As a society, we should probably be targeting more like 10% for 4-year degrees and higher.
Many jobs that are requiring or preferring 4-year degrees need at best a 2-year degree, and more likely no degree (maybe a 1-4 month focused training course).
The college degree requirement typically serves as either a vanity requirement or a filter to reduce the number of applications.
> As a society, we should probably be targeting more like 10% for 4-year degrees and higher.
You may correct regarding education and how it relates to marketable skills. However, a good tertiary education is so much more than that. It also teaches (ideally) the ability to think critically that is the foundation of an advanced society - especially a democracy.
That said, higher education costs spiraling out of control have corrupted the entire system. There is a solution though, I'm certain of it.
I mostly agree with that, but I would change it to “a good tertiary education has the potential to teach people to think critically.
If you look at the bottom half (or more) of the students at most good schools, and maybe the bottom 80% or so of the students at most not-so-good schools, you will find that the desire to learn does not extend much beyond “what do I need to do to get $GRADE?” Often the desired grade is merely a passing grade. If the answer is some variation of “learn to think critically”, expect extremely poor evaluations at the end of the term and low enrollment in future semesters.
The problem as I see it is that many people do not learn the value of critical thinking skills until later in life — typically after they have actually had to use them (and noticed that they were lacking) in critical life situations. In my experience, this is why vets (as one simple example) tend to outperform non-vets with similar entrance stats (e.g., grades, SATs, etc.) at highly competitive schools.
I would prefer to see our society have a reasonable means for people to engage in proper tertiary (and actually secondary) education on a continuing basis rather than just before he age of 22.
Do we really want to keep people in classrooms all their life up until 21, as if that's needed to give them critical thinking? Doesn't that make teaching sound inefficient?
Some people are ready to function in society younger than that, but they can't build savings for the rest of their life, do anything productive, or even have fun if you're making them spend another few years doing homework problems fulltime.
Unfortunately that isn't what higher education is today, because it's become so much a business/customer relationship from being tied to employment.
I think we could see a lot of benefit from separating an institute for higher academic pursuits from the employment and status market entirely, though I don't really have a good idea for how to go about doing that.
That seems to be a non sequitur — I suggested no such thing.
In abstraction, I will say that there always is an education system of some sort that trains workers, but that system may be formal, may be informal, may be public, may be private, etc. acknowledging what role the citizens want a formal education to serve is an important discussion, imho. This is a discussion we are not really having in the US right now — at least not in a frank way.
That said, I think education should exist to train future members of society. Work training is a part of that, but there are other elements as well (social skills, communication skills, life skills, etc.).
Can a question be a non sequitur? Asking a question does not imply an accusation, not sure why you read it as such.
I completely agree with your last statement, I have been troubled by America's recent move towards viewing education simply as training future workers.
An example from Wisconsin [1]:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker submitted a budget proposal that included language that would have changed the century-old mission of the University of Wisconsin system — known as the Wisconsin Idea and embedded in the state code — by removing words that commanded the university to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” and replacing them with “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
