A lot of accomplished entrepreneurs and industry heavyweights have been throwing their ideas into the education malaise which is our college system (as distinct from the malaise which is out K-12 system…). There have been a lot of broad attacks and criticisms of college education, of the plausible idea that there may be an education bubble (which may be bursting…), and that the real value of a modern college education has less utility than it has had since the en d of WWII…
All of these points may be close to being true…but as with most broad brush strokes; lots of things are glossed over or missed. Just looking are some of the citations I have below shows that there is a lot of confusion out there.
For instance, there may be a profound need to reevaluate college curricula, and what the aims of getting a college degree should be…now, as distinct from…let’s say…1962.
Just trying to minimize the debt load students exit college with is a mildly insulting way to gloss over the fact that the whole financial system of how colleges operate is wildly out of balance (and has been so for longer than most of these types of articles cover).
The fact is that a college degree can be many things…graduating with a degree in chemical engineering will likely result in a multitude of job offers (at a pretty high level of compensation too! On the other hand, most liberal arts degrees, which have been the backbone of classical education since the 19th century (and have forebears going back to Plato, or at least the Trivium and Quadrivium) can get you into (choose one) grad school or a job at Starbucks… This is not some newfangled radical point of view…this has been the way of the world for several decades…and the new global business world has emphasized this to steadily increasing degrees…
Is College (Finally) Ready For Its Innovation Revolution?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/is-college-finally-ready-for-its-innovation-revolution/239393
If a college student today stepped into a time machine and traveled back to Plato’s Academy of ancient Athens, she would recognize quite a bit. Sure, it might take some time to master ancient Greek and the use of stylus on wax, but she would eventually settle into a familiar academic routine. Senior scholars across a range of subjects like astronomy and political theory would lecture, pose questions, and press answers to a small group of attendants. Junior attendants would listen, answer, and defend responses.
That a class in 2011 resembles a lecture from 2,300 years ago suggests that two millennia of technological upheaval have only brushed the world of academics. Some professors use PowerPoint, and many schools manage their classes with online software. But even these changes don’t fully embrace the potential of Web, mobile, and interactive technology.
"The present resistance to innovation [in education] is breathtaking," Joel Klein writes in The Atlantic this month. The former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education was writing about public high schools, but he might as well have been talking about universities. Despite college costs rising faster in college than any institution in the country including health care, we have the technology to disrupt education, turn brick and mortar lecture halls into global classrooms, and dramatically bring down the cost of a high quality education.
College degree still worth obtaining, just don’t overpay
http://edreformer.com/2011/05/college-degree-still-worth-obtaining-just-dont-overpay
Mindshift (a KQED site run by former Edutopia writer Tina Barseghian) asked is a college degree worth it? Tina notes that five prominent figures have suggested that college is losing its ROI.
Andy Rotherham responds in Time that college is still very much worth it, “Education gives you choices. Assuming you don’t pile up mountains of debt that constrain your career options (and that outcome is avoidable) or go to a school where just fogging a mirror is good enough to get a diploma, there are not a lot of downsides to going to college.”
What College Degrees Are really worth
http://www.fastcompany.com/1755375/what-are-college-majors-really-worth?partner=rss
Steve Jobs may claim that the humanities are important for colleges, but Apple’s not hiring philosophers to build iPhones. A new report from Georgetown University confirms much of what we already knew about the financial payoff of college majors: Hard-scientists swim in a Scrooge McDuck-size vault of gold, while literature majors panhandle with multi-syllabic signs. The report further confirms many of the unfortunate stereotypes of poor minorities and female caregivers that progressive Americans would sooner forget.
Science rules, social drools
Engineers are the king of the cash hill, raking in a median salary of $75K, while Psychology and Social Worker graduates beg for the trickle-down table scraps, amounting to $42K. The brightest light in the non-hard sciences is the Social Sciences, with economists earning $70K, using their savvy knowledge of money to rake in more than their compatriots in both finance and architecture.
Art majors are pretty much doomed to small studio apartments, maxing out at $46K for a career in film (the graph below represents the bottom 25 percentile to the top 75th percentile earnings for each major; dotted line indicates median).
For (really) long-term thinkers, or for those who love studying, graduate school boosts earnings roughly 20-65%, which is several hundred thousand dollars in life-time earnings–if you can make it through the debt-addled, post-grad, Ramen-noodle dirge of your late 20s and 30s. For the risk averse, occupations in military technologies and school student counseling had 100% employment; studio arts had a measly 9% (but what about artists who draw missiles?).
