There has to be a limit to where society can pay for my own self-realization. A balance must be struck. To me that balance lies somewhere in the range of tuition-free study through master's...
There has to be a limit to where society can pay for my own self-realization. A balance must be struck. To me that balance lies somewhere in the range of tuition-free study through master's degrees.
I'm convinced society should only pay for PhD's and postdoctoral study where there's a need for the research in society for some reason. I'm also convinced society needs to have a plan so people get useful degrees that lead to relevant jobs. Tax payers in some way have to steer investment in education to be useful.
Education needs to lead to society fulfilling its job needs today and tomorrow. The market of individual student's choices of fields will not do so on its own.
You highlight another imperative issue: How to design schooling systems where as many as possible finish school and degrees first. But secondly also to end up with degrees they use and are satisfied with.
I chose a 4 year program for undergrad where I could try a ton of different things my first year before having to specialize and finish in normal time. I met a lot of push-back for not choosing more prestigious programs I was accepted to. The snobbery of the name of the school you go to needs to end. If there's an issue with bad programs existing, those need to be closed instead. A degree needs to be a degree, and you as a package of qualifications as a whole person needs to be determinant for employment and future study.
These are super important issues to solve. The wave of an aging society will hit hard. Things need to change to accommodate that, and also for a green and sustainable future where fewer working people take care of a higher proportion of elderly.
Hard disagree. General education exists to create good citizens with critical thinking abilities and broadly applicable general knowledge and skills. If you can be in possession of a bachelor's...
I'm also convinced society needs to have a plan so people get useful degrees that lead to relevant jobs.
Hard disagree. General education exists to create good citizens with critical thinking abilities and broadly applicable general knowledge and skills. If you can be in possession of a bachelor's degree and not get a relevant job, this is a flaw in employers' training and hiring practices. Universities are not job training programs and were never meant to be.
Employers are supposed to give generally educated people specialized training in the specific skills relevant to their jobs. Not outsource that to public institutions. They're the ones who need the skills, why is it out business to furnish them instead of giving people the skills to lead richer and more fulfilled lives rather than just well remunerated careers.
Maybe gen ed requirements should update if certain skills like formal logic, calculus, and basic programming are deemed to be really crucial for being able to get a job. But that's a different conversation from just defunding all the departments traditionally associated with being an educated person to degrade universities into pre-professional training programs. But really, if you think people should have marketable skills what you actually want is certification programs that validate the possession of that discrete skill, not a vague general proxy of a college education. Almost all of these discrete skills are, maybe, 3 months of focused training at best. There are some fields, like semiconductor design or medicine, where you actually do need real focused training. But in those cases people go through specialized doctorate programs, often after going through a normal general education bachelors program.
In fact, most overly career focused majors are actively bad at training because they're going to be out of date by the time you graduate if the field is at all fast-moving. These fields pay well because the skills are rare. If they're not rare anymore, they won't be well paid anymore. All of this just comes down to lazy-ass hiring people who don't actually understand how to parse good and skilled people from unskilled ones. They rely on bad proxies that they also don't really understand. Nobody calls it out because they don't have a better approach that isn't really expensive.
If society is set to need a lot of engineers or a lot of doctors, universities need to educate those people. That can't happen in a work place. I agree with most of your opinions regarding general...
If society is set to need a lot of engineers or a lot of doctors, universities need to educate those people. That can't happen in a work place.
I agree with most of your opinions regarding general education being there to create good citizens. However, we shouldn't educate 10 times as many Egyptologists or dentists as there's a need for in society. Can't all those students gain the self-realizing experience of upper education through degrees that give valuable specialization needed in the society's job market?
I also want to push back strongly against any view where education programs shouldn't have utilitarian goals, aims and design.
Why can't we have university programs that give the benefits of highly knowledgeable citizens equipped for the 21st century who also leave college fully qualified for running a farm, being a plumber, electrician or other skilled worker of whatever kind?
Many of the things you mention are only relevant for office-style jobs and office-style professions. A society with well-rounded education beyond high school needs to cater not just to those heavily into "booklearning" and theory, but to a much wider segment of the population. That is, if the goal is access to all, not just to one group of the population.
The vast majority of medical education happens in the workplace. Medical school gives you a basic foundation, but you learn to actually be a doctor from clinical rotations and residency, actually...
If society is set to need a lot of engineers or a lot of doctors, universities need to educate those people. That can't happen in a work place.
The vast majority of medical education happens in the workplace. Medical school gives you a basic foundation, but you learn to actually be a doctor from clinical rotations and residency, actually watching and participating in patient care.
I agree with most of your opinions regarding general education being there to create good citizens. However, we shouldn't educate 10 times as many Egyptologists or dentists as there's a need for in society. Can't all those students gain the self-realizing experience of upper education through degrees that give valuable specialization needed in the society's job market?
Skills you learn from specific majors are generalizable. Egyptology majors learn how to study and interrogate sources, write complex arguments from those sources, probably speak Arabic, and accrue a number of other usable skills they cultivate in the pursuit of Egyptology. It’s a staggering lack of creativity and imagination that assumes someone who majored in a field can’t do anything outside that field. That may be how it works for technical fields, but that isn’t the vast majority of skills needed in the workforce.
What’s more, the workforce and the skills it demands change on the order of a decade or so. People need to live and work for many decades. You can’t expect people to pigeonhole themselves up front. Society needs variance in skills and background and training. Overspecializing creates brittle societies.
And honestly, entry level engineering jobs don’t need that much training. Like I said, an associates level or certification course would be fine for most of this stuff, but corporate hiring practices have no idea how the skills they look for actually work.
who also leave college fully qualified for running a farm, being a plumber, electrician or other skilled worker of whatever kind?
Because that’s not what college is for. You can go apprentice for that after getting your degree. And you’ll be better for it.
A society with well-rounded education beyond high school needs to cater not just to those heavily into "booklearning" and theory
Education is book learning. Vocational training is training. That’s what I’ve been saying. If you want career training, get people trained for careers, but that’s not what the university is for.
It is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that value is reduced to its economic outcome. It is true that prosperity is a good thing, but not everything that makes a society successful can be...
General education exists to create good citizens with critical thinking abilities and broadly applicable general knowledge and skills
It is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that value is reduced to its economic outcome. It is true that prosperity is a good thing, but not everything that makes a society successful can be measured in terms of wealth.
Not everything needs to be reduced to capitalist logic though. That's just what you get when you let capitalists be in charge of everything, but we can also just say "nah stay in your lane finance...
Not everything needs to be reduced to capitalist logic though. That's just what you get when you let capitalists be in charge of everything, but we can also just say "nah stay in your lane finance bro."
I’d be fine with paying for PhDs (many in STEM are already paid for tuition-wise), the reality is that the acceptance rates will go down. The programs will become extremely competitive.
I’d be fine with paying for PhDs (many in STEM are already paid for tuition-wise), the reality is that the acceptance rates will go down. The programs will become extremely competitive.
That sounds about right. I’m thinking about a system that selects for the best minds regardless of income. And once you’re in you’re given the best environment to thrive in.
That sounds about right. I’m thinking about a system that selects for the best minds regardless of income. And once you’re in you’re given the best environment to thrive in.
Seems like a lot of people, including professors, discourage people from pursuing a PhD because the job market is so dismal. So, maybe not a bad thing?
Seems like a lot of people, including professors, discourage people from pursuing a PhD because the job market is so dismal. So, maybe not a bad thing?
It's amazing that tuitions keep going up and up, at multiples of the rate of inflation, but all the people actually directly involved in educating are functionally being paid less and less. I...
It's amazing that tuitions keep going up and up, at multiples of the rate of inflation, but all the people actually directly involved in educating are functionally being paid less and less.
I can't really understand where all the money goes. It can't all be admin bloat and facilities can it? But where else could it be? These are mostly non-profits so it has to go into salaries or capital investments somewhere. Are there that many more admins compared to the 80s? Are the senior executive managers making THAT much more?
I don’t get it either. My husband was an adjunct professor in a high-demand field for a decently well-known (and quite expensive) private university. He taught those classes in addition to his...
I don’t get it either. My husband was an adjunct professor in a high-demand field for a decently well-known (and quite expensive) private university. He taught those classes in addition to his main job, so he wasn’t dependent solely on that income, but the other adjunct professors he worked with were hopping between two or three different universities in order to make a livable income from teaching.
I used to want to teach at the college level, but based on the experiences from people I know who’ve worked at them, it doesn’t seem worth it. The ballooning costs of higher-ed don’t translate to higher salaries for professors (or even salaries at all, with so many schools hiring adjuncts for large numbers of classes). We’re also seeing the now standard compression of duties that’s unfortunately common across all industries, where professors are asked to do more and more work outside of their standard expectations but don’t receive proportional compensation.
Grad students tend to perform work for their university like helping undergrads and doing research. Even a perpetual student would provide value. They could help run drug trials so we could get...
Grad students tend to perform work for their university like helping undergrads and doing research. Even a perpetual student would provide value.
They could help run drug trials so we could get for profits out of the business.
Society has a limited amount of resources. I'm not for prioritizing education above all else. I want publicly funded affordable child care, dignified health care and care for those who cannot take...
Society has a limited amount of resources.
I'm not for prioritizing education above all else. I want publicly funded affordable child care, dignified health care and care for those who cannot take care of themselves anymore and all sorts of other things that cost a lot of money.
Education is an investment in the development of society like any other public spending. Ignoring that fact would simply be folly. Pumping money into a public postal service is an investment and a priority too: the investment is in a society with access to basic services for all, which naturally should be publicly funded.
It's quite simply irresponsible to leave it up to "the market" to entice students to choose their right subjects of education. The original article this is about precisely outlines why that's a really bad idea: people are choosing the wrong majors for them. At 18 or 20 how in the world could you (with little assistance) be the most qualified to guess at what profession will suit you and you can succeed in?
If say a fifth of youth want to try their hand at becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer, society should not fund classes large enough to take them all at the expense of other programs where society is screaming for qualified people. The market is not the right instrument for allocating degrees or field of study.
I'll say that they shouldn't, neither should private schools. Random lottery or first-come first serve. Most admissions screening is a crapshoot anyway with a large bias towards alums and donors....
I am not saying that public universities should not have admissions requirements for their programs
I'll say that they shouldn't, neither should private schools. Random lottery or first-come first serve. Most admissions screening is a crapshoot anyway with a large bias towards alums and donors.
Expelling for constantly failing courses is valid, as are course-specific prerequisites.
But there's too many counfounding variables when admitting students traditionally, leaving too much room for unintentional bias.
It feels like anyone choosing their path at 18 might feel unsatisfied with their trajectory by 22. We make a lot of weird decisions at that age for a lot of weird reasons. I think that fact backs...
If, at best, a quarter of your graduates regret their major... that's just incredibly rotten and inefficient.
It feels like anyone choosing their path at 18 might feel unsatisfied with their trajectory by 22. We make a lot of weird decisions at that age for a lot of weird reasons. I think that fact backs up all of your points that it is crazy that we're expected to figure out what we want to do in life at 18, then effectively bankrupt ourselves to do it, and then finish rather than pursuing what might be a more meaningful/fulfilling direction because we've already finished X% of courses inline with a different major.
I think a bigger problem is we punish people for trying to transition to be more happy. Dissatisfied as an accountant? Too bad, eat a hefty wage cut to try something else! Society needs to value...
I think a bigger problem is we punish people for trying to transition to be more happy.
Dissatisfied as an accountant? Too bad, eat a hefty wage cut to try something else!
Society needs to value both fluidity (ability to change jobs and take breaks) and job stability.
I partially agree in the sense that, if you're not going to college with a specific career goal, you ought to be a lot more careful about spending money. Somehow, we are not teaching college-bound...
I partially agree in the sense that, if you're not going to college with a specific career goal, you ought to be a lot more careful about spending money. Somehow, we are not teaching college-bound students to be careful about money, so they are spending huge amounts without a good plan.
In particular, it's strange to spend money on an expensive college education without choosing a major first. If you don't know what you want, you should be studying on the cheap, maybe at a community college? Or do something else for a gap year. Maybe it would make sense to have college-bound students do internships before starting college?
I think there's a lot of room for educational institutions that are not thought of as career-enhancing. But they need to charge a lot less. The only thing that justifies an expensive education is that you'll make it back later.
It's a little weirder than that in the US. As a graduating high schooler, it feels like your options are to 1) work a minimum wage job without benefits or any upward mobility, 2) begin education...
Somehow, we are not teaching college-bound students to be careful about money, so they are spending huge amounts without a good plan.
It's a little weirder than that in the US. As a graduating high schooler, it feels like your options are to 1) work a minimum wage job without benefits or any upward mobility, 2) begin education for a trade, 3) begin university education.
The people who take the first few years of schooling at community colleges are saving money, but then they're further behind in forming relationships with any professors or peers for the sake of networking, and many universities have very specific requirements for those general courses that even the local CCs don't fulfill.
The work experience at an entry level job that doesn't tie into your eventually-chosen field doesn't matter for future opportunities, and a lot of scholarships are granted conditional on beginning right out of high school. Advancing your career beyond management at a service business without steep nepotism or a degree is, at least perceived to be, impossible here.
Yes, it would require systemic changes. An internship would be more career-relevant (if you choose to go further), though it's unclear how a high school graduate could get one. (People have...
Yes, it would require systemic changes. An internship would be more career-relevant (if you choose to go further), though it's unclear how a high school graduate could get one.
(People have sometimes gotten surprising things by asking, but you need to know who to ask and what to ask for, and it doesn't scale.)
I'm not sure how important relationships with professors are? I never had relationships with any of mine that were career-relevant. It probably depends on the field. I interviewed at a few companies that came to the job fair on campus and went to work for the first one that said yes, which was Oracle. That was a long time ago, though.
Kind of funny that the article focuses on regretting taking humanities - sometimes I regret my BS in Biology and wish I'd gone with my first choice, English. I loved biology, still do, but none of...
Kind of funny that the article focuses on regretting taking humanities - sometimes I regret my BS in Biology and wish I'd gone with my first choice, English. I loved biology, still do, but none of the job opportunities in it ended up being accessible to me. I probably should have realized at some point, like when I had to get permission for a stool during a standing-only organic chemistry lab, or when I had to drop a bioinformatics minor because of 4 hour exams. But ah well. Hindsight is 20-20 and all that.
It's also interesting to see people talking about community colleges as a good alternative. I started at a community college and got an AA, which was specifically designed to transfer to a state university. It worked really well for me, a disabled student who dropped out of high school and got a GED. I never had to deal with SATs or anything like that, and I was accepted into my first choice transfer university.
But it didn't help as much with figuring out what I wanted to do. In my state, once you transfer to a university, you're locked into your major. And I only took my first programming course (Python for Biologists) after transferring. So I never had a chance to discover an interesting field that might have been more accessible than biology.
My major/degree is useless as far as the field (Web Design / Technology) it was in. It was a burgeoning field at the time that was saturated and way more modernized by the time I graduated than...
My major/degree is useless as far as the field (Web Design / Technology) it was in. It was a burgeoning field at the time that was saturated and way more modernized by the time I graduated than what was being taught at the time, so I was not prepared at all to get a job in that field upon graduation. A counselor or whatever guidance people at college are called steered me that way when I was struggling with very very bad professors in some programming and math classes. Had some truly awful experiences. I 100% regret where I went to college too for multiple reasons including the awful professors. All in all just such a waste of many years of life.
I regret it mostly because it made college a complete waste of time and money for me, at least at face value. However, just having the degree at all allowed me to get unrelated jobs that might have otherwise turned me away, so I think it worked out, and I try to keep perspective that "I'm glad where I am now and maybe all that weird crap I sorta regret really had to happen to get me to where I am now anyway"
There has to be a limit to where society can pay for my own self-realization. A balance must be struck. To me that balance lies somewhere in the range of tuition-free study through master's degrees.
I'm convinced society should only pay for PhD's and postdoctoral study where there's a need for the research in society for some reason. I'm also convinced society needs to have a plan so people get useful degrees that lead to relevant jobs. Tax payers in some way have to steer investment in education to be useful.
Education needs to lead to society fulfilling its job needs today and tomorrow. The market of individual student's choices of fields will not do so on its own.
You highlight another imperative issue: How to design schooling systems where as many as possible finish school and degrees first. But secondly also to end up with degrees they use and are satisfied with.
I chose a 4 year program for undergrad where I could try a ton of different things my first year before having to specialize and finish in normal time. I met a lot of push-back for not choosing more prestigious programs I was accepted to. The snobbery of the name of the school you go to needs to end. If there's an issue with bad programs existing, those need to be closed instead. A degree needs to be a degree, and you as a package of qualifications as a whole person needs to be determinant for employment and future study.
These are super important issues to solve. The wave of an aging society will hit hard. Things need to change to accommodate that, and also for a green and sustainable future where fewer working people take care of a higher proportion of elderly.
These are generational issues.
Hard disagree. General education exists to create good citizens with critical thinking abilities and broadly applicable general knowledge and skills. If you can be in possession of a bachelor's degree and not get a relevant job, this is a flaw in employers' training and hiring practices. Universities are not job training programs and were never meant to be.
Employers are supposed to give generally educated people specialized training in the specific skills relevant to their jobs. Not outsource that to public institutions. They're the ones who need the skills, why is it out business to furnish them instead of giving people the skills to lead richer and more fulfilled lives rather than just well remunerated careers.
Maybe gen ed requirements should update if certain skills like formal logic, calculus, and basic programming are deemed to be really crucial for being able to get a job. But that's a different conversation from just defunding all the departments traditionally associated with being an educated person to degrade universities into pre-professional training programs. But really, if you think people should have marketable skills what you actually want is certification programs that validate the possession of that discrete skill, not a vague general proxy of a college education. Almost all of these discrete skills are, maybe, 3 months of focused training at best. There are some fields, like semiconductor design or medicine, where you actually do need real focused training. But in those cases people go through specialized doctorate programs, often after going through a normal general education bachelors program.
In fact, most overly career focused majors are actively bad at training because they're going to be out of date by the time you graduate if the field is at all fast-moving. These fields pay well because the skills are rare. If they're not rare anymore, they won't be well paid anymore. All of this just comes down to lazy-ass hiring people who don't actually understand how to parse good and skilled people from unskilled ones. They rely on bad proxies that they also don't really understand. Nobody calls it out because they don't have a better approach that isn't really expensive.
If society is set to need a lot of engineers or a lot of doctors, universities need to educate those people. That can't happen in a work place.
I agree with most of your opinions regarding general education being there to create good citizens. However, we shouldn't educate 10 times as many Egyptologists or dentists as there's a need for in society. Can't all those students gain the self-realizing experience of upper education through degrees that give valuable specialization needed in the society's job market?
I also want to push back strongly against any view where education programs shouldn't have utilitarian goals, aims and design.
Why can't we have university programs that give the benefits of highly knowledgeable citizens equipped for the 21st century who also leave college fully qualified for running a farm, being a plumber, electrician or other skilled worker of whatever kind?
Many of the things you mention are only relevant for office-style jobs and office-style professions. A society with well-rounded education beyond high school needs to cater not just to those heavily into "booklearning" and theory, but to a much wider segment of the population. That is, if the goal is access to all, not just to one group of the population.
The vast majority of medical education happens in the workplace. Medical school gives you a basic foundation, but you learn to actually be a doctor from clinical rotations and residency, actually watching and participating in patient care.
Skills you learn from specific majors are generalizable. Egyptology majors learn how to study and interrogate sources, write complex arguments from those sources, probably speak Arabic, and accrue a number of other usable skills they cultivate in the pursuit of Egyptology. It’s a staggering lack of creativity and imagination that assumes someone who majored in a field can’t do anything outside that field. That may be how it works for technical fields, but that isn’t the vast majority of skills needed in the workforce.
What’s more, the workforce and the skills it demands change on the order of a decade or so. People need to live and work for many decades. You can’t expect people to pigeonhole themselves up front. Society needs variance in skills and background and training. Overspecializing creates brittle societies.
And honestly, entry level engineering jobs don’t need that much training. Like I said, an associates level or certification course would be fine for most of this stuff, but corporate hiring practices have no idea how the skills they look for actually work.
Because that’s not what college is for. You can go apprentice for that after getting your degree. And you’ll be better for it.
Education is book learning. Vocational training is training. That’s what I’ve been saying. If you want career training, get people trained for careers, but that’s not what the university is for.
It is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that value is reduced to its economic outcome. It is true that prosperity is a good thing, but not everything that makes a society successful can be measured in terms of wealth.
Not everything needs to be reduced to capitalist logic though. That's just what you get when you let capitalists be in charge of everything, but we can also just say "nah stay in your lane finance bro."
I’d be fine with paying for PhDs (many in STEM are already paid for tuition-wise), the reality is that the acceptance rates will go down. The programs will become extremely competitive.
Sounds like the quality bar of research can only benefit from that.
In practice, better research is done when there is less pressure, not more.
That sounds about right. I’m thinking about a system that selects for the best minds regardless of income. And once you’re in you’re given the best environment to thrive in.
Seems like a lot of people, including professors, discourage people from pursuing a PhD because the job market is so dismal. So, maybe not a bad thing?
It's amazing that tuitions keep going up and up, at multiples of the rate of inflation, but all the people actually directly involved in educating are functionally being paid less and less.
I can't really understand where all the money goes. It can't all be admin bloat and facilities can it? But where else could it be? These are mostly non-profits so it has to go into salaries or capital investments somewhere. Are there that many more admins compared to the 80s? Are the senior executive managers making THAT much more?
I don’t get it either. My husband was an adjunct professor in a high-demand field for a decently well-known (and quite expensive) private university. He taught those classes in addition to his main job, so he wasn’t dependent solely on that income, but the other adjunct professors he worked with were hopping between two or three different universities in order to make a livable income from teaching.
I used to want to teach at the college level, but based on the experiences from people I know who’ve worked at them, it doesn’t seem worth it. The ballooning costs of higher-ed don’t translate to higher salaries for professors (or even salaries at all, with so many schools hiring adjuncts for large numbers of classes). We’re also seeing the now standard compression of duties that’s unfortunately common across all industries, where professors are asked to do more and more work outside of their standard expectations but don’t receive proportional compensation.
Grad students tend to perform work for their university like helping undergrads and doing research. Even a perpetual student would provide value.
They could help run drug trials so we could get for profits out of the business.
Society has a limited amount of resources.
I'm not for prioritizing education above all else. I want publicly funded affordable child care, dignified health care and care for those who cannot take care of themselves anymore and all sorts of other things that cost a lot of money.
Education is an investment in the development of society like any other public spending. Ignoring that fact would simply be folly. Pumping money into a public postal service is an investment and a priority too: the investment is in a society with access to basic services for all, which naturally should be publicly funded.
It's quite simply irresponsible to leave it up to "the market" to entice students to choose their right subjects of education. The original article this is about precisely outlines why that's a really bad idea: people are choosing the wrong majors for them. At 18 or 20 how in the world could you (with little assistance) be the most qualified to guess at what profession will suit you and you can succeed in?
If say a fifth of youth want to try their hand at becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer, society should not fund classes large enough to take them all at the expense of other programs where society is screaming for qualified people. The market is not the right instrument for allocating degrees or field of study.
I'll say that they shouldn't, neither should private schools. Random lottery or first-come first serve. Most admissions screening is a crapshoot anyway with a large bias towards alums and donors.
Expelling for constantly failing courses is valid, as are course-specific prerequisites.
But there's too many counfounding variables when admitting students traditionally, leaving too much room for unintentional bias.
It feels like anyone choosing their path at 18 might feel unsatisfied with their trajectory by 22. We make a lot of weird decisions at that age for a lot of weird reasons. I think that fact backs up all of your points that it is crazy that we're expected to figure out what we want to do in life at 18, then effectively bankrupt ourselves to do it, and then finish rather than pursuing what might be a more meaningful/fulfilling direction because we've already finished X% of courses inline with a different major.
I think a bigger problem is we punish people for trying to transition to be more happy.
Dissatisfied as an accountant? Too bad, eat a hefty wage cut to try something else!
Society needs to value both fluidity (ability to change jobs and take breaks) and job stability.
I partially agree in the sense that, if you're not going to college with a specific career goal, you ought to be a lot more careful about spending money. Somehow, we are not teaching college-bound students to be careful about money, so they are spending huge amounts without a good plan.
In particular, it's strange to spend money on an expensive college education without choosing a major first. If you don't know what you want, you should be studying on the cheap, maybe at a community college? Or do something else for a gap year. Maybe it would make sense to have college-bound students do internships before starting college?
I think there's a lot of room for educational institutions that are not thought of as career-enhancing. But they need to charge a lot less. The only thing that justifies an expensive education is that you'll make it back later.
It's a little weirder than that in the US. As a graduating high schooler, it feels like your options are to 1) work a minimum wage job without benefits or any upward mobility, 2) begin education for a trade, 3) begin university education.
The people who take the first few years of schooling at community colleges are saving money, but then they're further behind in forming relationships with any professors or peers for the sake of networking, and many universities have very specific requirements for those general courses that even the local CCs don't fulfill.
The work experience at an entry level job that doesn't tie into your eventually-chosen field doesn't matter for future opportunities, and a lot of scholarships are granted conditional on beginning right out of high school. Advancing your career beyond management at a service business without steep nepotism or a degree is, at least perceived to be, impossible here.
Yes, it would require systemic changes. An internship would be more career-relevant (if you choose to go further), though it's unclear how a high school graduate could get one.
(People have sometimes gotten surprising things by asking, but you need to know who to ask and what to ask for, and it doesn't scale.)
I'm not sure how important relationships with professors are? I never had relationships with any of mine that were career-relevant. It probably depends on the field. I interviewed at a few companies that came to the job fair on campus and went to work for the first one that said yes, which was Oracle. That was a long time ago, though.
Kind of funny that the article focuses on regretting taking humanities - sometimes I regret my BS in Biology and wish I'd gone with my first choice, English. I loved biology, still do, but none of the job opportunities in it ended up being accessible to me. I probably should have realized at some point, like when I had to get permission for a stool during a standing-only organic chemistry lab, or when I had to drop a bioinformatics minor because of 4 hour exams. But ah well. Hindsight is 20-20 and all that.
It's also interesting to see people talking about community colleges as a good alternative. I started at a community college and got an AA, which was specifically designed to transfer to a state university. It worked really well for me, a disabled student who dropped out of high school and got a GED. I never had to deal with SATs or anything like that, and I was accepted into my first choice transfer university.
But it didn't help as much with figuring out what I wanted to do. In my state, once you transfer to a university, you're locked into your major. And I only took my first programming course (Python for Biologists) after transferring. So I never had a chance to discover an interesting field that might have been more accessible than biology.
My major/degree is useless as far as the field (Web Design / Technology) it was in. It was a burgeoning field at the time that was saturated and way more modernized by the time I graduated than what was being taught at the time, so I was not prepared at all to get a job in that field upon graduation. A counselor or whatever guidance people at college are called steered me that way when I was struggling with very very bad professors in some programming and math classes. Had some truly awful experiences. I 100% regret where I went to college too for multiple reasons including the awful professors. All in all just such a waste of many years of life.
I regret it mostly because it made college a complete waste of time and money for me, at least at face value. However, just having the degree at all allowed me to get unrelated jobs that might have otherwise turned me away, so I think it worked out, and I try to keep perspective that "I'm glad where I am now and maybe all that weird crap I sorta regret really had to happen to get me to where I am now anyway"