Good education for the guy. Clearly he was incapable of doing any research and instead sticking to stereotypes. If she gets through the program (not easy) she'll probably be doing better than her dad. After her enlistment is up she'll have more jobs thrown at her than she'll know what to do with.
I think the key issue is what do you want to do with your life and where you want to go. If you want to be a high school social studies teacher, then you are going to need a some sort of liberal arts degree - political science, history, etc. If you want to become a doctor you will need to an undergrad degree in some sort of life sciences like biology. If you want to become a plumber or an auto mechanic you will need vocational training. There is no 'one size fits all' approach to higher education. I think the problem is, and it has been mentioned in this thread, is that vocational education has been seriously undervalued in the United States. Plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and more are very much needed and are honorable and satisfying career choices.
I do not think it will be too long before plumbers, electricians, mechanics and other similar professions will be able charge like the mechanic in the joke because people who know how to make the things run are disappearing rapidly.
Thanks some people get it. What are there six airlines in the country that make the college degree a show stopper. Careers at Spirit, SWA, Atlas, NJ, and I know few guys at UAL, AAL, and DAL without degrees.
Further fuel from the WJS on how college is harming the country's kids.
A new report released by Harvard Wednesday states in some of the strongest terms yet that such a ?college for all? emphasis may actually harm many American students ? keeping them from having a smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood and a viable career.
?The American system for preparing young people to lead productive and prosperous lives as adults is clearly badly broken,? concludes the report, ?Pathways to Prosperity?
?It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don?t get college degrees], but we?re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,? says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard?s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students ? who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that?s more entwined with the workplace ? to drop out, he adds. ?If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that?s not very persuasive.?
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a ?qualification? that has real currency in the labor market..
In the US, vocational education has a bad rap, Schwartz acknowledges ? and often for good reason, given the poor quality and its traditional role as a dumping ground for poorer students and students of color. And he?s not advocating the sort of tracked systems that Germany and Switzerland have, in which poorly performing students are often pushed into vocational tracks as early as middle school.
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A Georgetown University study projected 14 million job openings between 2008 and 2018 in the ?middle-skill occupations,? such as electricians and paralegals, in which workers need an associate?s degree or occupational certificate.
The college-for-all rhetoric should be broadened, the Harvard report concludes, to become ?post-high-school credential for all.?
But the report also says that will take a massive overhaul to a system that, right now, doesn?t do a good job showing kids what the link is between their learning and the jobs to which they aspire.
Employers should be more active in the learning process ? whether through internships, visits with students, or brief ?try out? experiences ? and students need more opportunities to master the kind of ?soft skills? likely to help them in the workplace, perhaps through team projects, says Ronald Ferguson, another of the report?s authors and a co-chairman of Harvard?s Pathways to Prosperity Initiative.
?If we persist with the illusion that everyone is going to college, then we?re cheating those kids who aren?t going,? Professor Ferguson says. ?A majority of the workforce does not have a college degree, and a majority of the things those people do are going to continue not requiring a college degree.?
We must live on a different planet, you and I.
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