College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S. , page 3

reply to post by xpert11

We have those type of programs already. Places like ITT Technical Institute. The problem with them is this, what employer in their right mind would pass on a qualified prospective employee who just graduated from an accredited university to hire an individual who just got a certificate of training and is asking for the same salary and/or cannot achieve the same licensing as the college grad?

I'm sorry, I know how much work I put in to get my degree, my intern certification, and then my professional license 4 years later. I know the exams I took, I know the amount of study I had to do, and I know the value of what I gained from a traditional classroom setting in addition to real world, hands-on learning during my engineer in training run. Doctors and engineers are among a handfull of people who we, as a society, place a tremendous amount of faith in. We depend on their judgement and their qualifications and, when those fail, they frequently fail with catastrophic results. I will admit that even some of the engineering courses I took taught me many things I have never once used, some of the classes I despised, viewed them in much the same way I would view getting a root canal or lancing a boil on my ass. That said, I have since come to recognize they were put in place to separate the pretenders from the contenders. I have taken theorhetical math classes that I highly doubt most high school math instructors with math degrees have even imagined, let alone gone through. I have taken hydrology classes and thermodynamic classes which I have never once had a single reason to call upon. I took upper level chemistry classes that had accompanying labs where we had to go to a sewer treatment plant, collect a sample of effluent, and then add a little drop of this and a little drop of that to produce a technically clean sample of H2O even though I have no intention of ever working in wastewater treatment design.

The more I read about how a college degree is today considered to be on par with the previous generation's high school diploma, the more steadfast I am in my belief that we should have fewer people attending and graduating from college. We shouldn't ever live in a world where a college degree isn't an honor and a privlege. I was the first member of my family to graduate from college. I did it in 2001. It was the second time in my life I'd ever seen my dad shed tears. That type of response to a kid graduating college is getting lost right now and that's a freaking shame. When you have thousands upon thousands of kids graduating with crap degrees like hospitallity, personal training, art, political science, music appreciation, art history, creative writing, etc, it lessens the perception and value of all graduates. Seriously, even in a robust economy, what the hell kind of career does a person think a BA in communications is going to lead to? The only way to add any sort of real world value to these degrees is going to be to make them more difficult to obtain. As many of these degrees are not what I would call "challenging," the only recourse is to make them more expensive. Sadly, that also means that the degrees which require you to bust your butt and have a built in level of difficulty associated with them that acts as a natural measure of attrition will also become more and more expensive.