Much of the claims that university is a pointless in the USA also have little basis in other developed countries which have more equitable tertiary education systems and hiring practices. Yet a major factor is that more and more, American society is attempting to monetise knowledge and experience. It just can't be done, in a direct sense.
Whether successful or not, knowledge itself is never useless, and whereas a skills based certificate course may get your foot in the door to work, what kind of work will that be? In the USA today, according to Michio Kaku, a frightening majority of post graduate and higher level scientific study is being done not by citizens but by imported minds. This then carries on to hiring trends in the industry.
What it shows is that the cultural view on education has become more like the view of many other things -- factory line, stamp it out, pack it and ship it. The 'profit' meme on the Net reflects this laziness, and I think that politics and institutions prefer a population focusing on immediate job skills which are ultimately short-sighted, than the alternative which while not always immediately applicable to work, do broaden the mind and understanding.
Calculus may be useless in a sales job or stacking boxes or guiding a tour, but the experience required to master it is not. Similarly, the understanding of the world which it brings may not appear obvious but it has accumulative effect. See the film, Limitless. What society has engineered is a false controversy -- it has engineered this supposed clash between education and success for several reasons, including generating meat for the grinder, averting minds from further expansion, and generally fostering an anti-intellectualism illustrated all over the Net and the media.
There's nothing wrong with University education, and there's nothing useless about it. Efforts against it, or at least to placate it, have been to offer practical courses and to add 'real world' experience to larger curriculum, but in some ways this has made the dissonance worse. Life goes beyond work and accumulating wealth. Don't get me wrong, any job is better than none, but University is not the problem.
It's that unrealistic expectations have been fostered, exacerbated by the ever increasing economic burden of education in America. What were once 'unskilled' jobs have now been made 'skilled jobs' by introducing practical courses at colleges. Apprenticeships and the like are disappearing. Yet this has diminished the value of what tertiary education has traditionally been about. Thus, the problem is that American society is striving so very hard to push square pegs into round holes.
Whether successful or not, knowledge itself is never useless, and whereas a skills based certificate course may get your foot in the door to work, what kind of work will that be? In the USA today, according to Michio Kaku, a frightening majority of post graduate and higher level scientific study is being done not by citizens but by imported minds. This then carries on to hiring trends in the industry.
What it shows is that the cultural view on education has become more like the view of many other things -- factory line, stamp it out, pack it and ship it. The 'profit' meme on the Net reflects this laziness, and I think that politics and institutions prefer a population focusing on immediate job skills which are ultimately short-sighted, than the alternative which while not always immediately applicable to work, do broaden the mind and understanding.
Calculus may be useless in a sales job or stacking boxes or guiding a tour, but the experience required to master it is not. Similarly, the understanding of the world which it brings may not appear obvious but it has accumulative effect. See the film, Limitless. What society has engineered is a false controversy -- it has engineered this supposed clash between education and success for several reasons, including generating meat for the grinder, averting minds from further expansion, and generally fostering an anti-intellectualism illustrated all over the Net and the media.
There's nothing wrong with University education, and there's nothing useless about it. Efforts against it, or at least to placate it, have been to offer practical courses and to add 'real world' experience to larger curriculum, but in some ways this has made the dissonance worse. Life goes beyond work and accumulating wealth. Don't get me wrong, any job is better than none, but University is not the problem.
It's that unrealistic expectations have been fostered, exacerbated by the ever increasing economic burden of education in America. What were once 'unskilled' jobs have now been made 'skilled jobs' by introducing practical courses at colleges. Apprenticeships and the like are disappearing. Yet this has diminished the value of what tertiary education has traditionally been about. Thus, the problem is that American society is striving so very hard to push square pegs into round holes.
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