Who's Missing from America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates
Most jobs don't require higher education.Most jobs that do require higher education don't actually make any use of the higher education.Are people who didn't follow the author up the ivory tower all failures who just fell through the cracks? What if some people are perfectly happy working in HVAC? These articles are always so condescending. The position that all people should by default go to college and that people who don't are lesser-than and fell through the cracks, is incredibly condescending and ignorant.After interviewing and working with hundreds of people, I can't even tell the difference between people who have a degree and people who don't. I'm often surprised when I look. It definitely seems like a lot of graduates don't actually learn or retain much of anything, or the curriculum isn't applicable to anything after they graduate and quickly atrophies away.I don't think colleges are about learning or skills anymore; they're a place where you pay an ever-growing amount of money to compete for a higher position in the social hierarchy, or to obtain government-mandated paper credentials for a specialized position you want.A lot of the students I've talked to are contemptuous of the entire process, and have no moral qualms whatsoever with cheating and cramming their way through it. They see it as a series of pointless hoops they're being made to jump through. People who really want to learn or develop a skill seem to do it much more effectively elsewhere, and this seems to even be true of actively enrolled college students themselves.I don't see college as something we need more of. It's an inefficiency in our system left over from a time when technical limitations gave colleges a monopoly on knowledge. We shouldn't be trying to expand its reach, we should be trying to replace it entirely with something less costly and more accessible.The biggest hurdle are the incumbents who've already bought their status, and unfortunately they do also happen to have most of the power, so their position is safe for now. But I think people are finally starting to see through these clothes.