As far as signalling value received, those who attend and flunk out do get to check the box which says “some college”, which is something.

If we actually believed that people were learning useful and important things while in college, then the experience would be worthwhile in itself, degree or no degree. You don’t automatically forget your class in Plato just because you didn’t get a degree, nor do you automatically forget what you learned about a practical skill such as accounting or computer programming.

But, of course, college in America today is increasingly about screening and certification, not about education. To a substantial extent, it is a toll gate which requires payment to the class of professors and administrators in exchange for the opportunity to pursue income and status.

Sad.

I can do you one better, in a recent course I completed at college, the 2nd exam dealt with basic symbolic logic, base number conversions, and basic statistics (mean, variance, std deviation)…these are concepts I learned in middle and high school, I got a 93/100 on the exam, the class average was 69.7, and at the end 5 students managed to fail the class outright (2 other students dropped or withdrew). The student class population was approximately 85% of students under the age of 25, only 3 or 4 of us were over 25, and from what I saw, we did much better than the rest of the students.

No calculators were permitted on any of the exams, but the professor covered the material quite well in class, and had lecture notes online for use in study and exam preparation (of course, wikipedia and google helps as study aids also).

It’s pathetic to see students admitted to college who have no mastery of algebra/geometry/basic statistics along with a working knowledge of biology, chemistry, or physics, and excellent writing skills (including composition and literature). It’s amazing how far our educational system has declined in the 30 years since I was enrolled in 9th grade.

My mother told me that during the great depression, one need a college degree to be a sales “girl” at Woolworth’s. When there are more applicants than jobs, employers can be overly choosey.

When I worked for Hughes Aircraft Company, some non-technical administrative jobs required a college degree–in anything. I argued that if they didn’t care what the degree was, the requirement was not real. The counter-argument I got was that the degree showed the applicant had the perseverance to go thru four years of useless study to raise his future earning potential.

As long as we have this kind of thinking, it makes sense for any individual to try for a degree. Of course, if everyone had them, some other spurious requirement would need to be invented.

The root problem is this: Our culture assumes that almost every able male should spend roughly 40 hours/week, 50 weeks/year, 45 years/lifetime at work for which he gets a formal salary. This is no longer the way society gets useful work done but an end in itself. Until we restructure our economy so advancing technology gives us more leisure instead of “not enough work to go around” we will have many pathological side effects of too many people chasing too few jobs.

Last week I gave a test in my algebra class. More than one student thought that 4.9+5.2=9.11

Adding decimals is *not* something I’m supposed to teach in an algebra class. This calculation was part of a larger problem involving inequalities.

And I have many similar examples–sadly, from that same test.