Receding Higher Education

The Set-up...

We go through school learning that there will be a place for us at the table when we get out. It is that expectation that leads young men and women to study what they value over money making majors. However, the fabled "real world" that adults bitch about to college students is ruled by the green specter. How are students supposed to balance "you can be whatever you dream" and "just wait till you enter the 'real' world"? The education system is not constructed to allow easy career decisions: sure, if you select a major such as risk management or pre-law you have a nice straightforward path, but what about those *laugh* liberal artists? Our society does not value the liberal arts, we want the concrete, the money makers, the business-men, the math and sciences, but not even those last two fit: my straight up math major and biology/chemistry major peers do not have a career cut out for them. Thus, I will amend my previous statement with this: our culture values the practical fields over the theoretical. If this is the case, should not our education system move us towards practical purposes?

To properly understand how our education system works in conjunction with careers, we must analyze how our concentration fields interact with available jobs and the practicalities of running an institution. The bottom line is we set our students up for failure; not failure in our studies, but failure outside of them. Academic advising in colleges is a joke where the student often knows more about their major and how to go about it than the adviser. The lofty Career Center at UGA is its own small department that simply cannot serve the majority of students. Why doesn't the Career Center advise every student every year on what their job options are for their course of study? Additionally, the cost of higher education is rising exponentially as our state budgets allocate lesser money to state institutions and the buck gets passed on to the students. In response, students take on greater and greater debt with the fleeting promise of a well-paying job at the end of the educational tunnel. The Universities themselves must make a profit, and it is not exactly in their interest to provide a clear cut path to graduation and a job, they would not make nearly as much money if everyone got out of college and hired in three years.

Wow, that was a lot of bitching, but I would not say it is unwarrented. I should say that my experience in college has enriched my life ten-fold, but if our country would put more stock into education instead of profit, we could set-up a better system simply by giving our students better guidance. Adults complain about how students have no concept of the real world, but they don't provide any information on surviving it and allow us to germinate in cloistered bubbles.

(Excuse my writing since it is a bit rough and not as polished as I would like, but I need to get a blog started and must put something to pen)