Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Waiting for Superman

The AFT article Bostonian links to is a good one. Thought-provoking, and a needed perspective, IMO.

My dad has an A&P license, no degree, and almost 20 years experience with certain airframes when he left the Army in the mid 70s. He was offered a top job at a major maintenance facility making 60K. That same position today pays almost 200K.

Here is what the average mechanic with an A&P license makes today without my dad's level of experience.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=Airframe_%26_Powerplant_%28A%26P%29_License/Salary

And with an A&P license, you can work on a lot of things, not just aircraft.

The same goes for people with a two year Cisco certificate from a local college. A number of high schools offer certification programs, too. These are just two examples. LPN and Hygenist programs are other options.

These two routes are more appropriate for kids with ACTS in the low 20s or below than sending them to college.

The dividing line between those who go to college and those who should not can be found in the first year chemistry/latin/physics/geometry classes in high school or the last year of middle school.

So, backing up. In today's dollars. A kid goes into the military today, gets his A&P working on helos, gets out after 20 years at age 38 with a 50K a year retirement. He then goes into maintenance making 80K a year. At age 40 he is making 130K a year in today's money and has no degree. That is more than most degreed IT salaries.

Another way to look at it - I have three guys in their mid 20s with cisco certs. No degree. They all make mid 50s. Compared to the poor souls who took out loans for masters, who is ahead? All three own homes and have new cars. Again, who is better off?

You do not need a degree to be a contributing member of society nor do you need a degree to be a highly productive employee.

The military was a good way to go, as long as you aren't on the front lines and get killed before that 50K retirement and 80K job after.

My father was WW2 vet and all those guys got free college degrees. I also know someone who medical school, care of the US Army. Spent his six years with them and left.

There are ways with the military but there is that risk of life...
Ren

Not reading the abstract isn't so much a teacher trick as a time management trick when you have something more important to do. It's also called "avoiding procrastination" or "prioritization". So, Val, can we safely assume you read the entire Pew Report instead of skimming it as I did?

These certifications we are talking about as an alternative to college are not "college"? I do believe they would be included in the Pew report as "some college". Perhaps I misunderstand.

There are always specialties that are more in demand than others. A good ultrasound tech can make $80K with an associate degree, but that doesn't mean that everybody with a two-degree is going to make $80K. They will, on average, make more than a high-school graduate, but are less likely to be satisfied with their jobs. Perhaps this is because, like me, they have unfulfilled aspirations.

You still haven't answered my question. Here it is again:

What do you think of all the information that's been presented on this thread showing some very negative effects of pushing everyone to go to college?

I know a radiology tech. He's quite happy with his job. It's stable and it's much improved over his labor job.

The really good non M.D. job (if you can't be a radiation oncologist) to get these days is nurse antesthetist.

So, what aspirations didn't you fufill?

I'm going to randomly interject here on a related point.

You know, now that I think about it, part of the problem is with the colleges themselves. They have been massively bulking up on administrative staff to the detriment of professors.

What else are you going to do when massive amounts of money is pouring in from the federal government? Why, you hire more staff and protect your bureaucratic turf!

Another point is science/tech itself might be topping out. The entire post-WWII/Cold War massive science boom has pretty much picked all the low hanging fruit. We may be reaching peak cheap energy, which could render this entire debate somewhat moot.

Well, I've looked at the links and the studies provided earlier in this thread, and I'm not finding a bunch of solid information on the negative effects of encouraging people to go to college. Of course, the articles I've read--if they are the ones you are talking about--have been heavily interpreted, watered-down, and filtered for a mass audience.

If you're talking about the anecdotal evidence of a very specific and self-selected group of people on this board, I take that evidence and weigh it against the data of the Pew report, which found that 86% of people with college degrees thought it was a worthwhile investment. This is a board devoted to issues surrounding gifted students, who have historically not enjoyed their schooling experiences, found fault with their teachers, and been bored in class, whether it was general education or a gifted class. My classes have a handful of gifted students. Some of them, not all, are the ones who can recites the speech they got from their parents on the same topic.

The data I have for our school's community show that it is slightly better educated than the rest of the state. Just under 30% of adults have college degrees. More than a third have "some college", and just over 10% did not finish high school. Now, not everybody in the community has children or sends them to public school, so you keep that in mind as you interpret the data.

I do think that many young people in this country make uninformed choices about higher education and careers, and that many of them make irrational decisions even when given good information. For example, when I was in school, I thought that employers would be impressed by my education, and that a college degree in economics would help me land a position that required a college degree in economics.

However, I graduated into the beginning of a recession. Having come from a working class background, I did not really understand what white collar bosses were looking for and how to sell the skills that I did have. Since my professors had pretty much gone straight through to the PhD, there was not much advice they could give me on other paths, even if they thought that was their job instead of mine to figure that out (with assistance from the career services office, of course). My --now late--advisor was a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and his advice was for me to realize that I couldn't change much of anything.

It was not until I was in my 30s and had graduated again, into another recession, with yet more student loans, that an admiral's widow told me what I have found again and again in data. This includes US Census data which is available to everybody on the internet but you may have to graph it yourself. People in their twenties do not make much money, so there is not a big difference in income between the ones who have degrees, and the ones who do not.

I often found, in those years, that my bosses had not gone to college. Instead they had worked for the same company for a few years and been promoted. They had knowledge of the workings of the company that was more directly applicable than the philosophy, anthropology and economics classes I had taken.

Nor have I based my assumptions on a single, outdated, ten year old study. The Pew report and census data also show that "some college" is beneficial to income. And I have a couple of decades of my own post-college experience, as well as contact with a wide variety of friends from high school and college. This also inform my understanding of how education impacts income, quality of life, and standard of living. And how who goes to college is often determined by factors that have nothing to do with ability.

If you've spent $50,000+ dollars and four years of your life doing something, there's a fairly strong response to see it as worthwhile, even when it wasn't.

I don't think that article in American Educator was watered down --- but I read it all instead of skimming it. I found it to be rich in data that was well-supported with 60 references. I actually think that article should be required reading in high schools and middle schools.

I also didn't think that the information about student loan debt was watered down. If anything, it carried a big punch: people in this country carry one trillion dollars of non-escapable student loan debt (more required reading for MS and HS students). This statistic scares me.

Honestly, and this is just my opinion, my impression from your posts is that you're coming at this issue from an ideological standpoint and have no interest in even considering the other side of the college-for-everyone story. By your own admission, you only skimmed a well-researched article. You were dismissive about "anecdotal evidence" of people on this board, but your posts in defense of college-for-all center heavily around your own experiences, which have been generalized twice to apply to others.

I'll close with a quote from the paper in American Educator: