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Sure, Blow Off That College Degree

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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”

Despite a clear message that college is important – and a pervasive desire among young students to attend college – only about 30 percent of Americans complete a bachelor’s degree by their mid-20s, with another 10 percent completing an associate’s degree by then. A massive effort in recent decades to increase those numbers has improved them only slightly.

“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.”

Whether students opt for college or not, they need a range of skills to be employable in the long term, so “college and career-ready skills are really no longer two separate tracks,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Wednesday in Washington at an event releasing the report, according to prepared remarks.

While not endorsing the particulars of the Harvard report, Secretary Duncan noted the importance of transforming career and technical programs, in which more than 15 million high school and postsecondary students are enrolled.

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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Much of the current education rhetoric emphasizes college over career training. President Obama has frequently stated his goal of having the US lead the world in college graduation rates by 2020. “To compete, higher education must be within the reach of every American,” he said in his recent State of the Union address.

But higher education doesn’t have to mean a traditional college degree, the report notes and the Obama administration acknowledges. Many of the growing career fields actually require credentials other than a bachelor’s or associate’s degree.

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.

The report points to several models in the US that could also be expanded to improve career and technical education. Career academies for high-school students are showing promise in places ranging from Pennsylvania to California. And Project Lead the Way, an engineering curriculum currently serving about 300,000 high-schoolers nationwide, culminates in team projects to solve an open-ended engineering problem.

“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.”

 
http://time.com/money/3921734/self-made-millionaires-traits/

In the book The Education of Millionaires: Everything You Won?t Learn in College About How to Be Successful, author Michael Ellsberg cites the fact that 80% of all millionaires have graduated from college.

Furthermore, Pew Research Center data from February 2014 shows that millennials aged 25 to 32 who have a bachelor?s degree or higher and are working full time earned a median of $45,500 per year. Comparatively, millennials of the same age range with only a high school diploma earn a median of $28,000 per year. Over a 40-year timespan, that?s a $700,000 difference, not factoring in potential wage increases, the ability to save, or possible growth from investments.
 
DCAA320, we fly the same kit. You spent 4 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to do exactly the same job I do, so I am in fact living proof that you are wrong. its not required! By the way, I received a flying scholarship from the Royal Air Force at 16 years old and was the youngest licensed pilot in Scotland at the time. So whilst you were out picking up chicks and doing beer bongs with your frat brothers I was flying, who's the idiot?

What do you have against chicks and beer bongs?

Wrong about what? I have never said one could not become a pilot without a degree. Speaking for myself, it surely helped me. In certain situations it surely would have helped some of the guys I have flown with.

The idiot comment was in response to you thinking it is OK that this captain couldn't use an IPAD in the performance of his duties.

Congrats on being the youngest, did you guys wear kilts in the cockpit?

EDI has great beer, whiskey and drunk chicks.
 
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Comparatively, millennials of the same age range with only a high school diploma earn a median of $28,000 per year.
Here is the problem with this quote, there is so much training that takes place between a HS grad and 4 yr degree grad. No one takes that into account. As stated before my brother-in -law auto mechanic with is own shop makes more money than you. The people coming out of the military with skills that lead to high paying jobs, skilled trades in apprentice programs and two years certificate programs all lead to jobs well in excess of the average college grad pay of $47K.
 

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