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

[Ail]

mrstickball said:

Ail said:

mrstickball said:

richardhutnik said:

A middle ground that would work is the last year of high school now be training for a trade, and then the following year be an internship where they go into the field.  You end up adding one more year of schooling, but the last one would be work, preferably paid.

I understand colleges are graduating twice as many people as there are positions for.

Its not surprising. I've said it a thousand times, but looking at bachelor's degree statistics by decade is very eye-opening.

Here's a link:

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_300.asp

From 1976-7, approximately 919,000 million degrees were conferred to men and women.

In 1989-90, it was 1,050,000, or an increase of 10,000 degrees per annum.

From 1989-90 to 1999-2000, it jumped to 1,237,000, or an increase of 18,700 degrees per annum (a 87% increase in the growth per annum in just 10 years).

From 1999-20 to 2009-10, it jumped to 1,650,000, or an increase of 41,300 degrees per annum - an increase of 120% in 10 years.

 

What should that tell you? The growth of degrees conferred has ballooned 413% in just 20 years. Just like home ownership, that creates artificially high prices, meaning our students are over-paying and under-recieving when it comes to college. Even worse, the critical STEP degrees are doing horrible. There has been virtually no growth in the number of students in ~30 years. Those are the degrees that *really* matter, as they create technologies that drive our economy forward.

That's not how you compute an increase or a rate of growth..

An increase of 120% over 10 years like you write it would mean 2.7 million degrees in 2009-10.

Sure, but I was trying to demonstrate how much the growth of bachelors' degrees have increased using a different model.

You were trying to make the numbers say what you wanted ;)