Salon.com: Search any news website’s archives and you’ll find dozens of articles about how post-secondary education in the United States is broken. There’s too much debt to be had from attaining a degree, and too little benefit. Conventional wisdom is right; college is a poor decision.
While pundits, parents and pupils can all see something is wrong with the system, nobody can agree on a solution. Of the many that have been proposed, the $10,000 degree has gained the most traction.
7 comments:
While some of what he says does conjure up images of our former president Bush saying to a group of mostly Hispanic teenagers "not everyone needs to go to college" there is pragmatic advice in it. In America it seems as if the culture says that going to college is the utmost you can do to widen your world view and gain experience, and setting out on your own with no degree in hand is frowned upon, yes i agree that more students need to not be students for a while a just be people in order to figure out what they want to do, but this is not a panacea either, and will not work for everyone.
While I am in agreement that the college payment system in the US is fundamentally flawed. However, making all college education the same price is definitely not the right solution. Educations are not products, and the more that a sticker price is mandated the less likely they are to be treated as more important then a product.
There is no doubt that college and university prices can be detrimental to a fresh graduate and that as a senior in high school, that might be hard to understand. I also understand that many kids go get these high priced degrees because there are many jobs that say you have to have it. It is good to know that there are people trying to fix this issue, but there are also many cases where even $10,000 is too much for a potential student. So how can you fix that? In school's now it is stressed that you have to go to college and I saw many go into community college just to drop out. So maybe shifting the idea of what education can do is better than making it necessary and almost normal for every one.
While there is truth in what this author says, this is just another opinion or possible solution to what society currently says. A $10,000 degree doesn't sound like the right solution either. Now, if degrees cost this much it'd be ok, but if it is a "discount" or "stripped-down" version, that doesn't seem worth it. Although, I could be totally wrong. Also, a gap year may be a partial solution, I know quite a few people who have no idea what they want to do.
Though I may realize that the system in place for college payment is ridiculous and often complain that I pay too much. I think that dropping college educations price down to a flat $10,000 is not doing what we need in order to make college more affordable. As nice as it may sound, the person paying full price is indubitably getting a better education than the person paying $10,000. Unfortunately, I am in the group of people who dislikes the expense but has no other solution to it. I hate to say it but for now this is all we have and though I feel bad that people may not be able to afford the same high priced education as I can but cutting down costs in the way that these representatives would like to is not the most beneficial right now.
I agree that the cost of college in the united states is fundamentally flawed, but I think this is a stupid plan. There are many reasons that college makes people successful later in life and in their career beyond just their studies and this program strips all of those out. Also, how helpful is the bare bones minimum degree really going to be? I think people in the modern world often look at college as college instead of which college. If you go to the right college, you can get a job in just about anything, and although its expensive, once you have that job, you can begin paying back the loans.
Nobody disagrees that the college education system in the US is in need of some serious reform. That being said, I am highly skeptical that the "$10,000 degree" proposal will help solve anything. Is a college degree now something that you purchase as if you were going to the store? What features do you include and what do you strip away? What is the differential in quality between a $10,000 degree and a more expensive degree from the same institution? How is any of this going to be standardized? This proposal begs many more questions than it answers. I simply fail to see how this idea will resolve anything that is broken with the current system.
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