Page 2 - College is just too expensive nowadays!

03-07.-2008, 01:30 PM	#16
saintsfan342000 Registered User Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Texas, USA Posts: 80	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! Sounds to me like you might be the one who is having trouble getting a "woman is going to want to fuck you". Hahaha...you're hopeless. __________________ Simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.

03-07.-2008, 05:33 PM	#17
scuppy Registered User Join Date: Nov 2007 Posts: 12	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! My first year (1988) of uni, the fees were about $200 total (BE Computer Eng). The next year in Australia, a new fee system came in and they went up to a few thousand. I think of my early education as the halcyion days of public education in Australia. Same for public health care.

03-07.-2008, 08:34 PM

#18

Powerful Pete

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Join Date: May 2004

Location: Rome, Italy

Posts: 3,859

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by JTE83

My italian roomate said you need a Master's or PHD to become employable, a BS degree is not enough in Italy!

That is not completely accurate. The Italian University system is not really comparable to the US one. Traditionally we have had only two degrees - the laurea (a cross between a bachelor's and masters) and the doctorate (PhD).

The Bachelor's degree ('laurea corta' or 3 year degree) was introduced as a reform relatively recently in Italy... but never really supported by the University system nor the private sector hiring graduates - both groups continued to support graduates from the 'regular' degree programmes as well as postgraduate degree courses.

So the short degree programme was born an orphan and always considered something of a 'loser' degree - what people pursued if they were not up to the full degree course.

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03-07.-2008, 08:52 PM

#19

limerickman

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Join Date: Jan 2004

Location: at the bar

Posts: 12,558

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by alienator

Education loans, in the US, is not an issue. Well, there isn't a shortage of loans available to students. Undergraduates can borrow up to around $40k in guaranteed loans over the course of their undergraduate career. Graduate students have no upper limit on guaranteed loans over the course of their graduate career, but they are limited in the amount for each year. The interest rates on these loans are smallish, but a large segment of the student population requires a healthy set of loans to pay for a degree.

The real problem in financing US college education is the dearth of other significant financial aid and the its effect on middle class students. Government grants and loan caps have not increased with the cost of living, so it's quite easy for a middle class undergraduate to max out on loans before his or her degree is even done. The lack of grants and the minimal value of grants forces middle class students into greater loans.

At the same time, support of public universities in the US is embarrassingly underwhelming. Of course, that's not surprising at all since the vast majority of Americans lack the ability or the will to view anything in the long term. As such, education, in the US, is not seen as the solution to anything. That's likely why the US is falling behind in scientific discovery while other nations pull ahead. We are really good, though, at producing hand guns, smart bombs, and SUVs. The next decade is likely to see China, Europe (ESA), and at least Japan become equal to the US in space activities and capabilities, and some of those programs might well surpass US abilities. Such has already happened in aerospace as well as other fields. In the US, little value is placed on studying math, engineering, or science. It's much more important to study business management or marketing because the gods know you just can't have to many grads in those fields.

Other countries are increasing the numbers of science, math, and engineering graduates, while the US shortfall in these fields increases. The only interest the US has in technical matters is in how they might improve our ability to wage war or to build really boss cars.

There is a huge disconnect in American society wherein Americans just don't associate good education with a healthy society. Despite the fact that figures show that highly educated societies are more prosperous, happy, healthy, and have lower crime rates, Americans just can't wrap their World's Only Remaining Superpower brains around the idea that investing, as a society, in education might actually be good.

We're reaping what we've sown.

Interesting.

There drift away from engineering/mathematics/sciences is also happening over here (Ireland).

Young people leaving secondary school (high school) are opting for courses
centred on arts (english/history/languages) and accountancy/economics : simply because the view is that the entry points levels for engineering/mathematics/sciences faculties are far too high and that careers in financial services sector are better paid.
(we pride ourselves here on the perception that irish educational standards are nearly the highest in the world - that's what we're told).
This drift toward getting an education - to get a job - means that we have fewer engineers and thus we have to recruit qualified/experienced engineers from abroad.
That would be unheard of 20 years ago for example.

Education today appears to me to be, "educate me for a job", over here.

I take your point about the USA.
Back in the 1950/60/70's America technology was preeminent : think of the space programme for example.
The advances in US-based technology was so far ahead of the world then, that the USA really did enjoy an advantage.
I think that advantage has been negated somewhat.
Part of it is probably down to your explanation about the lack of investment in education - and part of it is probably down to the fact that many countries now regard real investment in education as being essential.
And I do think that it is essential.

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

03-07.-2008, 08:53 PM

#20

jhuskey

Registered User

Join Date: Oct 2003

Location: Great Smoky Mountains, TN USA

Posts: 6,506

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Powerful Pete

Correct me if I am way off on this Pete, but don't you have schools that are more closly related to our "trade schools" where by an individual that is not deem appropriate for an academic degree can get an education in a technical profession.

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03-07.-2008, 09:55 PM

#21

Powerful Pete

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Join Date: May 2004

Location: Rome, Italy

Posts: 3,859

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhuskey

Yes, but they are not always considered a step down. We have trade professions that allow one to live very well and begin working 6-7 years before a university graduate - for example, essentially all accountants in Italy are only trained in a trade school 'ragioneria' and they often become CEOs and CFOs. Same goes for what you could consider an 'engineering' trade school - 'geometra' - they are allowed to approve building designs up to a certain size/complexity (so, for example, most home designs and construction supervision are approved by a geometra and not an architect/engineer). The same for elementary school teachers.

This gives people a large advantage - they are able to enter the white collar marketplace without the heavy financial investment of university, thereby making it easier for their parents.

This is slowly declining as the Italian educational system goes down the tubes and with the gradually increasing importance and prestige of securing a university degree...

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03-07.-2008, 10:33 PM	#22
limerickman Community Team Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: at the bar Posts: 12,558	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! My view is that a university degree is never a guarantee that someone can actually do the job which is required. There is a perception that everyone needs to have a degree/diploma/certificate in order to get a job and to do that job well. Experience shows me that this in't the case. I've noticed the decline in young peoples ability to do the job. One company I do some work with, hire only graduates. These people are employed in "financial" roles with this particular company. All of these people have got a degree and have been "trained" by KPMG. Do you think that the could perform the simplest of tasks? Not a chance. Invariably, they are unable to add a list of numbers correctly, their use of grammar/syntax in written communication is poor, and their ability to comprehend and understand business processes is either too vague or inaccurate. How they managed to get a degree is beyond me. And as for possessing common sense - they don't (by and large). __________________ .."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF morelike hypocrisy.

04-07.-2008, 12:07 AM	#23
Powerful Pete Registered User Join Date: May 2004 Location: Rome, Italy Posts: 3,859	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! Come on Lim, maybe you are being a bit hard on them... sounds like something I used to hear my dad say about all the young hires in his office... In my line of work I am quite impressed by the qualifications and 'go get'em' attitude of a lot of the younger hires. There are, of course, a fair share of duds, but probably no more or no less than any other generation (am I being too optimistic?). __________________ De Rosa Planet Campagnolo Per Sempre! PAOLO BETTINI CAMPIONE DEL MONDO x 2!

04-07.-2008, 12:33 AM

#24

limerickman

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Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Powerful Pete

Come on Lim, maybe you are being a bit hard on them... sounds like something I used to hear my dad say about all the young hires in his office...

In my line of work I am quite impressed by the qualifications and 'go get'em' attitude of a lot of the younger hires.

There are, of course, a fair share of duds, but probably no more or no less than any other generation (am I being too optimistic?).

I wish I was joking............but I'm not.

These guys are qualified chartered accountants ; in most cases these guys would have been recruited after they graduated from university, by KPMG or PWC and they then train with KPMG/PWC while doing their professional (chartered accountants) exams.
Then, when they pass their exams, they're let loose in industry.

The excuse I most often hear from them is "I never knew that........I trained in wealth management (or some other specialised dept) at KPMG".
That doesn't absolve them from not knowing how to add a list of figures, or write an accurate/concise report.

maybe I am being harsh..........but in my day, we had to be able to do the basics proficiently.
This generation (22 - 27 year olds), many of them can't do the basics (for whatever reason).

Rant over!

04-07.-2008, 02:09 AM	#25
rule62 Registered User Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Texas Posts: 622	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! ::: shakes fist ::: "Damn kids!" __________________

04-07.-2008, 02:17 AM	#26
Pendejo Registered User Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 508	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! I left college teaching in the early 80s primarily because the vast majority of the students were barely literate and didn't seem to have the slightest interest in changing that. At least here in the states, I would say that nowadays a college education is about equivalent to what a high school education was about forty years ago. As evidence of this (as if any were needed), a few years ago the company responsible for the SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Tests), which most colleges require of applicants, decided to "recenter" their scoring. In other words, over the years the average scores had declined so much that the statistical distribution was being compressed. So they made their scoring easier so that the distribution looks normal and healthy again. In fact, I was forced to do the same sort of thing in my own classes. If I graded on what I honestly thought was a college standard, at least half of my students would have gotten D's or worse, most of the rest C's, and a smattering of B's and maybe a couple of A's. But then your teaching would become suspect, and you'd never get tenure. So I bit the bullet and "recentered" my own standards, which is the same thing that most every other college teacher is forced to do. Anyway, the bullet tasted awful and after a few years I decided that if I was going to martyr myself to some worthless employment I might as well get paid well. Bye bye academia.

04-07.-2008, 02:24 AM	#27
limerickman Community Team Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: at the bar Posts: 12,558	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! Timely reminder of how it was "much tougher in my day"...........................Monty Python sketch Eric Idle: Who would have thought, thirty years ago, we'd all be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chaselet, eh? All: Aye, aye. Michael Palin: Them days we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea. Graham Chapman: Right! A cup of cold tea! Michael Palin: Right! Eric Idle: Without milk or sugar! Terry Jones: Or tea! Michael Palin: In a cracked cup and all. Eric Idle: Oh, we never used to have a cup! We used to have to drink out of a rolled-up newspaper! Graham Chapman: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth. Terry Jones: But you know, we were happy in those days, although we were poor. Michael Palin: Because we were poor! Terry Jones: Right! Michael Palin: My old dad used to say to me: "Money doesn't bring you happiness, son!" Eric Idle: He was right! Michael Palin: Right! Eric Idle: I was happier then and I had nothing! We used to live in this tiny old tumbled-down house with great big holes in the roof. Graham Chapman: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twentysix of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling. Terry Jones: You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor! Michael Palin: Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor! Would have been a palace to us! We used to live in an old watertank on a rubbish tip. We'd all woke up every morning by having a load of rotten fish dumped all over us! House, huh! Eric Idle: Well, when I say a house, it was just a hole in the ground, covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us! Graham Chapman: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake! Terry Jones: You were lucky to have a lake! There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road! Michael Palin: A cardboard box? Terry Jones: Aye! Michael Palin: You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank! We used to have to go up every morning, at six o'clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week out, for six pence a week, and when we got home, our dad would slash us to sleep with his belt! Graham Chapman: Luxury! We used to have to get up out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot grubble, work twenty hours a day at mill, for two pence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky! Terry Jones: Well, of course, we had it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold grubble, work twenty-four hours a day at mill for four pence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a breadknife! Eric Idle: Right! I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah! __________________ .."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF morelike hypocrisy.

04-07.-2008, 02:33 AM

#28

buckybux

Registered User

Join Date: Jul 2005

Location: Spokane, WA

Posts: 219

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by limerickman

maybe I am being harsh..........but in my day, we had to be able to do the basics proficiently.
This generation (22 - 27 year olds), many of them can't do the basics (for whatever reason).

Rant over!

This thread is very interesting. I teach at the local college (4yr), and can be considered a "professor," but I don't have a PhD, only an MBA. I have only been teaching 4 years, but have 30+ years of work experience, so I position myself as a business man who teaches.

Here in the US, I call the traditional students today Gen Y. The class I teach (Marketing) is much more advanced than the Marketing class I took 35 years ago. I expect the students to do cases written in a concise format, learn the basic concepts on thier own, as I focus lectures on application and critical thinking. Conclusion, after taking my class the students are much more advanced in basic business concepts and marketing, then when I took the class.

I think that part of the problem is that the older generations expect the young people to have knowledge based on the older standards. For example, the local newspaper ran an article stating that less than 35% of the college graduates could reconcile a check book. This is a perfect example of the "old" standard, as todays student no longer has the need for this activity, and if they do reconcilation, they will use a computer program and not do it by hand. If we judged the older people on the standards that Gen Y has, the older people would certainly also score poorly. Thus the evaluation result is a function of the years separation between the evaluator and the evaluatee.

I consider today's student to be much more advanced in writing skills, critical thinking, application and world knowledge than 35 years ago. While I get my new information from the newpaper, Gen Y gets thier information from the internet. Gen Y has become much more savy about evaluating the quality and accuracy of the information than the older people. Gen Y is also much more technology savy than older people.

So....my question is: Are the basics what older people consider to be important? or are they really necessary to function effectively in the job. Why manually add a list of numbers when Excel is both faster and more accurate?

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04-07.-2008, 03:43 AM	#29
TheDarkLord Registered User Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 3,840	Re: College is just too expensive nowadays! When I did my schooling, my parents kept telling me about how the syllabus had gotten more advanced compared to when they did their schooling. That said, my undergrad professors tell me that the syllabus keeps getting watered down each year. In any profession, the tools used to do the tasks evolve with time. There are some education standards that grill down the underlying concept at the expense of not teaching the tools properly, while other education systems do it the other way around. I personally would prefer the first approach since the tools are easier to learn to use compared to learning the underlying concept.

04-07.-2008, 05:05 AM

#30

Pendejo

Registered User

Join Date: Apr 2006

Posts: 508

Re: College is just too expensive nowadays!

Quote:

Originally Posted by buckybux

I don't think literacy is era-dependent. Obviously there are always going to be smart kids out there, but I maintain that the average college grad in the U.S. is barely literate. I would suggest an experiment: have your marketing students write a business letter, in class, about some sort of proposed business venture, and see how many of them you would be willing to send out to clients.

Your defense of college grads not being able to reconcile a checking account is telling. The reason they cannot do this task comes down to two possibilities. Either their basic math skills are faulty (even using a calculator), or they don't understand the concept of check reconciliation. Is either defensible in a college grad?

Finally, I don't think being "Internet savvy," a badge pinned so proudly on the younger generations, is worth a bag of manure when it comes to being educated. First of all, I've taken individuals who had never touched a computer before and made them Internet savvy in a couple of hours. Second, all the Internet does is provide an additional and very convenient source for data and information (and much of it is misinformation). Somebody who knows how to find books in a library using the Dewey Decimal System is not necessarily well-read or educated. Neither is someone who knows how to Google.

Moreover, information is just raw material. It's next to useless without the intelligence, logic, and critical thinking skills necessary to make something useful out of it.

You also claim that today's younger folks have more "world knowledge" than older generations. Are you kidding? Please check this out:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/0...test/index.html

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