One thing college does do is to keep 25 million students off the unemployment rolls.
That’s according to Bill Gross, co-CEO of PIMCO Bond Funds, on his most recent newsletter: School Daze, School Daze Good Old Golden Rule Days
Gross has jumped on the’ college is worthless’ bandwagon.
He says:
A mind is a precious thing to waste, so why are millions of America’s students wasting theirs by going to college?
- All of us who have been there know an undergraduate education is primarily a four year vacation interrupted by periodic bouts of cramming or Google plagiarizing,
- It used to serve a purpose. It weeded out underachievers and proved at a minimum that you could score on an SAT test. Now, it proves that your parents had enough money to hire SAT tutors to increase your score by 500 points.
Now, however, a growing number of skeptics wonder whether it’s worth the time or the cost.
College now is stultifying and outdated – overpriced and mismanaged – with very little value created.
Fact: College tuition is now 4 times as expensive relative to other goods and services as it was in 1985.
Fact: The average college graduate now leaves school with $24,000 of debt and total student loans now exceed this nation’s credit card debt at $1.0 trillion.
Subjective explanation: Universities are run for the benefit of the adult establishment, both politically and financially, not students.
Conclusion: Students, however, can no longer assume that a four year degree will be the golden ticket to a good job in a global economy that cares little for their social networking skills and more about what their labor is worth on the global marketplace. Our penchant for focusing on liberal arts and high tech value-added jobs should be modified and redirected.
Solution: Focus on retraining existing unemployed workers and redirecting our future students. Instead of liberal arts, focus on technical education, technical institutes and polytechnics as well as apprenticeship programs.
Allow people with good technical skills but limited college education to earn a decent living.
* * * * *
Ken’s Take: I’ve been doing mucho reading on the subject this summer. None of it is very encouraging, The education system is a huge national issue. More to come.
Your thoughts?
* * * * *
Thanks to Tags for feeding this lead
The Homa Files 