A college education is useless unless you attend an elite university

[Doom_Guy]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

 

[RoryN]

A college education is useless if you're not smart enough to understand the curriculum, and subsequently apply it.

 

[Doom_Guy]

Forrest Gump went to college with an athletic scholarship.

 

[jomar]

Harvard Schmarvard...it's a book.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

Not true at all, Mike.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Forrest Gump went to college with an athletic scholarship.

That was a fictional movie.

 

[RawHumor]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

You're basing this on what, exactly? Your vast worldly knowledge of good careers and highly accredited colleges?

 

[warrior queen]

All education is useless if you major in Interpretive Feminist Dance.

 

[removed9556]

 

[Miss_Lucie]

I would disagree that it is pointless. However, it certainly helps to go to a well known school.

 

[Sean]

All art is quite useless. A baby is useless, and so is a flower. Most of the really valuable things are useless.

I was lucky enough to go to a wonderful university and to do well. But I didn't do it for a career or money. I studied because I love my subject, and the world would be a far better place if that were true of all students. The utilitarianism that reduces these glorious repositories of human culture and learning into a tool for gouging more cash is dispiriting.

This. And the disbelieving looks I get from people when I tell them I studied Physics cos I loved it, not because I was planning on a job at the end have to be seen to be believed.

 

[removed9556]

 

[Miss_Lucie]

error!

 

[Penuche]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

Even if your degree doesn't get you a better job (or, indeed, any job at all) there are other benefits gained from those years in tertiary education.

1) Three to four years with the chance to decide what you really want to do and who you really are (assuming that you get the chance to study without living under your parents' roof in those years).
2) The habits of independant study and research - these are often useful later in life, whether you like it or not.
3) Learning how to wade through a large amount of information, pick out the bits you need and put those together in your own words.
4) More confidence when speaking in public.
5) Debating becomes easier, even if you didn't join the debating society.
6) Discovering that people with relatively high incomes or high status still piss, shit, and puke, and they don't deserve respect, trust, or liking until they've earnt it.

 

[Penuche]

<snip> I studied because I love my subject, and the world would be a far better place if that were true of all students. The utilitarianism that reduces these glorious repositories of human culture and learning into a tool for gouging more cash is dispiriting.

Agreed - Him Indoors only began studying with the Open University after being medically retired. He wasn't thick, but had a rough two final years at school (and none of his immediate family had goe to university), so it took him a long time to realise that you don't have to be that clever to get a degree, you just have to want it enough to be willing to put in the time and effort.

As a mature student, he gained so much more from his time with the OU than the right to put a handful of letters after his name, and now a younger sibling is doing likewise - taking the attitude of "he's no brighter than me, so if he can do it...".

 

[RiverKnight]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

Pure bullshit...

 

[Setanta84]

The general public idea of formal education used to be that its purpose was intellectual formation, not professional training--those were why we had professional degree granting grad programs and trade schools.

The idea that you should get some ROI on your education is of a piece with the corporatization of the Western university system in general and the American one in particular. And there are a number of reasons to be wary of it.

Reason #1 is that, like the corporatizing of the k-12 system in the country, the end goal isn't to improve education. The end goal is to make the promise/illusion of that education easier to monetize for the administrators. If you convince everyone humanities are useless, for example, you get to cut the core programs that make a university, well, a university and devote those resources to important things, like dozens of completely optional campus renovation projects and it just so happens you own a significant stake n the construction company being paid to carry it out.

Reason #2 is it gets you to think like a corporate drone rather than a human being who has interests and wants to do more with the time that he is given than slowly die in a chair behind a desk in a white room perpetually illuminated by LEDs. Money isn't everything. Your job is not who you are.

Reason #3 is the aforementioned funneling of funds means the administrators treat non-faculty staff and non-tenure track faculty like shit. Do you, say, want to go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt getting a terminal academic degree and be paid about the same money that you'd have been paid if you just went straight to slinging burgers after high school? Then the current American approach to academics is what you want.

Reason #4 is that these schools cook the books--and not just the ones that are obviously online diploma mills--to sell their role in your future success. Does Harvard itself, to use an example, really play much of a role in your future success as an institution? No. That you were the kind of person who got to go to Harvard--i.e. in 99.99999% of cases you had a Mommy or a Daddy who cut very big checks to the school during admissions season of senior year--is what guides you to the top of the heap in this economy. (I went to a good school and had a background as a working class kid. I know a lot of people from good schools. For the most part, they aren't intellectually or emotionally different from a bratty toddler who has never been told 'No.')

 

[PoppingTom]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

You get a craftsman education without it?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

A college education is completely useless unless you graduate from an elite and prestigious university such as Harvard, Yale, Standford, Oxford, MIT, etc...

Again?

Do you have to recycle topics?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"The general public idea of formal education used to be that its purpose was intellectual formation, not professional training--those were why we had professional degree granting grad programs and trade schools."

Then why did Detocqueville lament in "Democracy in America" that the American knew his field with expertise, but had little use for other education.



I see us as having a fairly anti-intellectual bias in general.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

All art is quite useless. A baby is useless, and so is a flower. Most of the really valuable things are useless.

I was lucky enough to go to a wonderful university and to do well. But I didn't do it for a career or money. I studied because I love my subject, and the world would be a far better place if that were true of all students. The utilitarianism that reduces these glorious repositories of human culture and learning into a tool for gouging more cash is dispiriting.

I, on the other hand, cut my teeth on the edge of the computer revolution. When I went to college, I did study in the field I love to the tangible betterment of not only myself, but society in general and not for the fellowship of a small esoteric group of individuals who are into scholarship for the love of subjects that have value pretty much to only those who love their subject.



Then they spend a life of not just envy, but with the lesser "lovers of intellectual trivia," there seems to be a drive to political solutions for the plight they suffer of not being sufficiently recognized and rewarded for their contribution to the advancement of knowledge, a condition exacerbated by those who employ the tools of education for "gouging more cash..."

/:tic

 

[Ishmael]

My opinion re. higher education is simple. "Once the government began subsidizing higher education the quality of the final product has become inversely proportional to the cost."

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

B-b-b-but I have a right to an education.



YOU just don't want to pay your fair share of it.

 

[Ishmael]

B-b-b-but I have a right to an education.



YOU just don't want to pay your fair share of it.

That IS the prevalent attitude theses days. There's nothing so worthless as that which has been obtained at no cost.

Ishmael

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Amen and pass the plate...