Comments on: A Higher Education Bubble?

By: WorldWideBlog » Higher Education Bubble versus the Budget

WorldWideBlog » Higher Education Bubble versus the Budget — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:37:35 +0000

[...] universities pretty hard, leading to many questioning whether or not we’re in a kind of higher education bubble. The fact of the matter is not that a degree is being overvalued, but that large amounts of funding [...]

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:24:41 +0000

Carl, I like your comment about the degreed yahoos you’ve interviewed. Multi-degreed ninnies irritate me no end, and I applaud interviewers and employers who resist rigid degree requirements in favor of judging whether a job candidate has anything on the ball.

There has long been a cult of ‘higher education’ as a ‘way to get ahead’ in the US, and so many fall into lock-step simply because . . . well, because that’s the way it is.

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:16:47 +0000

“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” You bet.

No, I did not spend years in graduate school only to drift away embittered, having stopped short of the ‘terminal degree’. I say “you bet” because my bullshit detector remains in good working order, and my suspicions about the graduate-school racket date back to the wayback days.

Undergraduate/college education? Even that amounts to little more than a holding tank for an awful lot of people.

Oh, man. Don’t get me started.

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:11:27 +0000

I’ve been wondering this myself lately. Maybe this is more of a critique on the educational system, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been interviewing job candidates for a job that’s been open for over a month now. I can’t tell you how many masters degreed yahoos I’ve had to outright reject because they couldn’t answer basic questions.

But on another note, I’ve been seeing quite a few ads for local vocational schools recently and have to agree. I can’t help but wish that I hadn’t poopooed the idea oh so many years ago. Looking back, I know there would’ve been many things I would’ve wanted to take in high school, but vocational options were never presented, it was always Honors this, AP that.

By: Coop

Coop — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:45:07 +0000

Thanks for posting this, Andrew. As a person who had a career in public education, it has been one of my peeves for a long time that “we” (the educators) are supposed to prepare every 18-year-old for college even though the very idea is ludicrous. There aren’t enough jobs for that many college graduates; there are many jobs which require vocational training and not a degree; and most 18-year-olds aren’t interested in what a college education ought to mean.