This whole "good college" obsession

So I was stuck monitoring focus groups about education. The audience was affluent parents and the parents started talking about all the money they are shelling for extracurriculars and private tutoring, so they can "get an edge". Thank god I wasn't moderating or else I would have asked them, "Is it because these schools offer the best education in the world or is it because you just want that bumper sticker. and something to brag about to your friends."

correction, meant to say "you THINK these schools offer the best education in the world." I personally think you can get as good an education at many state schools.

It's the bragging rights. I work at the big school that starts with a capital "h" and the classes here are especially designed to let the students pass. Getting IN is the hard part... I don't even know why they make students bother to hang around for four years, They should just give them a bachelor's degree for passing the admission requirements. Ah, but then I wouldn't have the kind of job where I can sleep in the library for hours at a time!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"I have learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but pissing everyone off is easy and fun as hell"

:eatu

The skinny of it, is that colleges have dumbed down, lowered standards, and made exceptions just to make everything easier on the whiney-assed pansies in college today. Most of the little snot asses that my company hire have dual majors. Not because they are JUST SOOOO SMART but because it's easier than ever to pass courses nowadays. It's a fucking joke anymore.

With nearly every large university, it is the graduate and research programs that earn the prestige and not the undergraduate programs. My own alma mater, Johns Hopkins, has excellent graduate, research and health sciences programs but IMHO the undergrad program was unexceptional. There are some good programs, but by and large undergrad education is undergrad education in most entry to middle level courses. Even the advanced level undergrad courses really are not that great.

There are some good liberal arts colleges out there, but the Ivy League institutions are all about the graduate programs and not the undergrad part.

My sweetie tells me that his company has hired a few people with Ph.D.s to do software engineering.

Without exception, they were utter crap. If you spend too much time taking orders and honing your skills for passing college courses, it seems you don't actually learn how to operate independently in the real world. These people had impressive amounts of memorized knowledge, and almost no capacity to do anything novel with it. They were the most helpless programmers he has ever met. They could not adapt to new situations or work on their own withou a lot of hand-holding.

By contrast, some of the best programmers at his company don't have a degree at all! They were independently motivated to work on software projects of their own and thus taught themselves how to find information and handle adversity.

College is truly a waste of money unless you can be sure it's going to teach you what you need to know.

My company is big on hiring grads from a certain university in this state because they get money from Uncle Sam as part of some type of program.

Before this shit started, they used to get good, seasoned, experienced programmers, developers and analysts from local sources. Now they hire these kids just because they have a degree whether or not they can do the job.

My old job was loaded with kids fresh out of Ivy League colleges and they usually put them in charge of major research projects. They handle all aspects of field work and data collection with little to no supervision from "senior" execs (and these senior people are only 27 or 28 years old and they themselves are fresh out of school).

Problem is that these kids don't realize that it's not OK for your "representative" general population survey to be 75% female and 90% white. Or that a 15 point change in a tracking study is not normal.

I read a newspaper story a couple years back about how some parents hired tutors to help their high school kyds with their studies so that they would eventually get into that “good college.” But here was the thing. Private tutors here were “too expensive” so the parunts had hired tutors based in India who would tutor the kyds over the phone and Web. I found the situation a bit ironic with all the talk of how a lot of jobs, including some sophisticated ones, have been outsourced to India.

Yeah, everything w/ modern breeders is amped up times 10. I'm really sick of hearing about it too.

I even told my one friend to stop obsessing about it, let his girl somewhere local. I don't want her to be at a disadvantage but most all my female class mates became SAHMs 5 years after graduation.

Then, after law school the married women starting popping them out immediately and certainly didn't throw themselves into their new work.

Then, he sees how all of the female attys drop out or start getting real lazy after sprogging,

so, I was like, since this happens to a large percentage of women, why bother? I know I sound like a CF chauvansist, but look at the reality.

So, I told him to stop worrying about money and her grades to get in to the best school possible. Just send her the cheapest college here in Chi-town and be done. He'll see. Not everyone can be like his 2 CF female friends.

watch...she'll end up curing cancer and I'll have to eat my words.

but, I'm the only 30-40 married woman I know from HS, college, grad school who works a FT job anymore.

theres been reports that in the uk female doctors, and other needed people, after training for years, go off and have children.. this is a fact of life.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/06/27/do2702.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/06/27/ixopinion.html


More than half of all students taking up scarce places at medical school are women - yet, after 10 years, 60 per cent of them have given up, leaving a huge hole in the NHS. The same goes for teaching.

*********************************************************************************************************************************
I just post the stories, for interest.. for everyone

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene ii

Voltaire said: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

H.L.Mencken wrote:"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

MOST of today's parents are pathetic. They allow their kids to do whatever the hell they please with NO discipline and spoil them so the kids "have it better than they did." They push the kids to BE THE BEST in the form of lessons, tutors, etc.

These types of parents are wanna-bes living vicariously through their kids. Can you IMAGINE the contempt and disappointment when Shitford or Cunleigh isn't that successful doctor, high powered attorney or master basket weaver said parent was hoping they'd be?

Meh.

College is just for babysitting spoiled brats fresh out of high school.

I had the pleasure *cough* of working for a student loan company last summer, and saw the effects of people trying to get that degree from the "right" school. Most of these young adults were swimming in massive amounts of debt (often $80,000-$100,000) in private loans *eek!*, sometimes just after a Bachelor's degree. The only people who were fine with that debt were the doctors and lawyers, obviously because of their pay. I think these parents and their kids only care about having a certain school name on a resume, and don't think about the consequences of taking out massive amounts of private loans, which have terribly high interest rates. I had to talk on the phone with people in my age group (mid-20s) who didn't understand the concept of capitalized interest, or the fact that when you borrow money from a company, um, you have to repay said company. They'd be like: "But wait, I didn't borrow that amount of money", me: "Yes, that amount is the interest that has been added over the past couple of years", kidult: "Uh, can you talk to my dad?"

I think college is what you put into it; it doesn't matter whether it's Princeton or a small community college. Many students just see it as an opportunity to party, waste time, and learn nothing. But then there's a good amount who use what the school has to offer, such as talking to their professors, taking advantage of the library, going to campus-sponsored lectures, concerts, seminars, multicultural events, etc.

I'm attending a state university right now for my master's degree. The tuition is quite reasonable, and this school has great resources: excellent faculty, a huge, nationally-recognized library, tons of cultural events that are free or cheap for students, and a multitude of classes/degrees from which to choose. I'm grateful for the fact that my debt won't be too bad when I graduate.

Banshee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Meh.
>
> College is just for babysitting spoiled brats
> fresh out of high school.

Hehe...and that undergrad degree is only good for showing employers you can do busywork.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

KidFreeLuvnLife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> These types of parents are wanna-bes living
> vicariously through their kids. Can you IMAGINE
> the contempt and disappointment when Shitford or
> Cunleigh isn't that successful doctor, high
> powered attorney or master basket weaver said
> parent was hoping they'd be?

Yeah, it's bloody annoying. My mom is one of these people - she pretty much coerced me into college and, just to spite her, I picked a college 300 miles away. But it's definitely a great school, so I can't complain about the cost of my education.

Since I've started college, all I've been hearing from my mother is how I need to get my credentials to teach as a fall-back job (because I'm getting a bachelor's degree) and how I need to get a master's in something because "it's only six more years of school". The last fucking thing I'd want to do with a four-year art education is teach; it's not worth it to have a class full of fucking teen brats and have one good art student every other year. And I especially do not want to teach when we live in a world where the kid's word is law and the teacher is at fault (rather than being vice versa like it was when I was a kid).

My mother wants me to teach so badly, I think, because she wanted to get her teaching degree...but, when she was college-aged, there was no such things as student loans or financial aid, so she never went to college and has been stuck at the same shitty job for 30 years. So, she's trying to live vicariously through me. And she always makes a big fucking deal out of things when I do something good - when I get on the Dean's List, she calls the newspaper to have them publish it under the 'college crowd' section, which is where local students who are in college have their academic achievements published. And although my mother can't be arsed to remember my major, she always remembers to include in the announcement that "Cambion is the daughter of Cambion'sMom".

And shit, she told every one of our relatives at my grandmother's viewing that I got my work published - she was just bloody beaming. Yeah, I'm proud of that work, but I wasn't going to brag about it at a funeral service. Geez.

So, to clarify...it does suck when a parent views their kid as an extension of themselves rather than an individual, separate person. I love my mom, but it irritates me that she always wants me to be more than what I want to be. Shit, she tried to discourage me from honing my art skills when I was younger because "drawing don't pay the bills". Then the local high school art instructor gave her an earful and explained that, yes, drawing can pay the bills. And she shut up about it right quick after that.

______________________________________

I see the entitled attitude a lot with some of my classmates, who get all pissy when they can't turn in their assignments two weeks late and still get full credit. One instructor (whom I always get class with because he's awesome) has caught a lot of shit because he accepts no late work under any circumstances, and students think it's unfaaaaaaair because they were up late doing coke and chugging Bacardi the night before and were just too wasted to do their work. But I know he enforces this rule because an employer will give a person the boot if they finish something late, and he just wants to prepare people a little more for the real world. But hey, if these whiny suckholes are my competition, I'm not concerned about job opportunities.

It scares me when places like medical schools and law schools lower their standards - I don't want someone with a double-digit IQ being able to graduate with a Ph.D. in neurology. I wish no colleges would lower their standards, but especially not places where people get certified to hold people's lives and finances in their hands.