Charlatan:

1 : quack 2 2 : one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability : fraud, faker

I am a reader and try to work on self-education. While he may be an extreme exception, Dave Thomas of Wendy’s fame obtained his GED when he was in his 60s.
Dave

I think the same can be said in communications, art, and music, just to name a few.  Now, don’t get me wrong, a person still needs to study the subject, but much of the capability is already there.

Some areas are different.  I have a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M.  I don’t see how I could have learned the information on my own.  I also think that, so far, the degree has been worth it.  I went back to school at age 31 and graduated in 2005.  Prior to that, my highest paying year ever was $25,000.  My first job after graduation was $48,000 per year with bonuses and vacation time usable immediately.  The downside was that I had to commute 65 miles one way to Dallas.  Now, I am making over $60,000 per year a mere ten minutes from home.

Having said that, some companies require a degree to "move up the ladder" and many require it to get "in the door".  Just to show how unimportant the education is in some cases, the area of study doesn’t matter, just that you "have a degree".  At one point, I thought I would have to go into retail management to get closer to home.  In many cases, I think I was turned away because I was "too educated".  I had this engineering degree and couldn’t get interviews for management positions.

At our local Sam’s Club, the store manager makes about $75-80,000 per year base plus a bonus.  Last year, the bonus was about $125,000 (that was for hitting 85% of projected sales).  I know this because I have a friend who works there in management.  That store manager has no degree; he came up through the ranks and, to top it off, he is only 35.

Sometimes I think I would have been better off if I had gone to work at Sam’s in 2001, but I wouldn’t trade my time at Texas A&M for anything…

John H.,

You have perfectly described current life in academia. The university system is first and foremost about the university ’system’. Next in line are the instructors and their personal interests.

Knowing this, though, one can still benefit from college.  Go to a school with good weather, read the books you want, if you’re not going to grad school, don’t worry too much about grades. Drink some and have fun. Do some interesting internships and extra-curriculars. Make some good contacts.

College is a young man’s game. Going to school later in life, when you have familial and financial obligations is real, real tough.

HB

Preach it, brother. And that’s true absolutely everywhere: government, the corporate world, education, research, medicine, even religion.

I expected a vocational training in the profession of architecture. What I got was four years of esoteric nonesense from bitter, arrogant, untalented hacks. We were repeatedly told what a privilege it was to be attending a university as if it were free and we were hand picked by the grace of God.

The university system has no checks and balances. It is accountable to no one. Have you ever tried to voice a complaint or concern? You get no where fast. It cloaks itself as an altruistic organization when it is really nothing more than a business. A business that enjoys the luxury of non accountability to its clients (students), and like any other business it’s only concerned about it’s bottom line. They will tell you whatever you want to hear but have no real interest in ‘educating’ you. The university system is first and foremost about the university ‘system’. Next in line are the instructors and their personal interests. The student’s education and self revelations of are no interest to them. Where there are no checks and balances complacency and corruption will prevail.

Trade schools and apprenticeships provide a much better education less expensively and more quickly than a university can but the accreditation is not there. Hopefully this will change as the price of a university education continues to increase beyond what people are willing or able to pay.

While college may be a waste of time for some, it does not follow that the institution is overvalued and/or badly managed; even if it was, the consequences get paid by the student (or parents thereof) and they should have enough sense to check it out before the investment.  If I spent the money it takes to go to school on a stock investment, be assured I’d check it out thoroughly before the crap shoot.

It may have been a waste of time for Dean, that does not mean it is generally a waste of time and does not generally cause families to break up.   Having got that off my chest, I am not particularly enamored of a degree.  I spent a lot more than 4 years getting to my current educational state, and I did not particulalry enjoy it.  I got married Thanksgiving break of my first semester in an engineering program, and am still. In some ways the pressure of college acutally helped bonding through shared experiences under stress (and by the way, we ate a lot of rice and beans — not much money).

However, (long long ago in a galaxy far far away…) after 6 years in the USN rising to the august level of petty officer 2nd class, I realized the difference between me (an enlisted man) and the typical officer was a degree (I dropped out of college to join).  Initially I considered the degree not much more than a Union card.  After my education, I am faced with the reality that there was a lot of technical information that I did not understand and a lot of hard-core engineering that I could not have performed (not sure the typical naval officer I came in contact with could either, that’s another story).

Before the EU, various European countries had  a kind of formal apprentice program for engineers as an alternative to college (maybe they still do, I don’t know), and for a fresh high school grad it takes something like that to make sure the practioner knows what he/she needs to know to do the job.  In the U.S., a degree is a prerequisite for most professional jobs, period.

For me, the thing that made me go to college was a summer job working on an interstate moving van with my uncle.  Loading and unloading house after house of furniture in midsummer through the Deep South convinced me that the blue-collar world was so not for me!

So, I pulled myself together and nailed junior college, and transfered to UC Berkeley as a JC transfer.  There, I ended up being a math major (I’d always hated math until I took advanced math, where they actually explained how math worked versus memorizing formulas), but took lots of computer classes to eat. 

After school, I worked in private industry for awhile, before going back to UCB as a staff programmer.  I ended up running the programming part of the research project.  I did this as a sort of dryrun to see if I wanted to go to grad school, but decided that grad student life wasn’t for me.

But that experience shaped my career; I’m now one of a very few people in the world with deep skills in my odd discipline.  There aren’t many jobs in it, but there are even fewer people, so it’s provided a good living for about 15 years.

foobarista’s last blog post..Are the super-rich who advocate taxes really altruistic?

I’m not as bad as Dean; I can learn and enjoy learning in a classroom setting, but only if the instructor cares enough to make me care, too. At the University of Michigan, I was disappointed that I could only find one such caring teacher per semester after my freshman year (when I had two). Then I transfered to a smaller school, and discovered that one was a luxury. Zero was the norm. The instructors were there to do a job, or there to support their own studies and research, or there to promote their politico-social philosophies. Damn few of them were there to teach for the sake of teaching. Twenty-five years later, those few still stick in my brain, and I often find myself quoting them today.

And now my nieces and nephews are in college or have passed through; and the stories I hear from them sound like everything I hated about college, only worse. The bureaucracy sounds bigger. The costs sound a lot bigger. The caring teachers sound fewer. It’s like everyone’s playing a game: "You pay us this money and jump through these hoops, and we’ll give you a piece of paper that says you’re qualified for a hoop-jumping job."

I’ve become convinced that the old truism is more true than I ever realized: learn by doing is the best way to learn. But it’s darned hard to structure that and measure that and certify that. The old days of apprenticeships had a lot going for them.