Why people in the us of A go to colleges? :)) I wanna her phelky's bul to reason why =)

youtube/v/VpZtX32sKVE

-----

Is a College Education Worth Pursuing?

Students have for some time said no: Sellgreen reports that, of a 15,000 strong poll, only 36% believed they were receiving good value for money from their institutions. Parents, increasingly, agree with them: it is reported that 60% of parents in the UK consider university education to be too expensive for what it offers. Employers' perspective is more difficult to track. Crouch and Goulding present a case that 'employers prefer to see experience on a CV rather than a load of educational merits', and in making the case for postgraduate study, they observe that such study 'does make you stand out a little more. Pretty much everyone now has a degree, but not many have a master's.'

Both statements may well have merit. Graduate employability is a contested field. De Grunwald argues that 'the push under the Labour government to get half of all young people to go to university has hoodwinked young people into thinking that if they get a degree, a well-paid job and high-flying career path will follow'. Perhaps it has. It can also be argued that the result has been an over-qualification of the workforce, to the point that a degree is no longer a guarantor of graduate-level employment simply because there are so many people with degrees pursuing them.

Although a report by HECSU indicates that 68% of graduates (of 256,350 surveyed) with first-class degrees are working, and the Complete University Guide indicates that a similar figure move into postgraduate study or a graduate-level job, this only covers around 50% of the total graduate population in a given year. In both cases, between a third and half of the student population have arguably not received a return on investment, in that they have not ended up with a job they needed a degree to do.

Of course, this assumes that they needed a degree to do those jobs in the first place. This is by no means a given. With so many graduates expecting a "graduate job", more and more jobs emerge which demand that applicants have a degree, whether the work involved requires that level of knowledge and skill or not - indeed, whether or not the work needs to be done at all. Graeber hints at this in his attack on the phenomenon of 'bullshit jobs', i.e. jobs which are known to be pointless by those who are doing them, and which do not require half the level of training and qualifications which are demanded of applicants.

The effort put into acquiring a university degree may be grossly in excess of that required by one's "graduate job", and in those circumstances is it surprising that a university education feels as though it is not worth the effort? For that matter, is it necessary to make the effort at all? If the point of university is to acquire a piece of paper which qualifies one to apply for a job, even if the process of acquiring the piece of paper over-qualifies one to actually do the job, is it worth seriously pursuing the course at all?

A university education should be specific and rigorous, honing a breadth of general knowledge and life skills into a specialist field, readying the student to contribute to an interdependent society. At present, a university education is all too frequently a formality: an expensive promotion from one sector of the labour market to another. One of these things is worth any amount of time and money: the other, for a substantial percentage of the graduate body, is apparently not.