Skip to main content
Post a Comment

Is College Worth It?

A response to a post in a long line of articles regarding the value college:
 
For economic reasons, an undergraduate is worth it because you can't get a master's degree otherwise.  With an increasing number of people with 4 year degrees, and the growing divide between degreed and non-degreed, as well as the increased risk of off-shoring, a young person today needs to be more qualified than ever.  A master's degree is no guarantee of a job, but it certainly correlates with better outcomes.  A better question might be to ask if a master's degree worth it, and even that is often dubious.

As for the non-economic reasons, continued education correlates with many positive outcomes in life - with the awareness that some positive aspects are correlates of higher incomes and intelligence - and extending education as long as possible is a social good, particularly since modern life is more complicated than ever.

Comments

James Igoe said…
A unrelated but supporting article from the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
7:51 AM, July 24, 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Meanings of Ender's Game

In response to an Ender's Game discussion (Goodreads), with a link from Reddit, I posted the following: Much of the Reddit stream seems to focus on military tactics, or the lack thereof, used by the Ender, but who reads Ender and thinks it about military tactics, except the 20-year old grunt that started the thread? For a book written in the 80's, then edited in the early 90's, it seems more prophetic, with its use of game immersion, remote military operations and portable computing. Then when you think about the use of children in military games, one can think somewhat more deeply about sociopolitical indoctrination.  The series itself becomes a broader exploration of empathy and foreign culture.  The criticism seems more like the problem of a man with a hammer, who thinks every problem is solved by hammering, but even worse, every problem is about hammering. An additional post, regarding suspension of disbelief: Some people commented on the suspension of disbelie...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Right to Write - NYTimes.com

In an article,  The Right to Write - NYTimes.com , I commented on the right to write, since writers are sometimes questioned on the validity of their writing, e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe with Uncle Tom's Cabin: One, people always have the right to write, but readers concurrently have the right to reject said writing. Much personal criticism of depictions from writers is whether the depiction seems valid or plausible, but even that is an exercise in empathy, since it requires one to experience that depiction ideationally.  Two, there is a streak in Americans, and maybe anyone, that states that you cannot understand 'my pain', usually the death of a child or some horrific personal lose. Over a longer term I have sensed that people most easily accept empathy if it is expressed by someone with similar experiences, an aspect I believe is part of human nature. I find both irksome, since they deny empathy.
Post a Comment
Read more
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more