Nocta-Aeterna said:
Also, he apparently supports our governments new ruling that students who take extended time for their studies are fined ?3000,- (roughly $4069.2 USD) for each consecutive year after the first extra year taken. (Granted, loafing requires some proper consequences, but COME ON.)
Wow, I find that law frightening, as many American college students would. On average, it takes American college students 7 years to get a 4 year degree. I actually feel special because it only took me 6 years to get my English degree. Granted, would have been more like 5 years, but I dropped out one semester because I was told by doctors that I needed to have my gallbladder taken out and the operation and recovery would have removed me too long for me to catch up on my classes. Then after a graduated with my 2 year and transferred, my second university had crappy scheduling for classes and I missed taking classes I needed during three semesters because three times they scheduled two classes I needed to take on the same hour or relatively overlapped so that I would have to leave halfway through one class to get to the other.
But on top of that I liked taking my semesters slow, 4 to 5, classes, because I just couldn't handle taking all those classes in the same semester. The semesters I did have 5 classes were pretty hairy with being able to get most if not all the work done on time. I seriously don't see how people work and go to school at the same time. It's no wonder so many people die young from stress related illnesses; they don't have time to rest and do the things they like to do.
Another reason I think students in America take so long to get through college is that they go into it not knowing what they want to do. Heck, there is a degree for those people, it is called "general studies". The problem is the secondary eduction system. It really doesn't allow for much narrowing of the kid's teaching before they get to college. Example: In my state, high school students get 6 credits for electives. That is three classes, which is definitely not enough to narrow their career views, when they have every subject thrown at them for at least 3 of those 4 years, unless they are honors students, then they have to take every subject for all 4 years and at least one college level in every subject.
It is hard for normal people to decide what they want to be when they are told they have to excel in every subject. Not once was I told that it was okay that I wasn't very good at Math or Science, because I could get some career that used my great English or good Social Studies skills.
We ruin our children in America because we tell them that they have to be great at everything.
Enamour said:
I can definitely see where you are coming from on Americans, but I don't think it is that we don't know anything. The problem goes along with what I mentioned about our schools. Our kids are bombarded with so much information at one time and are told that they have to know and be great at it all, that their heads just overload and shutdown. Bad students aren't all the fault of bad teachers(while they do have a part); bad students are mainly created by the fact that they become overwhelmed and decide that they just aren't going to do all the work that is expected of them.
One only has to look at the amount of homework that is sent home with the kids here. I'll just use my past experience as an example(though I hear that grade school students have even more homework that I did back then). When I was in high school, just about every night, I would have so much homework that I would maybe get 45 minutes a day to be myself, to be a kid/teenager. I actually found that college was easier than high school, for the point of the amount of work. While some of my college work was harder than what I had in high school, quantity-wise, I had 10 to 12 times more homework a week in high school compared to college.
Moving on, intellectually, there is another problem with America, and it is the reason why the unemployment rate is so bad.
Employers value experience over knowledge these days. One of my friends and I haven't been able to get jobs because all the jobs that are available in our career areas require around 2 to 5 years of experience. If a person doesn't have the experience, the person can't get hired. The problem that my friend and I have is that in college we got the experience we need for the jobs we apply for, but the people hiring come back and tell us that our college educations don't count as experience.
My friend has an engineering degree. He has applied to several different companies in the area that do the type of engineering that he learned and worked with. Only one of the them came back and told him that college counted as experience, though they told him that they counted 2 years of college as 1 year of experience, but the employer told him that they really wanted someone that had the precise training with what they were doing, and they couldn't hire him. The problem with what that employer said is that my friend had taken 3 classes that precisely trained him in what they were doing.
So basically, people here can't get hired unless they have experience, but they can't get experience because they can't get hired to get the 'experience' that is deemed worthy.
Now the only way college students can get experience is if they get to take internships classes. The problem is that they are limited. Example: If I wanted to get experience in English at my university, I could get in an internship with the university writing publication, not the newspaper, but the literary review book/magazine. The problem was that they only offered 9 spots each year, and there were usually 200 students looking to get one of the spots. It didn't help me that by the time I had room for the internship in my schedule, it was already full up, because I would have had to know about it 6 months in advance. The reason, they may have announced the internship during the scheduling weeks, but by that time it was already full, because people that personally knew the professor that was running the program were already told by him the previous semester about it and made an early sign-up list.
If I was an employer, I wouldn't bar the possibility of hiring a person because they don't have the specific experience that 'can only be gained' from holding the same job I am hiring for. The reason, I guarantee that the specific 'years' of experience needed that I have encountered that employers want, 99.9% of the time is stuff that a person can be explained/trained on the job in less than a week.
Finally done, I would say that this is officially the longest post I have ever made.
