Yeah yeah, it was probably always like this. But WE weren’t like this.
A few months back, budgeting in the fun stuff had
a guest post
on Get rich slowly talking about how she worked her way through college
and ended up with no loans (after her parents paid off the balance).
In order to do this, she spent some time during the school year working
60 hrs/week at low wage jobs while going to school full-time.
Very few people can work full time and go to school full time and
still learn. Many folks who try end up not getting educated. Folks who
do manage it… one has to wonder what they could have achieved if they’d
gone to a more challenging program and worked less. Maybe they could
have rocked MIT or Caltech and come out with a 6 figure starting salary
and paid off those loans in a year or two. Or a high quality state
school in 2-3 years and started a high paying job that much earlier.
Many undergrads today are not learning how to think. I don’t know if
undergrads ever did learn how to think, but at the undergrad
institutions I attended (both in high school and as a college student
myself), a big emphasis was on how different high school and college
were from each other. Calculus was taught to “expand your brain,”
that’s why it fulfilled degree requirements. Students had personal
responsibility to learn– to do the homework even if it wasn’t graded.
To attend recitation sections and get help from the TA (at the regional
state school) or office hours and get help from the professor (at the
SLAC). Today college seems to be just an extension of high school– with
huge lecture classes it’s much easier for professors to lecture and
then assign work that can easily be tested in a scantron framework.
There isn’t enough support for small discussion sections; budget cuts
have resulted in ballooning class sizes with no corresponding increase
in resources (TAs, faculty lines, faculty pay, reassigned time, etc.).
Not only that but many undergrads do not want to learn how to think.
They want the certificate as a ticket for a job and don’t care about
the learning. If there’s no value to the education itself, then that
makes perfect sense. You want to get the degree at least cost with
minimal effort, so sure, working long hours at a menial job and not
wanting to learn makes sense.
Even the undergrads who WANT to learn how to think are often not
being taught how. We get graduate students with high grades from
supposedly high-quality schools who are shocked that not everything has
an answer that they can memorize and regurgitate on a scantron exam.
They’re smart, and after the initial cognitive dissonance, they succeed,
but it is often difficult going before they get there.
What’s the point of school anyway?
We’ve already talked about how people from different educational class backgrounds have different beliefs
about the reason for schooling.
We’ve always thought of it as a coming of age experience, something to
make you a cultured adult, to teach you different ways to think. Or as
South Park says, There’s a time and a place for everything, and that
time and place is college. But we’ve come to realize that many other
folks were brought up believing that college serves as primarily a job
credential. If it isn’t going to help you get a job, or a higher paying
job, you shouldn’t go.
Not all education or degrees are equal. Some are difficult and, as
one of our partners knows full well, students who try to work full-time
and go to school full-time end up failing and wasting their time and
money on the schooling. Other majors apparently allow shiny grades and
full-time work outside of class. Does your degree matter in the labor
market? The evidence is mixed. It is true that an engineer will tend
to make more than a communications major, and that an ivy league grad
will tend to make more than someone from a not-so-good private school or
directional regional school. But is that because of the selection of
the students who go into the programs or because of the degrees
themselves? Research hasn’t pinned the answers to these questions down
yet.
Crystal from Budgeting the Fun Stuff worked long hours at low wages
and got pretty grades in a non-challenging major in school. She is not
making much money from her day job that she dislikes. Maybe if she’d
spent more effort and time in school and worked a bit less in the labor
force and found a major that was more challenging, she would have found a
better fit in the labor market as well, and perhaps been able to pay
the loans off with a higher salary.
Then again, maybe not.
Crystal from BFS is
going to be a full-time blogger, and she is very happy with that. Even if we made choices about work and education it’s never too late to make new choices.
Bottom line:
As your professors we request:
Please do not try to work full-time and also go to school full-time.
That’s why we have low-interest loans for education. Don’t take out
more than the average salary for someone in your major from your
school, but don’t kill yourself either. School isn’t just a degree–
the reason it gets you a job is because of the skills you learn, and a
lot of these skills are fuzzy… they’re training your ways of thinking.
How to think like a [insert your major here]. If you’re just repeating
things you’ve memorized back, or cranking numbers through an algorithm
like a computer could, then you’re not really much more useful to an
employer than a high school graduate would have been.
If you do work full-time and go to school full-time, don’t blame us
for trying to make you get a solid education even though you don’t have
time for it. Choices = consequences. As your professors, we realize
that you have other things in your life besides our courses. But if you
don’t place a high priority on our courses, your grades will suffer,
and if they don’t, you have to wonder about the worth of the degree
you’re getting. More importantly, you won’t be learning anything. Save
yourself the time and money and don’t go to school full-time now if
it’s not going to be a priority.
And… regardless of the schooling choices you make, it is never too late to learn and grow and change.
Do you think people should be encouraged to work full time while going to school full time? What would your advice be?
source : http://nicoleandmaggie.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/education-and-kids-these-days-a-cranky-rant/
