College for profit, or college for culture?

College did wonders for me personally. When I went to High School, I was taught to write down what the teacher said, memorize what was in the textbooks, and regurgitate all of that on the tests. I was an A student, because I was good at memorizing. But I wasn't taught how to really think about things or how to analyze things.

I remember my American History class in my freshman year of college. I wrote extensive notes during the lectures, and I read the textbook and highlighted and memorized key points. When taking the essay exams, I dutifully regurgitated all the memorized facts just as I had always done in High School, yet I was getting C scores. I couldn't understand it. The professor would write comments on my exam, like "so what?", or "what was the importance of this?" It took me a long, agonizing time to understand that he wanted more than just the facts. He wanted me to analyze the facts and come up with some kind of conclusion or theory of my own - AKA - critical thinking. Took me a while, but I finally got it. That critical thinking skill has done me very well in all my jobs as well as in my personal life.

Is it possible to develop critical thinking skills without going to college? Maybe, but it would probably take a lot longer.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

wow - just wow - blinks

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
I find myself saying out loud..."How did some of these people EVER make it through college?????" The truth is, they probably didn't, at least not the type of "college" I remember.

The college you attend matters a lot. Check out the graduation rates at various schools. Usually the better the school, the higher the graduation rate. The best rated universities like Princeton and Harvard boast 99.99% graduation rates these days. Which to anyone who has been around the system enough knows means they simply don't fail people. They operate on a model of using exclusive admissions, but then graduating pretty much anyone who gets in.

The much more impressive schools in my opinion are the ones with low entrance requirements and low graduation rates. For example, at the school I'm at right now, across all programs only 17% of people graduate and in my program specifically only 8% of people graduate (a little under half the major fails out each year). That's because it's extremely difficult and the professors have no problem failing you. In fact, in one class I had last semester, 85% of the class failed, I was in the upper 15% after finishing the course with a 60.37% and no curve (that's a very low D-).

Anyways, the point is that grade inflation and deflation are both at work depending on the schools. Just because the big name ones are all relatively easy at this point doesn't write off the entire university system.

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