What he said. I got my degree in Computer Science, and the classes were filled with people who were there to learn how to program and make mo' money, mo' money, mo' money. When they got there and found out that they're weren't going to learn how to write programs in C++ or whatever the flavor of the week was and that they were going to have learn about Turing machines and linked lists and how operating systems work and a bunch of other more esoteric subjects, they got frustrated, deemed the whole thing a waste of time, and switched their major to MIS. I might've ended up as one of them, if someone who was about to graduate in CS hadn't given me the straight dope. Any idiot can write a program in C++ or Pascal or Java or any other programming language. Any idiot. What they teach you in any decent CS program and what separates a graduate of a decent CS program from someone who's a graduate of "Java for Dummies" is that the CS graduate has learned programming skills that transcend any programming language and any operating system.
A person who graduates college also indicates to a potential employer that this person can stick it out for 4-5 yrs. (or more) to get a degree. I don't know what the stats are, but I bet about half of those who start college never finish. It's more or less a hurdle or a bar for those to clear to get hired at many companies.
What nonsense. If you want, college education can get you quite a bit of money - go to college, do well, go to a good law school, come out with a 6 figure salary. That being said, the better the school, the less practical its courses are. Why? Because they're more interested in seeing if the students can learn how to think about problems in different ways. Yet oddly enough, students from those schools don't have trouble getting jobs. The job training will take care of itself. That's why you go to college - to broaden your horizons, intellectually speaking, which will be useful to you at work when confronted with problems that aren't in the exact job description. Is that true for EVERYONE? No, perhaps not for a fighter pilot. But if you ever want to command other fighter pilots, it might be.
Dog's on to something here. A lot of the 4 year program is filler, and expensive filler at that. In England, it's a 3 year course of study. I wonder how they pull it off?
That Patrick Kavanagh (poet) was one cynical bastard, isn't he? (Studying him at the moment) BTW, College education in Ireland is FAR cheaper than the States and only €3,000-4,000 a year, as opposed to those CRAZY fees you pay over there... and the reputation of Irish colleges is extremely high, before somebody chimes in with a "not worth sh!t" comment
I promise you, there is a very good reason that the military requires a college education to be an officer. It's the same reason that (at least in the Air Force) payload delivery can only be authorized by an officer. You have to be able to think for yourself, and think on your feet. A college education does not guarantee that skill, but it does make it more likely.
We didn't actually do any Kavanagh in the couple of classes I took, since they mostly concentrated on drama. Man, you Irish have contributed to english drama like no one else in the last 200 years. Shaw, Yeats, Wilde and Beckett. All Irish. 3000-4000 euros is not bad, it's about that much to go to a Uni here in Canada, but I didn't feel like staying home for college. Tuition alone cost me 10 times more in the US.
Why can't we move the basic college level cirriculum to high school? The evidence (like AP classes offering in high school) shows that it can be done. Young people can digest these subjects without too much difficulties. Grade school pretty much is wasting of time because there's not much to learn, isn't it? Let's move the high school stuffs down there. (Peolpe are still take introduction algebra course in college, that's ridiculous) The modern human brains can afford that kind of workload. As for the arguement that college education is to produce renaissance men. Come on, many famous renaissance men had never gone to college. Liberal arts, liberal study, by the name itself means wasting money and time. Purely for aristocracies.
Try teaching all those courses when schools are going through a crunch and laying off teachers. Schools have a graducating system similar to universities. The demands in college are far greater. If a human brain can handle that much, then explain the suicide rate amongst those in high school wiseguy? People with no university turn out quite stupid. I've seen some good examples before my eyes.
Yes, because most people with any brains at all are being pushed to go to college. I'm certainly not going to argue that upward social mobility is a bad thing, but it does have some negative consequences. 60 years ago very few farmboys had any pretensions towards higher learning. That didn't mean they were stupid. But they put their brains into farming, or carpentry, or running a mercantile, or whatever. Now, anybody who'd mastered the times tables and can fill out a loan application will feel like a dumbass if he doesn't at least go to junior college, leaving his dim-witted siblings to stay behind and run the farm, build your house, fix your car.
Or perhaps the farm boy is going to learn a technical trade. Technical schools have started to spring up offering training that can lead to a job. This is especially true since finding someone who's willing to take you on as an apprentice is becoming more difficult.