idiot do the jobs that don't require college degrees, and year after year we send more of those jobs away to third world or emerging economies.  But to maximize the potential of our populace, as many people that can become educated should.  Education, throughout several centuries - nay, several millenia - has only served to make the whole populace more wealthy.

There are a lot of jobs that don't require college that cannot be outsourced. Construction, police, real estate, pilots, air traffic controllers, HVAC/Eletrical/Plumbing, and so on. I also find it interesting you argue that we lose a lot of jobs overseas, yet we have more college grads than ever.

As an example, look to Spain 1000 years ago, when the land was divided between Mulsims and Christians.  Which group favored education more?  The Muslims.  Which were more prosperous?  The Muslims.  By learning of Greek, Persian, and Indian traditions and incorporating the ideas of all the muslims were able to grow crops on a plot of land four times as often as the Christians did.  Even long after Islamic rule began to fall apart, the Muslims did much better than the Christians.  Yes, farmers were taught only what was necessary to fulfill their role the best they could rather than knowledge in general, but without the desire to gain knowledge (a key component of early Islamic society) they would never have had that moment at all.  By gathering, analyzing, testing, and then spreading what they learned, they were able to spend centuries as the dominant power while their foes barely held on to what they had.  And the worst part is that once the Muslims were defeated, the Christians subsequently ruined their land.  Almeria, as an example, was once a rather fertile (though arid) region.  When the Cristians retook it they gradually turned it into a desert.  Lands that could produce food if used properly were destroyed by soil errosion from the massive deforestation that later occured.  Something that happened out of ignorance, despite the knowledge of preserving those lands existing for centuries.

I have nothing against education. My problem is that the current system doesn't work properly. It takes ~4 years to learn things that may realilistically require half that.

I'll reply to your replies by number.

1.  A spoonfull of sugar helps the medicine go down.  It doesn't matter what you study, you learn the same basic skills.  It's better to give people the option to study what they like and then learn to do what they are best at.

2.  Many people can easily learn those skills without college.  Many, many more people cannot.  Your parents were probably more well educated than the average, they probably instilled the values of self-motivated learning on you, and you probably even picked up some of the skills from observing them.  Not everyone is like you or I.  In fact, most people fail to learn those skills even at their basest level despite having 13 years of compulsory education.

3. Consturction is "insourced" to (illegal) immigrants quite frequently.  Police officers actually are required to complete college-level education, though it may be provided in the police academy.  Even in a backwards state like Arizona (<3) you're required to take classes equivalent to earning an associates degree in order to be a real estate agent, and many other states require agents to take classes on a regular basis even after they have completed the compulsory training.  Pilot?  Okay, you got me there.  But all of the next three jobs are most certainly made more efficient when completed by people with high-level education to back them up.  And the jobs we're losing to overseas competitors are the ones that take the least education.  Before long, a pilot may be no more educated (and no more natural born citizen) than a taxi driver.  We're really as good at insourcing as outsouring in the US.

4. I'm not going to claim the system works as well as it could, but you're pulling those numbers out of your ass.  People learn at different speeds, which explains why the average college grad is actually in school for 5.5 years, and that's one of the biggest reasons why it "doesn't work."  Yes, people would get what they need out of the system if it were structured to teaching the individual rather than the class, but then we'd have to resort to the education system that worked even worse a few hundred years ago OR dramatically increase the number of teachers (aka, spend more money on education).  It's certainly an imperfect system, especially since many professors care more about their research and many adminstrators care more about money than genuine results, but it's merely a reflection of our capitalistic society.  Because these schools have to earn the money to keep themselves in business, they have to neglect the students in favor of more profitable ventures (I'm looking at you, NCAA).  They can't reform their systems because they aren't free of the need to be profitable. 

As much as I hate government spending, education is one of the very few areas in which I think it's not only justified but in the long term repaid in full.  College grads do their jobs better than those who aren't, and they can do other jobs on top of that the are far more valuable.  We could fund a full university for a year off of what the military spends in a couple of days (if that, maybe we could fund several off of one day's worth of pentagon spending).  Our priorities are wrong, and our systems are wrong because of it, and it's the warped values of our society that make your argument seem even remotely plausible.