My thoughts... stream of consciousness as I was watching the video. This was originally written as a comment on another blog. I'd love to know what you think of the video and/or my analysis. Yep, it's my typical acerbic self :)
True - college is too expensive.
Dentist who would rather be working at McDonalds -- scary. What if everyone thought that way? Who would our doctors be? Only those with parents rich enough to put them through college debt free. How can we expect that those people would 1. want to and 2. be suitable for the job.
Building new libraries adds nothing to the quality of education at a college? That's just laughable.
If we were graduating geniuses from college would we be this unhealthy of a nation? I don't have any statistics and maybe this is partially stereotypical but the unhealthiest people (especially when it comes to obesity) tend to be found among those who do not go to college.
Since when are we in a war in Pakistan?
The man at 31:27 is recommending that people run not walk away from the idea of going to college because it won't help them when they have no money for food and no water from the municipal taps. Who is going to manage those municipal taps if not a civil engineer? And how will that civil engineer gain the knowledge to do so without a college education?
There is no value to having a college degree if everyone else has one. If this is true, then one can compete even less without one.
I do agree that it can be too easy perhaps to do well. However, this does not negate the value of the education. So much of college is what you make of it. The student who does the bare minimum to pass (or to get the 4.0) will not be nearly as successful as the one who works above and beyond that bare minimum.
The most successful college of the future will be online. Where there will be no interaction between students and teachers because it will be all automated with a professor (who was educated how?) teaching hundreds of students. Not to mention that this method would be worthless for medical, engineering, and any other hand-on field (including my own specialty which I'll mention at the end). At that point, why bother doing anything more than just reading a textbook or the information online for free?
If I had kids, I would not want them educated in a school by teachers without college degrees. I definitely do not want to have my health in the hands of doctors, nurses, dentists, therapists, etc who do not have advanced degrees!
A note about myself and where I'm coming from. I graduated a year and a half ago with a bachelor degree in music, specifically voice performance. That degree could not have been completed online. It's an impossibility. One cannot learn all of the skills needed to compete in the world of opera without advanced training with personal instruction – in real life. Actually, a bachelor degree is the bare minimum as nearly all successful opera singers need the additional training of a masters degree with continued lessons and coachings well beyond that point. You can say that I did not study something “necessary” and that it's not “practical” and that I really didn't need to study something that will provide such little assurance of employment. I beg to differ. For a number of reasons, I was not singing professionally or even on a high community level last year. Neither was I taking private voice lessons. I cannot put into words how that pained my soul. I need music. I can't say that I need it more that God, and I could survive without it if there was no possible way to pursue it but I would be hardly a shell of the person I am now. For me, my degree was for myself more than for the purpose of getting a steady full-time job. I am currently working at McDonalds, Toys R Us, and just got a job as a preschool teachers assistant. I could have started any or all of those right out of high school. But where could I have gone from there?
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