Has College Education Lost its Value?

[Reiqua]

Thanks everyone for the details about how different countries manage fee paying - very interesting. Sounds like most places have some form of system a bit similar to what I'm used to.

Though as Celestial mentioned, we're getting a bit off topic, which wasn't my original intention, sorry!

Jan 6, 2017 18:09:30 GMT -5 Reiqua said:

I suppose [making uni education so financially accessible to everyone] could also be construed as making a uni education even more devalued, since anyone can get it now... but seriously, money probably shouldn't be the barrier making only some people able to get a uni degree.

I guess that begs the question, though: what should be?
Should it be intelligence? The kind of job you're aspiring to get into? Or is it okay that uni degrees are becoming so commonplace?

I'd be interested to know: do people think it a negative thing that everyone goes to uni these days? Should it still be an 'elite' thing? Or is it okay that uni degrees are so commonplace these days?

[Shinko]

Jan 7, 2017 16:25:23 GMT -5 Reiqua said:

Thanks everyone for the details about how different countries manage fee paying - very interesting. Sounds like most places have some form of system a bit similar to what I'm used to.

Though as Celestial mentioned, we're getting a bit off topic, which wasn't my original intention, sorry!

Jan 6, 2017 18:09:30 GMT -5 Reiqua said:

I suppose [making uni education so financially accessible to everyone] could also be construed as making a uni education even more devalued, since anyone can get it now... but seriously, money probably shouldn't be the barrier making only some people able to get a uni degree.

I guess that begs the question, though: what should be?
Should it be intelligence? The kind of job you're aspiring to get into? Or is it okay that uni degrees are becoming so commonplace?

I'd be interested to know: do people think it a negative thing that everyone goes to uni these days? Should it still be an 'elite' thing? Or is it okay that uni degrees are so commonplace these days?

Hrmf. I am not sure- I feel like restricting college education to only the monied elite is unnecessarily limiting and would only reinforce the inherent class divisions in most modern societies. On the flipside, as supply and demand teaches us, when there is a lot of a thing it loses value.

Perhaaaaps if it was something like a medical or education degree, where you spend the last semester or two in a mandatory internship to get actual practical work experience? Or alternatively, if there was some sort of board to streamline what is or is not taught in a certain degree, since it was brought up earlier that just because you take say... history, that doesn't mean you'll have all the classes wanted by someone with a job opening in a history related field.

[June Scarlet]

Jan 7, 2017 16:25:23 GMT -5 Reiqua said:

I'd be interested to know: do people think it a negative thing that everyone goes to uni these days? Should it still be an 'elite' thing? Or is it okay that uni degrees are so commonplace these days?

Actually, I think it's a negative thing that not everyone goes to college. Or the people who go to college, but end up dropping out.

I have ten cousins. And yet I'm the only one so far with a college degree. Even counting two year degrees.

My two cousins that are older than me both dropped out of their four year college. The oldest dropped out with only a semester left to complete her degree.

I have three cousins who are two years younger than me. One prefers working with his hands, and so went to a technical training place, and now has his own business as a brick layer. That's actually a good fit for him, he's quite good at it. So I think it's okay in his case.
The other two dropped out of community college. They just couldn't find the motivation to care even about that. One has two decent enough jobs, one in retail, and one as a cook. He actually went to a college to get a degree in culinary arts, but didn't up up finishing it. So he's kind of close to where he wanted to be. The other works in her family's store. Working retail made me miserable, but some people can handle it better, I guess.

I have four cousins currently in college. I have a good feeling they'll all graduate, but then, I thought the same thing about all my cousins. But still, they're making it good so far, and I think that's a good sign.

And then I have one cousin still in high school. I'm not sure what will happen with her. She already has trouble keeping up with her high school classes.

So I know the conversation has been focused on what a college degree doesn't get you, but yet, I don't really like the alternatives, the sort of narrowed career paths I see for those without. Maybe it is just a checkmark for a company looking to hire, but yet, if you don't have that checkmark, you're out of luck.

[Moni]

If anything, because college is now expected and mandatory, it has gained more value than ever before--though perhaps not if you're thinking it in a supply-demand sort of idea. Diamond may be more valuable than food in an economic sense, but, uh, that doesn't mean food is practically worthless--food is more practically valuable if you're starving. The sheer opportunity a college (and high school) degree gives you are astronomical compared if you didn't get one at all.

Especially, especially, especially considering that "grunt" jobs, particularly good grunt jobs, are vanishing extremely quickly as automation continues to become a thing. If something can be automated, it will be automated. (This is why, for example, coal is never going to come back. Ever.) As our economy transitions into a service-oriented one, creative and specialized jobs are going to be the new mode of labor, and those will require higher education. That shift is basically an inevitable part of our economy--and well, if everyone's super, then no one is, and new employees will have to meet higher and higher standards.

College is really only a ticket to a job if you have a degree that a) requires a lot of work and includes training as part and parcel of the program, like medical school or b) you're in a low-supply, high-demand field (like CS or agriculture). Other than that, you really do have to carve out your own thing or be really creative with available jobs.

[Reiqua]

So Moni, I take it you're saying that having a degree is more necessary/important but less remarkable these days, and that that pattern fits with the shift in what kinds of work people do - more creative and less menial. Correct me if I got that wrong! xD

I think your point is a sound one and an interesting one. It certainly makes a lot of sense of why you'd see this shift towards needing a degree being really commonplace these days!

I was wondering, though... what do you make of professions like nursing and teaching that didn't used to require a full degree and now do?

((And this is where we run into terminology troubles, because in Australia 'college' means an institution that is far less prestigious than a university. A college doesn't give you a degree (maybe a diploma or a certificate), but a university does.))
In my grandparents' generation, going to Teachers' college or Nurses' college was enough to guarantee you a job as a teacher or nurse respectively. Now teaching requires a full degree from a university, and to become a Registered Nurse you need a full university degree too (though technically you can still be a lower tier nurse without a university qualification).

Basically what I'm trying to say is that Nursing and Teaching have always been fields that require creativity (or at the very least humanity) and will probably never be automated, but it seems these fields are also being affected by the increased need for university degrees.

If you have any thoughts on the topic I'd be interested to hear!

[Huntress]

It's not off topic if you tie it to the topic xD I'ma poke a little at the question of availability/accessibility of higher education via tuition fees and the notion of checkmark education, henceforth referred to as such because it's such a nice descriptive term we've coined here.

(As an aside, terminology is getting wibbly, yes, because there is a difference between colleges and universities. For us, universities are what give you a higher education with a degree and letters and other fancy things. Colleges aren't very common because it's essentially used as a shoddy translation of a foreign concept, but you do encounter them with places such as the Health Care College, which trains nurses and gives an applied higher education. I'm not up to date with all the intricacies, but the difference in prestige is very much there. Far as I know, there's also a difference in prestige in the US with colleges, especially community colleges, and actual universities, especially the Ivy League.)

So honestly, I do think that the fact that higher education is so commonplace is hurting everyone in the picture: both the people with the degree, whose degree isn't worth much of anything and boils down to having to jump through hoops for several years before you get to progress to an actual life with a job, and the people who don't have a degree and opted to go into vocational studies or similar, because they have to struggle constantly against the stigma and limited opportunities that you have when you don't have the checkmark. I wouldn't say that higher education should be 'elite', because that'd be equally harmful for a different reason. Rather, what seems ideal to me is a situation where higher education is needed for things that actually take specialized academic knowledge (economics, law), applied higher education or insert-terminological-equivalent-here is needed for more hands-on specialized knowledge (nurses, various technical fields such as engineering) and no actual degree is needed for highly practical fields but you still get vocational qualifications (car mechanics come to mind) and then you get the grunt work, which can be learned on the go and in a perfect world should still get you a livable wage because where would we all be without the dude who shovels snow off the pavement in early mornings, amirite.

What you get these days is a situation where positions that by all accounts shouldn't need any academic background still come with degree requirements, just so that the employers can weed out candidates better. So you can have extensive experience in the field and be all-out awesome but when you don't have that paper to show, be it even in a completely unrelated field, your application gets shredded. That's how my mom ended up going into Master's studies a year before I finished my BA studies. She's spent a lifetime in accounting-related jobs, most of it in a management position, knows all relevant programs and systems inside and out, and was facing redundancy because she had a degree equivalent to an incomplete BA (orrr something. It was a Soviet carryover degree.) She got an MA in business management and is still in the same accounting-related field with middle manager positions. Not the best example because finance most probably should require a university degree anyway, but that's what we get for being a recent transition society.

But while I hold that not everyone should go to uni and vocational skills should also be valued and grunt jobs should also be valued, big piles of tuition fees are better at ensuring that the people who can afford to go to uni will go to uni no matter their capabilities (or more to the point, whose parents can afford to send them to uni, because look at all those lotteries we don't win at age 17) and if you have the brains and drive to excel in an academic field but your finances don't match, you have the options of a scholarship, a loan, or something that doesn't require a degree. And the latter would be fine and wonderful if you don't at one point run into a wall because you need that checkmark.

The way it worked for us until fairly recently, you had state-funded studies and non-state-funded studies. If your highschool exams got a high enough score, you were eligible for state-funded studies. If they didn't, it was up to you where you got the tuition money: get an inheritance, rob a bank, work and save up, or get a student loan from a bank. You could opt to start paying back a year after you graduated, but during that time you'd still be paying interest. And if you went to work in the public sector, the state would pay the loan back for you. Well, then they started reforming the system and did away with the compensation for public servants (big uproar). Then they decided that higher education should actually be free for all and did away with tuition fees entirely, on the condition that you graduate within the nominal period of studies, after which you'd start paying fines (conveniently when I did my MA studies). And now they're talking about bringing back tuition fees because the system isn't sustainable. The idea is that higher education should be available to everyone who has the capabilities and persistence to stay in the program, but there's no agreement on how best to ensure that.

Teaching is a whole separate argument and someone rein me in if I run too far off with this because I spent a year and a half as a teacher and had enough time to build up Views, some of which conflict xD
On the one hand, good teachers are basically born teachers and no amount of schooling, higher or otherwise, can give you that lil something that makes you a good teacher. There's psychology and negotiation skills and Listening With Your Heart and knowing where to enforce rules and where to bend them. Skills you either have or you don't.
On the other hand, university education gives you things that you generally can't get even with years of life experience and self-schooling. It's a certain way of viewing the world on a larger scale, making connections across fields, the ability to see the practical in the abstract and vice versa. Knowledge that's been rigorously tested and approved, and critical thinking to be able to find knowledge that's tested and approved. We live in a world of information overload and people who lap up the stupidest demagogy and I'd quite like any teacher of my kid to have the skills of critical thinking, as well as the skills to teach those skills.

[Shinko]

Toooo clarify, here in the US "college" is a lump term for any establishment of higher learning. University is a term usually associated specifically with a research insitution, often associated with the state or federal govmint, though these are not ironclad rules.

I do kind of agree with the idea that teachers should have some sort of higher education, collegiate or vocational or... something plz. That's actually dovetailed into the problem that's come up a few times with college education not being standardized; college professors are doctorates in their particular field. They are not bloody teachers. I have in my various studies suffered under so many bad professors who had all the enthusiasm in the world for their subject matter, and no bloody clue how to bring it down to our level so we could understand it. Or who had not patience for/concept of what neophytes in the study were capable of. Or just... expecting us to read their dang minds because no, that assignment criteria was not stated anywhere thankyouverymuch now remove that ding off my grade for it because how was I supposed to know?

Point being, there are some fields that traditionally just required a certain amount of inherent empathy and/or knowledge of the field (be it a subject you wanted to teach, or a gloss knowledge of medicine in the case of nursing) that I'd hoooonestly prefer these days to be in the hands of someone with a bit more specialization. (Can the nurse who is giving me an IV drip of morphine after my surgery have a basic education in effects, ethics and legality of modern pharmaceutical practices? That'd be swell!)

That said, I do agree that there are some fields that could do with a bit dialing back. I've always been a touch baffled, for example, by the concept of culinary degrees. Like... wut? You really don't need to go to college to be able to cook, you can learn that in a sort of master-apprentice kinda deal on the fly, or in one of them aforementioned vocational schools.

Although, I have to tilt my head at the food VS diamond comparison. The thing is, yes, higher education practically speaking is more neccesary now than it used to be, but food is relatively cheap and diamonds are not. We're looking at a situation more like... bread VS meat, where meat is the higher education and bread is the job experience. We need bread waaaay more than we need meat. It has more nutritional worth, and meat is, throughout history, universally way more expensive than bread. Used to be you could subsitute the nutriment you get from meat with something else- beans for example (IE a vocational study). But nowadays people are holding back the bread from you until you eat the meat. So it's like, "EAT THAT RED MEAT DANGIT, OR NO BREAD FOR YOU. I don't care if you can't afford it or if you're a vegan (in a field that really shouldn't require a degree), you'll eat that meat and you'll like it. And even so, you can only get my bread from me if you prove you've had lots of good bread in the past so I know you'll appreciate my bread."

If that made sense. XD

[Moni]

Reiqua

I can really only speak for the United States (college in the united states is a catch-all term; university refers to a larger, research-oriented institution but not necessarily more prestigious.)

Medical institutions have drastically changed; there are less doctors around and there are more tiers of assistants and specialists. Physician Assistants and Nurse's Aides, for example, have only been around for a short while (Physician Assistants being physician lite and nurse's aides being nurse lite)--in other words, being a nurse is now a trickier field that requires more knowledge than it did in the past. Nurses make increasingly more responsible and important decisions.

As for teachers, honestly, they should have just always had a college degree--it kind of boggles the mind that there used to be schoolteachers who didn't. In New York State, to be a teacher, you need a bachelor's degree and then a master's in education. Teachers really ought to be more educated than your average muck-a-muck.

Ofc, the need for degrees is not solely driven by our increasingly service-based economy. There are also some brainless business and employers involved. I also think the discourse and business around college has changed a lot--college is a lot more expensive now than it was in past, for example, and we now talk about it as an investment, a consumer product to get a better job. Colleges haven't quite caught up with this; academia is still very much the spirit of a lot of higher education--knowledge for the sake of knowledge and all that--and less about the job market.

(I could contrast this with Egypt--(it may not be a really good example because the Egyptian economy is in shambles and unemployment is almost at 50%--yes, 50%--at that point, you have a really big problem demand-side)--or at least how it used to be before the economy went completely down the gutter. College education is virtually free (a semester costs basically $50) (but drinkable water isn't--joke's on you, poor pee-ple!), but in countries where this is the case, colleges are a lot more selective of students straight out of high school (this is true in Germany). You need a GPA of more than 95% to get into a good college that isn't just a trade school in Egypt--and almost perfect grades to get into a medical school or engineering college.

Most jobs in Egypt, of course still doesn't require a college education--because A) they're rare and b) most jobs in Egypt are very much apprentice-based and still require a lot of hands-on trade knowledge.)

[doctortomoe]

Speaking as someone who lives in the American South, yes.

Most jobs around here now actually say that they're not accepting anyone with a college degree.

[Twillie]

Jan 11, 2017 4:24:47 GMT -5 doctortomoe said:

Speaking as someone who lives in the American South, yes.

Most jobs around here now actually say that they're not accepting anyone with a college degree.

Wait, what are some jobs like this, and what's their reasoning behind this limitation?

[doctortomoe]

I don't really know their reasoning. But on the general places, like the stores and such, they say 'college educated need not apply.' There was one place last year that said that they were only hiring high school drop outs.

The temp agency I went to a few years ago said it would be easier to be placed if I was a convicted felon than a college graduate.

Considering that, as it is the South, and a lot of, what might be called, 'better' jobs don't exist down here, short of moving to a different part of the country, I have to say that it's not worth it in the slightest.

[Joker]

Jan 11, 2017 17:12:12 GMT -5 doctortomoe said:

I don't really know their reasoning. But on the general places, like the stores and such, they say 'college educated need not apply.' There was one place last year that said that they were only hiring high school drop outs.

The temp agency I went to a few years ago said it would be easier to be placed if I was a convicted felon than a college graduate.

Considering that, as it is the South, and a lot of, what might be called, 'better' jobs don't exist down here, short of moving to a different part of the country, I have to say that it's not worth it in the slightest.

I just wanted to throw in my two cents that, as someone who also lives in the American South, I've never seen this - so it definitely varies within the region.

[Shinko]

Jan 11, 2017 17:12:12 GMT -5 doctortomoe said:

I don't really know their reasoning. But on the general places, like the stores and such, they say 'college educated need not apply.' There was one place last year that said that they were only hiring high school drop outs.

The temp agency I went to a few years ago said it would be easier to be placed if I was a convicted felon than a college graduate.

Considering that, as it is the South, and a lot of, what might be called, 'better' jobs don't exist down here, short of moving to a different part of the country, I have to say that it's not worth it in the slightest.

Echoing Joker here- I'm Floridian, and my main application turf as of recent has comprised of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. Can't get much more Great American Southern Hickland than that. XD But I haven't seen much of a bias against college graduates. Could be your local area?

[doctortomoe]

Mississippi.