The Other Kind of College

Those of us who went to elite four-year colleges and universities are prone to forget that most people don't. In the Washington Post today, a community college professor writes about the differences between the experience her community college students are having on the one hand, and the experience her daughter had at an elite college on the other.

You go to community college because you are an ambitious kid whose parents don't have professional jobs. Because you are a girl in a family whose culture for thousands of years has valued education only for boys. Because you come from a family that never really thought about college for anyone, never saved for it or steered you toward it. You go to community college because you had a significant trauma during your adolescence: Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent, lost a sibling, lived in a household of chronic anger, suffered from depression or anorexia, did too many drugs. So you failed some of your high school courses, and the "good" colleges won't take you. You go to community college because you were born in another country and came to America too late to pick up English very easily. Because you landed a good job or gave birth to a beautiful baby right out of high school, and didn't look back for 10 or 15 years, when, suddenly, you thought about college. You go to community college because you have a learning disability, undiagnosed or untreated, that pushed you to the sidelines in school. Because you started at a four-year school and discovered that you weren't ready to leave home. And you go to community college because you believe that America is a society where intelligence is rewarded, and since you're such a fine, intelligent person, it's unnecessary for you to actually do any homework in high school, and suddenly you have a C average and your SATs are pretty good but, frankly, so are a lot of other people's, and the best offer you got from four-year colleges was their wait list.

Very interesting, and worth reading the whole thing.

Comments

[dude]

....or you go to community college for the first year because your parents didn't want to pay to have 2 siblings in a 4 year college at the same time ($$). I didn't realize until after college, unfortunately, the value of my parents paying for my college - I just thought it was normal at the time. Unfortunately my dad passed away before I had this realization and thanked him.

Anyway, my experience was that the quality of the classes and teachers was higher at the community college than the fairly well thought of big ten school I ended up graduating from. Although I only went to the comm. college one year. Aside from classes there is definately something to be said for the education outside of the class at a 4 year university.

[Gadfly]

Colleges - all colleges - should be free and should be palaces. If we valued education like we claim, it could be done. Imagine if we took the $200 billion dollars we just spent invading Iraq and put it into education.

[ABC]

If something is valuable, why should it be free?

[isildur]

I like 'put it in' as a description of what happens to $200 billion when applied to something like education. It's wonderfully vague; put money in, get education out! That's how it works, right?

Right?

[s.a.m.]

The girl/guy ratio at the CC was much better for us guys then the "elite" school. At 19 and 20, sex is a career worth working hard for!

[Warren]

I did my first two years at the local CC. The place was over-running with, and run by, liberal-arts losers. However, the math and engineering departments were surprisingly good. When I transferred to a 4yr school (actually a 5yr program), I found I had no trouble keeping up with the 'natives'.

The thing that pissed me off the most, was finding out that my lab fees went to re-carpet the deans office. But all in all we had excellent faculty and equipment. The library was not as well appointed, but the profs all taught their own labs.

[PBK]

I keep hearing the refrain that the teaching is better at junior colleges. Doesn't jibe with my experience. I was bored to tears at my local JC and almost dropped out. Except for math and science, all of my courses were utterly worthless and many of my teachers were either insane or stupid or both. However, at UCLA, where I finally transferred, all my courses were challenging and intellectually stimulating, and most of my professors and TAs were intelligent, knowledgeable, and more or less sane.

[matt]

Well said dan....

Gadfly, perhaps the government should have returned the $200 billion to the people from whom it was forcibly taken and allowed them to do with it what they will....which might include paying for their child's education.

[stubby]

I knew a lot of people (sister included) who wound up at community college cos they had so much fun in high school that their grades wouldn't get them into even the most forgiving public 4-year university. Most of those people served their two years, got decent grades, reapplied to the 4 years and then got in.

I took a few math courses at my local (Houston) community college. The teachers seemed competent, but I made passing grades in every course I took except calculus, and even in calculus I made a B on the first test, so obviously the teachers weren't top tier.

[Ruthless]

What's missing here, as I knew it would be, is what does an education "get you"?

Until an education can come up with at least the equivalent of 36 virgins--half of what suicide bombers expect--there will continue to be love-hate of edjumakation in the US.

Then there is the collision of the Skull and Bones mentality with the education establishment... very complex.

Finally, how much should teachers be paid?

[Jennifer]

Ruthless-
Were I, a former public-school teacher, allowed to remake the public education system, here is what I'd do:

First, get rid of the idea that a college degree or even a high school diploma is mandatory for various jobs. Instead, replace these evermore worthless pieces of paper with rigorous, balanced (and voluntary) skills tests. Let wannabe lawyers take the bar exam without bothering with law school first, if they so desire. If a would-be doctor has learned enough on his own to get a medical license, why make him go to school for years and years?

For younger people, give high-school exit exams to anyone who wishes to take them, no matter what their age; some kids at twelve are already smart enough for a diploma. Make public education free, but not mandatory--students only go there if they want help learning the skills necessary for a particular test; there will be no grades or mandatory assignments, but also no bullshit allowed from the students.

Yeah, I know. Not a snowball's chance that will ever happen. But I'll say this: when I got my current copyediting job I had to take a difficult test. I passed it easily, but I probably would have done just as well back when I was eighteen. (I always did read a lot.) Only at eighteen, of course, I had no college degree, so I never would have even been called in for the interview.

[stubby]

Although I was a liberal arts major, and my favorite English Lit professor occasionally decried the strong anti-intellectual streak prevalent in Texas - a streak that manifested itself (can they do that?) in "But what are you going to do with an English degree???" - I've decided I'm comfortable with the idea that education gets you, hopefully, employed. In today's economy, entering the workforce without a college degree yada yada. Even if you get a good job with that degree, your chances for advancement etc. etc. That's why you do it and that's why you pay for it - so's you can get youse a sheepskin and then go out and get youse a job. Those who revere education "for its own sake" - whatever that means - can go hang out down at the stoa and wait for a Socrates to show up. Pack a lunch. Or just go to the library. Which you can do when you're not working.

Stop for a moment and think about all the "careers" that require a bachelor, and maybe a graduate, degree nowadays, as opposed to years ago when they were more like trades that one entered on the basis of one's talent or desperation or whatever. You got that first job, did your journeyman time, and then you became a newspaper writer. Or a manager of the plant you'd worked at since you were a kid. Or an attorney. Or a librarian. Nowadays everything's gotta have a degree. To be a "professional" "librarian," I had to get a Masters.

But I was happy to do it, because what I did with my English degree was, first, wait tables and, second, work as a legal secretary. Strangely enough, no one ever offered me money to hear what the aforementioned professor assured me were cogent and humorous opinions about Joyce and Thackeray. I guess someone would've paid me for them if I'd climbed into the ivory tower, but ick no.

[Jennifer]

Stubby perfectly proves my point. Rather than make him spend two years taking classes for a "Master's of Library Science," why couldn't he have, on his own, read up on the Dewey Decimal System and how to put things in alphabetical order, and then take the librarian exam, or whatever, when he felt damn good and ready?

[Ruthless]

Jennifer,
As usual, you have hit the nail very close to on the head.

Stubby,
Read Jennifer's and come back at us.

(actually I'll be slumberizing, but more tomorrow...)

[stubby]

Jennifer: Exactly. Except that I'm a she. And it took more like 4 years, cos I was working full time while I got the MLS. (And I use the Library of Congress classification system, cos I'm a law librarian, not a public librarian. And have you ever seen the salary averages for public librarians? You don't know whether to laugh or cry.)

I do freelance copyediting on the side, BTW.

[Jennifer]

Ruthless-
I too am off to bed, to be fresh and awake for said copyediting job, which I need to pay off my goddamned student loans, without which I never would have earned my two degrees which qualify me for said job.

[Kevin Carson]

Gadfly,

I don't know what "we" you're talking about. I certainly didn't spend any money invading Iraq. I was robbed at gunpoint, and that's the last I saw of my money.

And you overlook some of the most important aspects of people paying for education, or any other service, with their own money. First of all, the market price of a good or service tells the consumer of it what the cost of providing it was, so he can make a rational decision as to whether it's worth it or not. When the consumer doesn't personally foot the bill, he has absolutely no incentive to economize or make cost-benefit calculations.

Second, when the prosperity of a college depends on people being willing to spend their money on it, there's competition to attract customers. There's no conceivable administrative "quality control" mechanism one tenth as effective as the threat of taking your business elsewhere. An educational establishment that's guaranteed an income by the state, regardless of performance, is bound to be mediocre. Would private universities still be allowed to organize their own currucula and catalogs, or would the State be doing it for them, on the same pattern that it's already doing for our fine publik skools?

And BTW, a lot of us who pay taxes aren't living in palaces.

[Kevin Carson]

I meant to add, Gadfly, that the main function of federal education spending since the land grant colleges (let alone the G.I. Bill) has been to underwrite the costs of reproducing skilled labor, so that big business can externalize its personnel costs on the state.

And guess what? When an operating expense of big business is externalized on the taxpayer, business firms tend to adopt production models that use that factor a lot more extensively. The main effect, in the case of education, is to make a college education necessary to achieve the same income status, as a percentile of the population at large, that required only a high school education sixty years ago. In another fifty years, if we follow your suggestion of free education, we'll be living in the world of Kurt Vonnegut's *Player Piano*, where a man can't even get a job as janitor without a PhD.

[Bo]

Missouri has this program available for high schoolers that requires students to A) not fail and B) "tutor" for 50 hours. In return, you can go to any two year school (technical or community college) in the state on the taxpayer's dime. Lots of people who aren't the typical community college attendees (like those described at the quote in this article) do this, then transfer over to a real university.
I'm not taking advantage of this, but basically everyone qualifies.

[Jeff Smith]

I thought the WaPo article was kind of bizarre.
Does this woman have no bad students at NOVA?
Are there no kids just killing time because
they don't really want to get a job but they
need an excuse for not having one so their
parents don't bug them too much? I have
students like that in my classes at Maryland,
and it is much harder to get into (and much
more expensive for said parents) than NOVA.

If you read the popular press, you would
think that the optimal amount of education
is infinite. It is not. It is the amount
that equates marginal costs and marginal
benefits. For some students, because of
government subsidies, that margin is well
less than their actual consumption of
education.

I will though, scare some of the hardcore
types by saying that I support having the
government pay for primary and at least
some secondary education (pay for, not
provide) though it would be nice if the
tax system partially compensated by having
extra taxes for people with children (to
account for the externality they are
imposing, and their free education) rather
than subsidizing them. I think there are
big externalities from having kids not
growing up with basic skills.

Jeff

[Matthew Cromer]

Yeah Jeff, that's what we need, the birthrate to go down to European levels. You think having kids is a net DRAIN on society? Try not having kids!

[Geotech]

During high school, I took my second algebra at the community college wher my mom taught reading (yes, reading). I then miserably trucked my way through the civil engineering program at my local $1500 a semester boring commuter college, University of New Orleans. I was usually one of the youngest in all my classes. I've just now graduated and about to start my first real engineering job. Where I don't think my education was any better or worse than those who attended the small liberal arts schools, I can say that the gap in quality of experience is massive. I was taught by cantankerous old adjuncts who largely resented having to teach classes in order to get grant money for research. What brought my friends and I together was largely contempt for the indifferent 200k a year consutling engineers moonlighting as teachers. I can't even begin to relate to my friend who got his history degree from William & Mary and is now in law school. I mean, Jesus, he actually wishes he could just go to school forever and never have a job. I'm nearly doing backflips over getting out of that cold, hostile nightmare of a place I went, just like everyone else who went there.

[KentInDC]

Geotech,
Where can I get one of those $200K/year engineering jobs in NOLA? If I had known that option was available, I would never have left NOLA to attend law school! Hmmm, making $200K in NOLA vs. making less than $200K in DC - not a tough choice at all. Besides, I could make extra money being an indifferent teacher at UNO. 😉

[Geotech]

You'll require the following:

1) PhD in engineering

2) 20+ years experience

3) Connections

[joe]

crimethink, what was the literacy rate in Jefferson's day?

[zorel]

Jason,

For once, I have to disagree with you about 'MBA being a joke'. After my Bachelor's, I went on for a Master's in Engineering. While it was certainly beneficial and worth the money, I felt it would have been better if I had some real world experience. Now after several years of professional life, I am back in school for an MBA. It is not a joke. I have not learned much new stuff at work lately, and grad school makes-up for that. Granted, people can make themselves learn new things, etc. but it is easier and more structured when it happens in a school setting.

I may not benefit financially from the MBA (the ROI calcs indicated I wouldn't get my money back if I went to full-time school), but personal & professional development justifies it for me.

Generally I have no idea about the liberal arts schools, but the technical/professional education in the US kicks ass!

[Theresa]

Good English writing but not so well written...Colleges should not have preferential status based on who can afford to go where and what societal standing one has! I've seen some PRIVATE COLLEGES being pretty lax in their teaching vice what a community college, like NOVA, require of a student! This government is egoistic that it doesn't want to educate all of its people so that the upper crust who graduated from ELITE, EXPENSIVE PRIVATE COLLEGES can continue to rule the world that's comprised of mostly hard-working laborers beneath it...kind of like the kingdom of ANTS!

[JDM]

"You'll require the following:

1) PhD in engineering

2) 20+ years experience

3) Connections"

You don't really need the PHD depending on the field. There are lots of programmers who get that kind of money as consultants. It comes out to $100 bucks an hour. You can also trade off between connections and experience, if your connections and skills are that good. The best programmer I ever worked with was getting $80 an hour at 27 with no college degree whatsoever.

[KentInDC]

joe,
It is impossible to know to a very high degree of accuracy what the literacy rate was in TJ's day. Many think it was higher than today's literacy rate, though. Some cite the fact that there were laws against teaching slaves to read as evidence that even slaves were learning to read. A large percentage of early immigrants were from Reformed (especially Scottish) backgrounds and learning to read was a high priority among those immigrants. The tiny population of Scotland didn't revolutionize the world in the 18th century by being illiterate.

JDM,
I am not a native of NOLA, so forget the connections part. I have the 20 years experience, though.

[JD]

Jennifer, count me in as another who agrees with you. Not every job requires, should require, or can be made to require a college education, and insisting that everyone should have one only ends up causing "degree inflation". It's no wonder that so many kids drop out of high school and those who do stay don't learn much of use: school has become a juvenile detention facility. I firmly believe a lot of kids would be better off in apprenticeships than sitting around in school (where we still make them do work, we just don't let them do useful work for which they can get paid). Let them get out there and learn real-world skills and be productive. If they never need or want to get more book-learning, fine. If they do want to learn more, that's great, but forcing young people to stay on their duffs through 12+ years of "education" is inane.

Gadfly - you can lead a child to school, but you can't make him think. Education is great, but it isn't the same thing as mandatory school attendance.

[Jason Ligon]

zorel:

I should have qualified. The value of the MBA from a non top tier school in the marketplace is very, very small due to the huge numbers printed.

Getting educated in an area you find personally useful or valuable is a good beyond question. I feel the same way about my years in liberal arts and archair philosophy.

[JDM]

"I am not a native of NOLA, so forget the connections part."

Well it's best to have all your experience in the same general geographic area, so you can cultivate some. I've seen $270k/year long term software positions in NYC, which is unheard of in the backwater of Seattle, so I imagine consultants do even better there, and presumably in DC as well.

Generally, you don't get those jobs through the want ads. You have to have worked with someone at the company before and proved you're a 90/10 guy.

[KentInDC]

JDM,
I was really just kidding about going back into engineering. I have no intention of changing careers again, although I would love to return to NOLA. By the way, I am coming to believe that "consultant" in DC is a euphemism for temp. My best friend from the navy was a partner at Accenture and said it embarrassed him to tell people that he was a consultant for that very reason.

[JDM]

I figured you were kidding. I'm just rambling for no particular reason. And the last thing you want to do is work for a place like Accenture, they charge the place you work at least twice what they give you. The big bucks go to self-employed contractors.

[KentInDC]

JDM,
My friend IS an independent consultant now. He was spending all his time on the road with Accenture. Now he is spending most of his time at home and making more money while charging clients less than Accenture was. I wish my firm paid me half of the rate at which they bill my time. It is more like 30%.

[holmie]

"Imagine if we took the $200 billion dollars we just spent invading Iraq and put it into education"

Well, I'm no fortune teller but I'd say everyone would still complain that education is underfunded.

[kevrob]

If you want actual assistant and associate professors teaching freshman and sophomores, in classes smaller than Radio City Music Hall, one need not have to settle for a JuCo education. Besides the U of State, State U, and the other directionals and hyphenates* of your state's government system, there is the alternative of the medium sized or even small private colleges and universities. They charge more than the megacampuses, but less than the Ivies and their peer institutions. The ones located in big cities also accomodate part-time study for those who have to work a full-time job, by offering night sections. Often, the cost of attending, after financial aid, is competitive with the state college, and a higher % of students get aid.

I had two academic "careers." In the first, I lived in the dorms, went to class (or skipped), partied, bar-hopped and was involved in extracurricula activities. The cash came from a scholarship, loans, summer jobs and my parents' sweated brows. I did OK, but not top-notch work. I took time off with a year to go on my B.A., and when I came back to school after joining the work force, I appreciated my opportunities much more than I had. For one thing, my folks weren't subsidizing me anymore. Most of my night classmates were also earning livings and even supporting families. In the three semesters it took to complete my degree I earned excellent grades, and the things I learned in those courses have seemed to stick with me longer than some of the stuff I let blow past me on the way to the kegger. When I had adjunct instructors, they held down jobs in their fields at major companies. To my delight, when our Intro to Microeconomics instructor flaked on our section, days before the first class, the Department Chairman stepped in to teach it himself. AND he was an Austrian!

I can empathize with some of the CC students in that article. What I am not happy about is the Bush administration's plans for pumping money into the VoTech/CC/JuCo schools as a way to deal with job retraining issues. This sector of education has a smaller percentage of private schools than even secondary ed does. Are students going to be able to spend those funds at DeVry, U of Phoenix, or any proprietary schools?

Kevin
(*Marquette `84, hence the Al McGuire
phraseology)

[Kevin Carson]

Gadfly,

The problem is, you're confusing state-organized and state-controlled processing with education. When the citizenry is educated by the state, it shouldn't come as a surprise when most people unquestioningly share the official ideology of the state.

John Taylor Gatto puts it very well, in the last source cited below: "What defines the important debate is whether this planet is going to be managed centrally and scientifically, by a trained professional bureaucracy with comprehensive control over licensing and employment, with exclusive police power to manage dissent, and with a dossier on each one of its citizens - or whether the planet's critical management is going to be localized, each miniature community free to develop as its people see fit. Put simply, should families, neighbors and individuals be at the center of things or should scientific government and government-appointed overseers?"

Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society

John Taylor Gatto. An Underground History of American Education

Gatto. A Short, Angry History of American Forced Schooling

Gatto. Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education

Gatto. Radical Democracy and Our Future

[Geotech]

JDM, I'm not talking about programming, I'm talking about civil engineering, REAL engineering. *pounds chest*

[KentInDC]

Jennifer,
Preach it, sister - even if you are an atheist! I couldn't agree with you more about eliminating the need for diplomas. I have considerably more schooling than the average American, but don't think I received much education through all that schooling. Even though I always attended class in engineering school (Redneck guilt - is there such a thing?), I felt attendance was a total waste of time because the information is all in the book and I, like most people, can read several times as fast as I can listen, skip the portions I know, and reread the portions I didn't quite understand. I learn much better on the job and don't have to pay tuition.

I wish I could remember the name, but years ago I read a book questioning the educational effectiveness of schooling in general. The book mentioned a study in Sweden that found that as years in school increased, people became less interested in learning and more interested in receiving credentials for attending school.

I attended engineering school at a middling state university and law school at a fairly elite liberal arts college. It is tougher to get into the liberal arts college, so it makes sense that those who passed that hurdle are, on the average, more successful than those who had no such selection process. While the lower cost and lower admission standards of the state university ensure a fair number of slackers, most students at the liberal arts college are not paying tuition themselves and many are counting on daddy's connections to get them where they want to go upon graduation. In addition, most selective private schools try to ensure a high graduation rate, leading to a fair amount of slacking in those schools.

I began law school at 40 and most of my classmates at that elite school appeared to have no knowledge of the world outside upper middle (and higher) class suburbia and certainly had no concept of any work other than that related to school. In contrast, in the state university where I attended engineering school, almost everyone I knew worked at least part-time and many students worked full-time.

[joe]

My wife, an engineer, taught an Algebra class at night at a community college, to people who'd either never taken Algebra before, or who hadn't passed in High School. You know who takes an Algebra class at night at a community college? Nurse's Assistants and metal workers and homemakers who've put in a full day of work, then spend their leisure time studying freaking Algebra - and since they're taking it for the first time at 19 or 27 or 38, they're people who don't have a great deal of natural ability or experience/comfort with academia, and have to work that much harder to get it. So that someday they can get nursing degrees, or move from the floor to the design room. In short, a hell of a lot more inspiring than me and my college roommates.

[Ironchef]

I went to community (technical) college after: a private-school secondary education
Bachelor's & Master's at state public universities.

I wonder which reason of her's that I fit into?

[Jason Ligon]

I find the undergraduate degree to be an odd bird these days. I got mine from a fairly selective private liberal arts college. The cost was high, but as someone else pointed out, so was the financial aid.

I have never for a moment regretted the liberal arts education I received. I feel that it has given me tons of intangibles that I would not have known to seek out until much later if at all.

That said, we all used to sit around making fun of each other's majors. I did undergrad physics and minored in English lit, but it turns out I was really more interested in philosophy. My wife has a BA in International Relations. One of my friends has a BA in History. I have heard 'what are you going to do with an English degree' before, and I have since realized that at the undergrad level, majors don't really mean much. What can you do(career wise) with a BA/BS in history, philosophy, sociology, or any other subject you can think of? I can tell you that the employment opportunities afforded by a BS in physics are not pretty. From an employment standpoint, all that matters is having any 4 year degree.

Now in my early 30's, many of my co-workers are seeking further degrees. Being among the most egg headed of the bunch, I almost feel guilty saying this, but I can't figure out why one would choose to do most of it. If you want to be a lawyer, I understand going to law school, but the MBA may be the biggest joke in America now. These folks aren't going to acadamia.

I really enjoyed and appreciate education for the sake of expanding one's knowledge base, as I did in college. However, I have a real problem with the society of certifications, each of which costs hugely in money and time, but most of which have a current value hovering near 0. I can't bring myself to do it.

What I would like is an opportunity to continually educate myself a few classes at a time, with some way to document this kind of incremental study so as to increase my visible value in the marketplace. Think of a sort of educational personal trainer. The library is there, just like the gym is always there, but while I make it to the gym, I know that I would be too lazy to complete a field of study totally alone.

[KentInDC]

Jason Ligon,
As I stated above, I think going to class is a waste of time - at least for me. However, like you, i need something to spur me into action. When I was working at a construction site in a remote area, I had lots of time on my hands and took an electronics correspondence course. Being able to work at my own pace and on my own time without the hassles of class attendance led me to work much harder than if I had to go at the pace of the class.

Maybe some people need the discipline of class, but I think attending class mainly teaches us to equate time spent on a task with accomplishment. I spent 6 hours a day in class, 175 days per year, for twelve years, so I deserve a diploma. I am convinced that most people can achieve the same education in much less than 12 years if they are properly motivated and have not been totally turned off to learning by their schooling. Education could be achieved at a much lower cost if we adopted Jennifer's proposals and stopped pushing schooling while calling it education.

[dhex]

i dunno if any of you have seen the recent village voice series on being poor and broke and college educated (it has a few good anecdotes and a lot of that "i have school, gimme work now!" entitlement crap). i went to school with a lot of those kids, whose parents subsidized their partying (or clueless grabassing and bad planning) and now can't figure out why joanie's BA in history won't let her get a job in public relations.

i'm lucky enough to have gotten scholarships for most of my BA and work for a hospital willing to subsidize my MA in corporate communications (about as exciting as it gets). my wife also did her ba and ma largely on scholarship and grants, so we can pay out for her phd work and still come out with no debt. yay!

[child of eggheads]

AS = All Shit

BS = Bull Shit

MS = More Shit

PhD = Piled higher & Deeper

[Perry]

I have gotten the chance to take undergraduate and graduate coursework at:

- a large community college
- a fairly well acclaimed SEC university
- a commuter style university
- a fairly "elite" university in the northeast;
- and some classes at its law school, ranked as one of the best in the nation.

And in all of those experiences, the only tanglible differences in teaching or classwork that I could find were in the few classes that I took at the law school. The professors that I had there were thought provoking, inspiring and brilliant - and their classes were as well. Everything else was hit or miss, with a few great teachers sprinkled in with some good ones and a lot of mediocre ones.

And only other difference that I can gather is that the expectations are higher at the "better" schools. For people who benefit from very high expectations, the experience of an elite school can potentially be very beneficial. For those who don't need that, they can do just as fine anywhere they choose to go.

Now, there are students at every single level of school who because of their parents or their trust fund or whatever else have the ability to slack off and not care about learning.

But also there at every level are the students that really care and that want to learn.

Education is solely an experience based on what you choose to get out of it. You could send the brightest kid in the world to Harvard or Stanford or MIT and if all they do is party and get by, or worse - they learn and accept without ever stopping to learn and question why, then they get nothing better than any average student that is really trying to make it through any number of "lower tier" colleges or community colleges across the nation.

People tend to equate 'putting in their time' with actual learning, which is a shame in and of itself. (And this goes for elementary, secondary AND post secondary education).

Just by making schools free or cheap doesn't make anyone any more likely to really learn.. and when we all realize that then our problems with education are halfway solved.

[Gadfly]

"It is safer to have the whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance." --Thomas Jefferson

This thought, I believe, is the foundation of any successful Democracy - an educated electorate. Once we turn the educational system into a trade school or one that is only accessible to the elite, we set ouselves up for politics of fear and hate - or whatever else may tickle the brain stem of the uneducated masses.

[joe]

"Just by making schools free or cheap doesn't make anyone any more likely to really learn"

Um, it makes people who couldn't otherwise afford to go to school, and who would otherwise be "manufacturing" Quarter Pounders with Cheese, more likely to really learn.

[KentInDC]

The law firm for which I work announced a few months ago that they are only seeking the best students from nine schools, which included several Ivies, Georgetown, UVA, George Washington, and another obviously added to attain "diversity." (My law school was not listed - I got in through the back door when they hired attorneys en masse from my previous, now-dissolved, firm.) Almost in the same breath, the managing partner expressed disappointment that attorneys hired under similar standards have tended to leave within a few years - often for jobs in the federal government.

I think there IS an advantage in certain professions in having a degree or degrees from highly regarded schools. If you have two doctors to choose from and all you know about them is that one graduated from Harvard medical school and the other graduated from a medical school in the Carribean, which one would you trust with your life. You know that the Harvard guy had to be pretty bright to get to Harvard in the first place, but the other is a wild card. I have heard college described as a very expensive and time-consuming job-screening process. An employer knows if someone is a college grad that he at least stuck with something he didn't have to for a few years. Similarly, attending a highly-selective school shows that a number of highly-educated people felt you had a lot of potential. Inefficient, but the system we are stuck with.

[crimethink]

Gadfly,

How many state-funded universities were there in Jefferson's day?

I don't think a "free" education at a palacial college is going to really enlighten anyone. Now, a relatively cheap education -- with prices set by the market -- combined with a productive life in the workforce, that will produce enlightened people.

[anon for obvious reasons]

I teach in the evenings at a small private college owned by a for-profit corporation.

The college has many fine points: It is very career-oriented, and many of the students are highly motivated because they came here to study something they're passionate about. Many of the faculty had careers in the private sector before coming here, and many still have day jobs or work part-time outside the school.

And the for-profit aspect has definite pluses: Much better resources than a lot of schools, a willingness to expand facilities rapidly (gotta keep those margins growing!), and fewer academic turf battles, but maybe that's more because most of us only work there part-time so we have less invested in the place.

But there's no getting around some of the disadvantages of the for-profit side:

*Information is much harder to get. At other colleges I've taught and studied at, the website was a cornucopia of information. Faculty and staff and students could maneuver their way through the day just from the website almost. Here, information is more tightly controlled, to protect image and the brand name.

*The administration wants to maximize the number of students to maximize profits, even though some of these students have no hope of graduating. It's good to maximize profits, but the students are willing to pay big money for our degrees because they're valuable. If a transparent web site is somehow detrimental to the reputation of our degrees, surely a high wash-out rate and/or unskilled graduates are also detrimental.

*The school is a bigger target for lawsuits because it has deeper pockets, so policies are much more risk-averse. If a teacher's strict decisions can't be backed up by the most hyper-technical reading of the fine print on our policies, the teacher won't be supported. This would be fine if the teachers had the right to issue written policies on the first day of class, but those written policies can't be anything more than a restatement of what somebody On High wrote. And good luck getting the people On High to take the time to remove loopholes from the official policies.

I'm not saying for-profit education shouldn't exist, and I'm not suggesting that we'd all be better off if the school were run by the state. But don't kid yourselves into thinking that private, for-profit education will be an unqualified miracle for society. It isn't. It has its wrinkles too, just like any other system.

[dhex]

"Once we turn the educational system into a trade school..."

um, it is a fucking trade school. or rather, should be more like a trade school system. it would be especially helpful on the high school level, since that tends to be more like playschool and turns college into high school part II.

i went to a fairly expensive private college and most of the students there were of the "is this going to be on the final?" variety. maybe if they were learning some actual skills instead of being placeholders...and so on. which is what made taking night classes so great (outside of getting more hours to work jobs) was dealing with people who actually wanted to be there and were often paying for it themselves. and had better stories, being in their 30s and all.

or to make everyone happy: "many of those who can afford it do not appreciate it, and those who would appreciate it often cannot afford it"

[linguist]

This discussion has made me think that actually, our higher educational system still works pretty well in this country. I used to think that the expensive private colleges were the only way to prove my worth. But having tried that (and HATED it) I finished up at a large, urban commuter school. Was the education quite as good? Honestly...not always. But there were certainly enough things to make up for it: more choice in classes, more diverse population, much less money output!

And so here I am finishing a graduate degree at another large urban commuter school. Should I have gone to a Big 10? Maybe. But so far it doesn't seem that people care as much as you might think about the type of schools you've attended.

Point of all this being: if you're smart and willing to work, you still can get where you're going, community colleges included.

[KentInDC]

linguist,
Someone did a study comparing people of similar ability and backgrounds, some of whom graduated from state universities and some of whom graduated from Ivies. He found that the school from which a person graduated had little to do with their success after graduation. Whenever I see differences in average income for different levels of educational attainment, I take it with a grain of salt. The guys who get PhDs will, on the average, be considerably more intelligent and/or ambitious than the guys who drop out of HS. Some of them would probably have had even higher incomes had they skipped school and applied themselves to something not requiring a degree - think Bill Gates.

[kevrob]

Bill Gates is a bit of an outlier. He did matriculate at Harvard. Given the period he was there (mid-1970's) it is arguable that sticking around to pick up his diploma would have cost M$ valuable lead time against their competitors. Any education he was getting on the subject of computing was probably less interesting than what he and his Altair programming buddies were up to.

As for God's profession, a doctor an engineer and a lawyer were arguing about the nature of God. Doc said, "The Lord is a master biologist and physician. He designed all the species of the world, from the merest one-celled organism, to the complications of the human brain." The engineer scoffed, "That's just a subset of his designing of the entire universe. God is an engineer. He brought into being all the physical constants of the universe, set the stars in their courses, built mountain, sea and plain, and created it all out of chaos!"

The mouthpiece took a sip of his drink, and quietly announced, "God is a lawyer." His friends stared at him, until the doctor asked, "Have you got any evidence for that, counselor?"

"Sure," the lawyer replied. "Who do you think it was who created the chaos?"

Kevin

[joe]

Three engineers are arguing about God. The structural engineer says, "God must be a structural engineer. Look at the female body - the curves, the skeleton...Gotta be a structural engineer."

The chemical engineer says, "God must be a chem e. Look at the way the female can produce milk, or not, or can grow a baby, or not, depending on the complicated interaction of hormones. Deninately a chem e."

The civil engineer says, "C'mon, God must be a civil engineer. Look at the female body - who else would put a recreational area right next to the sewer outfall?"

Bah-dum-dum. Is this thing on?

[Geotech]

Eh, you guys have the wrong idea that all engineers are design engineers. I'm going out in the field, mostly offshore. Lots of civil engineers are glorified construction foremen.

[thoreau]

kevrob-

You might say God is a lawyer, but what about this one?

An engineer went to hell. He saw how miserable things were and decided to make some improvements. So he installed air conditioning, cable TV, and other creature comforts. Pretty soon everybody in hell was having a good time.

God saw this, checked His roster, and realized that there had been a mistake. So He called Satan and said "The engineer was sent to you by mistake. We need you to return him right away."

Satan said "No way! We're living it up down here."

God replied "If you don't return him I'll sue you."

Satan just laughed: "Don't try to bluff me, old man. You know you don't have any lawyers up there!"