Thanks to liberals, everything requires a college degree (fast food, Mexicans, illegal)
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So from I can gather the OP is either:
A) too dumb to recognize the irony of having that user name and then creating this thread;
B) not really a Virginia Tech fan? or;
C) has a degree, but gives a big ********* to others and blames it on "libs"
This revelation does not surprise me. It has been going on for some time. With a lot of manufacturing jobs gone and a lot of college-educated and non college-educated people in the prospective work force employers are using education as a "weed-out". My wife, some 10 or more years ago, applied for a job at a hospital as an "educator" which was requiring an associate's degree in early childhood education. Come to find out the position was not an "educator" but just in a child day care assistant position. And the salary was barely above minimum wage. She was also "classified" out of another position at a 4-year college, in which she was performing fine, when the college reclassified the job for someone with a 4-year degree. It was as an administrative assistant position in which she had experience and education.
That's terrible @ the bold. Guess you speaking about yourself with the AA part. AA doesn't force anyone to do anything. People apply to the schools on their own. It's up to them to succeed.
Who is talking about alumni associations? I'm speaking about alumni privilege or rather legacy privileges. It affects over 1/4 of the admissions many schools.
I don't know what's so terrible about it. I could be off a little on my numbers. But it's somewhere around 20%.
Affirmative Action does force people to people to do things. That's is it's purpose. To force schools and businesses ti educate/hire certain groups of people or face consequences.
Misunderstood what you meant by alumni. But you can't outlaw prvilege. And accepting legacy students is obviously a good idea or schools wouldn't do it. I see no reason not to do it. Especially for private colleges.
No, the left is on the side of giving everyone who wants to go to college the opportunity to go.
Exactly. The very fact that our right wing friends still refuse to acknowledge this tells me they are deliberately attempting to misunderstand because it has been explained to them for decades.
Oh I dunno about that. If I was in high school today I think instead of college I would be looking at a trade like welding. Good pay and high demand. That four year degree in PolySci isn't going to get you very far.
I think that every discussion that I've read on C-D treats a college education as being a commodity whose value is based purely on profitable monetary return, believe it or not, there are other intrinsic rewards that are equally valid criteria that justify the cost.
Certainly from a monetary view point it may be more cost effective to be a welder than to be a classical cellist but not to a young person whose heart and soul is devoted to being a classical cellist whose life spent welding can be as inversely debilitating and depressing as a life as a welder can be monetarily rewarding.
As a parents who is currently baring the burden of a college education it was always our intent to provide whatever financial resources that would be required for our child to pursue whatever occupational choice that they desired regardless of the potential monetary return on that investment. If there is a liberal sin with regards to higher education, then the sin is to help children pursue their dreams and to help them as best as we can to provide them with the foundation and tools for making their dreams reality. Which brings me to the liberal sin of steering children towards a college education.
Historically, the sin of secondary education was to kill the dreams of students particularly those students of color or from working class backgrounds, to steer them into the "practical" professions without regards to the child's desires or untapped potential. The "liberal" sin, is to grant every student the opportunity to pursue where their hearts and minds direct them.
Our society needs great writers, artist, musicians, anthropologist, sociologist, and yes political scientist and those vocations should not be determined by what those occupations pay, but what they contribute to a vibrant society. A society of worker bees might be some pragmatist's vision for society but it isn't mine. Nor is it my vision that those writers, artist, musicians, anthropologist, sociologist, and political scientist should only arise from the homes of upper income families. So if it is a sin to believe that all of these vocations are important to a society and that they should be filled with people from across the breath of that society so be it. I am guilty.
But by the same token, I recognize that there are children who dream of being auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians, IT technicians, welders, iron workers, and hell even garbage men, and they too should be granted every opportunity to pursue their occupational dreams.
The point is that education, occupational directions should not, cannot be viewed as a zero sum game which is how these discussions are treated. Life is far more complexed and nuanced than the comments on these threads acknowledge and that is a sin as well.
Disclaimer: The Kid'sâ„¢ dream was to find a way to work in international relations, so she majored in policial science and Spanish, with a minor in sociology, that gave her a foundation to win an appointment with the Peace Corps which she will then leverage into an MBA so that she can find work with an non-governmental development agency in 5 years. The Peace Corps reduces here college debt, and give here the experience base for her ultimate goal. Will she ever make what a good welder makes, who knows but she won't look back on her life and feel that it was wasted doing something that she never wanted to do in the first place and for that, no price would have been too high.
You know I did a similar thing. I took my last three months of High School on a correspondence course so I could work with my Uncle in Electrical contracting. I did finish and got a diploma. I only got my AA after I semi retired. I can remember going into my Attorneys office after a car accident I had, and he had to ask how much did you make on your last job you did. I told him it was about 4000 dollars for a weeks work. He looked up at me and said, thats a lot of money. Yep. And I saved a lot more. LOL Its why me and the wife can weather this recession like we have. Not living the high life but pay the bills and I don't work. So a college education is not something that is as useful as it was say in 1945
Yeah, I did ultimately get my GED, and then I petitioned the school board of the district I'd been in for a diploma based on my stratospheric test scores and the fact I had a GED, and so I do have a high school diploma.
The big thing to me is that a college education is considered by many as the gateway into a successful career and life, and that's simply not the case - it's one thing to go to Harvard law or the UW School of Medicine, it's another to go to Calstate Long Beach for communications or something like that. You'll pay for, or more likely and accurately, take out loans for four years of academic and living expenses to get a degree that most people don't even know the purpose of and... seriously, why even bother getting a degree like that? Just spend four years working your way up to shift manager at a retail chain; that's ultimately what you'd end up doing with your degree anyways, you just won't have $100k in debt over you, and in the meantime, your overall QOL will be about the same making hourly wages as it would be if you were living off of quarterly student loan dispersements and a few bucks here and there from mom and dad.
The experience I've had is that many of my friends from my teens and into my mid 20's who were doggedly pursuing their academic lives are just now finally picking up jobs with salaries in the $40k range in their late 20's/early 30's, which is what I was pulling in my early 20's; most of my friends who don't have degrees and stayed the retail or office route are now making about $40k as managers. The recurring thing I always heard was that I was "going to hit a ceiling," which I haven't yet, and I likely won't in the line of work I'm in. The recurring thing I reminded them was that they were taking out debt that was going to take many years to pay down and that a $600/mo loan payment is a $7200/yr hit on your salary that will follow you for years. If you needed that degree to get into a field where you'd be making $70, 80, 90, 100k/year or more and there's no way you would have been able to get into it otherwise, then it's a worthwhile debt. But, if it was a segue into a job where you make $40k/yr, then you're now effectively looking at a $32,800/year income.
The big thing to me is that a college education is considered by many as the gateway into a successful career and life, and that's simply not the case - it's one thing to go to Harvard law or the UW School of Medicine, it's another to go to Calstate Long Beach for communications or something like that.
Too bad your "stratospheric" test scores haven't helped your analytical skills.
First do you know that every corporation, organization, local, state and federal government and their agencies have communications departments staffed by people who have degrees in communications? Or, the fact that every public relations company on the planet is owned or operated by individuals with degrees in communications/marketing and that NOTHING is more ubiquitous in American life than some communications person communicating somebodies spin to the media and the general public every waking moment of the day?
Do you recognize that a degree, even a lowly degree (in your estimation) in communications will cost a student in four years what one year at Harvard would cost? That regardless of degree the Cal State system is a whole lot of bang for the buck even before calculating life time earnings over those with a high school diploma much less a GED?
Now I know that you want to feel good about earning your GED and you should, but any self-esteem that you think you might earn by denigrating students who had demonstrated an ability to succeed through high school and four years of college is nothing more than false bravado. If your scores are as stratospheric as you claim, then I would suggest that you have so needlessly squandered that gift by your demonstration of a lack of discipline to stick to what should have been a very easy high school curriculum.
I guess it is true that you learn something everyday. All this time I thought Clinton was a democrat, and now I learn he was a greedy right winger republican.
"When President Bill Clinton signed off on the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs in 1993, otherwise known as NAFTA/GATT, he quite literally slashed the economic throat of the United States. We've been hemorrhaging jobs to foreign nations like Communist China ever since."
That hemorrhage began in the mid 60's for some indutries like steel followed by mostother manufacturing based industries. Who in the global marketplace is going to pay a premium for U.S. manufactured goods when the same goods can be acquired elsewhere for substantially less?
Does anyone think the global market gives a rat about the living wage in the U.S.?
Romney took a huge hit in the campaign because Bain Capital has a history of acquiring companies on the brink of failure on the cheap and moving in to align those companies with the global marketplace, including in some cases, outsourcing some aspects to the lowest cost producers. Either way, business failure or outsourcing, U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared.
The good times rolled for a blip in time when the U.S. found itself without global competition, after WW2.
I'm not disparaging the value of an education for someone with a solid goal, but college has indeed, to a large degree, become an extention of high school where young people who have no idea what they want to do with their lives can kick the can down the road a few more years. People in that situation need to figure out what they really want to do and how realistic it is before they take on a debt that may follow them for the rest of their life.
A lack of a dregree certainly did not hurt Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, innovators and entrepeneurs.
Most folk, with or without a degree are never going to have the sucess they have had, come what may.
The top IT departments (cutting edge) hire on recommendation from their employees and don't even read resumes much less care about degrees. No recommendation? Well your degree means exactly dck, your only way in is to prove yourself with work you have done (no, following along with teacher does not cut it as work you have done). I was first hired as a computer programmer without a bachelors, any work experience, or even a formal resume by providing the source code to video games I had created in high school. That is all it takes in IT, ability to do the job, and its easy enough to prove without a degree.
Hot field IT is sometimes less intersted in degrees than the mainstream world where most of the jobs are. Those who can show the ability often have an edge in hot field IT
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