Posts tagged with ‘college degrees’
The Degree in Three
A New York Times Op-Ed arguing that the four-year degree is a wasteful relic that ought to be condensed to three years. Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog talked about it, too.
edustir being cutting-edge had this discussion back in September.
I still think this is a good idea on balance, but doing it citing the rising costs of higher education are a bad catalyst for this type of change. There’s no talk of the possibility of eroding educational quality or the fact that according to the National Center for Education Statistics 69% of college students earned their bachelor’s degree in less than five years. I guess I wonder how that number would change if we shortened the route to the degree? Would it automatically decrease over time? One would think, but I think it opens up more questions than it answers.
The fallacy of the worthless degree
The New York Times has a story on students who attend trade schools to give themselves a boost on a possible career, only to find themselves in a worst spot than they started due to lack of opportunities and now saddled with debt from their practical education.
None of this is really new, nor is it a surprise and it’s not likely to change anytime in the near future. One of the readers selection comments had other ideas though:
Agreed, it can be a rip-off. But, er…how about those expensive university degrees in Feminism Studies that cost upward of $100,000 and more? How about all those Journalism degrees awarded to students years ago who still haven’t paid off their loans because delivering mail is not such a high-paying job? You guys at the Times need to dig a little further and explain exactly what a young person does after he gets that Environmental Studies degree. I imagine that impoverishing yourself by going to a regular university is far more devastating than doing the same with a trade school.
It’s going to be increasingly important as time goes on to use all of the tools at our disposal to educate people on what colleges and universities — specifically the non-profit ones — are actually selling.
