Since I can't thumbs up your posts I'll just leave this comment: great posts!!!, even with all the typos lol.

Thanks! I just wanted to inspire all the kids on this gaming forum to go to school while you are young, this is coming from a gamer who use to think school was irrelevant until I became a doctor; my perspective has definitely changed since I graduated from high school in 2002. I think higher education is essential for advancement of society. We need to teraform Mars asap, and putting more kids in school is the way we achieve this...even though i doubt in my life time this will happen!! :) (look that up on Wikipedia, TeraForming is a cool concept)

Funny that this is mentioned; I was thinking of a related problem yesterday. The problem of the value of important degrees crashing down. It comes down to the teachers' and the schools' fault even though they seem honest. The problems mainly are:

Dumbed down material. Easy homework. Easy quizzes/exams. Grade curving. Too much helping the students.

I agree that not everyone is meant for college. I am double majoring in Aerospace Engineering and Mathematics and I simply cannot stand how the material is sacrificed and the lecture speed is destroyed due to "making sure the average student gets it". Some teachers use a gigantic curve to ensure just about everybody who had two brain cells passed, when without the curve they should just have let 3 or 4 people pass with an A, and about 30 out of 80 actually pass the given course.

It is done everywhere. What happens next is that a lot of people who shouldn't be graduating because they don't seriously understand the beauty of the material (you know, the people who want only simple concepts and then say math and theory are useless because they can't apply their dumbed down theories of the world) are actually graduating.

This is not only gravely unfair, it is also very inefficient as the people with actual serious mental capacities may not have as many contacts. Because there would be less people graduating into the field, the people who would graduate would be in far greater demand, and as such they would have a higher salary. The job done would also be of a higher quality.

University needs to be a place of challenging learning and creativity. Either you get it or you don't. If you don't have the minimum intelligence required to solve the tasks that should be demanded, you should not be going into college. All the "practical" people shouldn't be in college if they don't really want to learn. If they just want a job in their "practical" field, they can do a trade or shut up and study.

My immediate suggestions to teachers would be: Drop curves and make the material harder.

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.

I'm studying Geography. Does that fall under the "Engineering" type of degree, which is useful, or the "Music Theory" type of degree, which isn't?

I think the OP completely misses the point of what a college education is supposed to do.
Of course, so do many college educations -- which is the problem.

Given the increased reliance on technology and off-shore labor to accomplish things that were once done by American muscle (writing from my own perspective, but you can probably substitute any Western European country or Canada there), people need to have better problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. Those are helpful in management or "maintenance" positions. (By maintenance, I mean those people who keep things running like electricians, plumbers, etc., who are often undervalued but are in fact invaluable).

That is what higher education is supposed to do.

Also, the OP forgot that "college" can also mean community and technical college, which accomplishes a lot of what is being discussed in the OP.

Mike from Morgantown

Trade schools are absolutely something that should be encouraged... but let us not kid ourselves about factory and production jobs in the US. That sort of labor is being exported, and to bring it up in the same train of thought as actual skilled trade work makes no real sense.

Trade schools and skilled labor should also NOT come at the expense of promoting college, it should be a valid option but not seen as the only option.

The real issue is that no one is pushing our children into engineering and hard science majors, these are important jobs that country needs and that we currently hire foreign firms to provide.

I totally agree with College being "pushed" onto children, as though it is a given. It is done in a noble way with no ill intention, but it keeps children misinformed about how the world works and keeps them in "spoon fed" mode where they have another 4 years of not being in control of the majority of their lives.

And for those who do go to college, I HIGHLY recommend a community college that is SUPER DUPER cheap where you can learn just as much information as you want to on whatever hobby or career subjects you are interested.

Unless you have a specific career and life path in mind, spend time learning about your hobbies in a cheap way. Only spend bucks for a real degree that you KNOW you need. And, surprise surprise, most of us don't know what we want at 18 years of age out of High School.

Completely agree, in the high school I attended I can honestly say I AINT LEARN SHIET. Not to say I'm an idiot, but things like math and what not I just don't care about. Now in college things are getting serious (finally) since I'm actually working towards a specific career, but in high school I didn't work towards anything I wanted except for maybe a couple of art classes.

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