Teachers and leaders of American Society need to stop telling our kids to go to College!

[xwan]

HappySqurriel said:

xwan said:

I am afraid you are wrong, it has been consistently shown that higher education leads to higher IQ and better critical thinking skills. Of course IQ is not be-all; end all to intelligence, there are other aspects such as EQ. Who knows, if you have a PhD in business maybe you are now owner of more than 2 store front business, maybe you have a company that is much bigger because you realize you had better ways to monetize it.

How do you expect Albert Einstein to build the atomic bomb without reading all the books, learning all the theories first? How do you expect me to come up with a list of 15 differential diagnosis of common cold without having to first memorize the 15 things first and then be able to utilize it later on and apply it in real life.

If you think you are learning a bunch of things you don't use, you are wrong; you use it everyday. Eventhough most of us learned calculus in high school do not end up using it in your professional life, i certainly hope you know what "are under the curve" measn when people are talking to you in both business and math terms. You have already gained the knowledge and you are already using it in an abstract way without realizing it.

You guys take things for granted, you have the concept of bacteria, virus, cells, and molecules because you learned this from your high school and college course, even though you are now a business man it doesn't mean these biology concepts are useless to you. If you have cancer and I tell you the results, you can at least appreciate it from an abstract level that it is some abnormal cell in the body.If you are in some third world country that you never went to school, you will probably seek out a Witch Doctor to try to cure your "cancer" by some stupid "chant".

All you guys do not even realize the value of education, and you walk into any major University lab and you walk into any major Teaching hospital; all the good doctors and pHds all speak with an foreign accent. How far have we fallen behind as a country. This country needs to encourage people to go to college and beyond. Leave the burger flipping jobs for those who doesn't want to go thru college, it's their choice and thats what they are content with, sooner or later there will be robots taking those jobs as well and you will find urself obsolete

excuse for various typos, did it kind of fast.

 

Most studies of higher eduction demonstrate that college and univeristy graduates have higher IQs and better critical thinking skills than those who only have a high school education, but this doesn't take into account that people need highre IQs and better critical thinking skills to enter into college. When you actually start measuring improvements in critical thinking skills of students in college and university the results are less impressive.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/opinion/la-oe-zimmerman-are-college-students-learning-20120131

My New York University colleague Richard Arum and the University of Virginia's Josipa Roksa recently tracked several thousand undergraduates as they moved through two dozen U.S. universities. They found that almost half of them didn't significantly improve their reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college. And after four years, subsequent research showed, more than one-third of students still showed no significant gains in these areas.

Arum and Roksa based their conclusions on results from the College Learning Assessment, or CLA, an essay test that tries to measure the things universities say they want students to learn: critical thinking, complex reasoning and written expression. One sample question provides several documents about an airplane that crashed, then asks students to advise an executive about whether his company should purchase that type of plane. Another test item presents crime data from a city and asks students to counsel its mayor about how to respond to criticisms of his policing policies.

The CLA was administered to more than 2,300 students at 24 institutions, ranging from big state universities and selective liberal arts schools to historically black and Latino institutions. Forty-five percent of the students showed no significant gains on the CLA between their freshman and sophomore years, and 36% didn't improve significantly between their freshman and senior years.

Now, the unfortunate problem is that they didn't study high school graduates and see how their critical thinking skills developed because in your late teens and early 20s your brain is still developing and this development primarily occurs in the frontal lobe which is responsible for critical thinking and reasoning. It is likely that, due to continued brain development and learning new skills on the job, a large portion of high school graduates also see similar improvements in critical thinking skills. If they had the data demonstrating the improvements in critical thinking skills for high school graduates we could produce a reasonable estimate for the improvement in critical thinking skills due to college.

Personally, I suspect that the minority of students in college develop critically thinking skills due to their college education

U can use statistic to your advantage. here let me paraphrase the article a different way for you. "Half of them did not improve", which means half of them did improve. that's 50% that did, 1 out of 2. not bad. 45% did not show signification gain but that means 55% did showed an significant gain? Article did not provide p values and they did not specify their null and alternative hypothesis; so I am only assuming the opposite to be true, of course if their study was designed only to show there is NOT a significance difference I may not be able to make those assumption. 

I can probably find a bunch of studies to support my point that college is linked to higher average life time earning, IQ, and other markers. I don't just randomly search the web for sources though; I only read things with methodology, studies with adequate power, a small P value < 0.05 and confidence interval that does not cross the midline, so I know that it is not due to chance. (how would you know what i am even talking about if you had no education on statistics, you would believe everything you area online as gospel)

Higher education is definately linked to higher scores in problem solving skills (this will be student dependent, if u dont' show up to class and go clubbing everyday, of course you won't improve). Like the guy above me majoring in Aerospace Engineering, who's going to build the next space shuttle if no one goes to college, I am quite sure street folks are less likely to understanding and problem solve aerospace engineering related problem.