More thoughts from Elizabeth Scalia.
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to aspire to get an Ivy League degree. Of course, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college, and my high school grades (and lack of even taking the SAT) showed it.
[Update a while later]
“College for all” harms students.
Even when I was a kid and had pretty much decided I’d go to college, it never occurred to me to shoot for Harvard or any other faraway, high-brow university. Why should I, when community college was right there in my city? I did think about going to the university my father graduated from, Georgetown U in DC, but that was because he’d gone there, and had a nice diploma (all in Latin even!). But when I found out how much it cost, and how I’d have to take the SAT, and even have to apply for scholarships, it all seemed to be too much trouble. There was no stigma attached to going to Miami-Dade Community College and then one of the local universities to finish up. That attitude seems to have sprung up in the 90s, after Clinton (The (drum roll and trumpets please) Rhodes Scholar! (bow down, kiss his ring) was elected. Before then no one seemed to care what school the president, or anyone else, went to.
I think WHERE you live has some bearing on the attitude of “college or stupidity” as the only choices. Where I grew up in KY it was suggested that college was better than trade school, but not the be all and end all. When I came to NC as a teen, college WAS and still remains the be all and end all.
I’ve got friends from SD, ONLY the students who intend to go to college take the SAT. Here in NC they push about 80% of HS kids to take it.
I’m sure from moving around that there are other variances.
But I blame a different culprit than Clinton. This idea was well seated long before he took office in AR. I blame business in general, NASA and the military. It was during the era of “The Right Stuff”, and ONLY college educated men becoming pilots that going to college took off, and less than that degree became just LESS.
Every boy in America wanted to be an astronaut, and what did that take? A college degree then, an advanced degree going forward until now.
I met and was around Chuck Yeager once for an evening years ago. I’ve seen him on TV and in interviews all my life. You’ll never convince me he was untrainable as an astronaut because he had no college diploma.
How many other WWII and Korean War pilots did they just cast aside? Not to mention young men who could have been trained to be pilots, but had no degree to start off the process?
It’s astounding how quickly that changed.
And if you go back and look at NASA’s original engineers many of them had JUST a four year degree. Try getting a job there with just a four year degree now. Businesses in general took on that ‘higher degrees mean smarter people and better employees’ thinking. That attitude makes even a four year degree ‘seem’ like less.
It’s too bad that our country has been sold this bill of goods.
I’ve got one more thing I think causes problems that is linked obliquely. I wish to attack the term “Human Resources”.
When companies, i.e. guys WITH degrees in the front office / corporate headquarters, began separating the work force into managers / bosses had degrees and the non-degreed work force became a RESOURCE, they were then expendable, like raw steel or coal. The work force became something LESS important.
You simply cannot convince me that such an attitude hasn’t permeated our culture, belittling those sans degree and creating the image that those without a degree are themselves LESS.
I repeat, it’s too bad that our country has been sold this bill of goods. We and certainly OUR children deserve to be treated and seen as better than that.
And I’ve completely ignored the sorry state of WHAT or how little they teach in colleges now.
My great grandfather Michael (a 19th century lawyer) sent his three sons to Rutgers. My grandfather got his degree in chemistry in 1890. My father got his degree in economics in 1935. Now you have some idea why I went to Rutgers. I graduated from Rutgers in 1967 with a degree in physics.
Things had changed from my father’s day to mine. Up until sometime in the 1950s, Rutgers was a small private college. It was New Jersey’s Land Grant School, but that was the only government connection. New Jersey decided it needed a university. It picked Rutgers. A few years ago Milton Viorst, Rutgers 1951, gave a talk. After the talk I asked him a bit about his college education. He told us that about 400 people started in his class in 1947 — about half veterans. Virtually everybody graduated in 1951. A man from a class in the late 1950s told us about 500 started as freshman — and about 500 finished in four years. My class started with 1700 freshman. 1100 of us graduated in 1967. Those of us who were physics majors sometimes observed that there were too many physics majors for the faculty. I learned last fall that my class stills holds a Rutgers record — for the worst freshman GPA.
I’ve done grad work in physics and social psychology. My art attracts attention. Credentials, though? No. Well, I do have my Mensa membership card — and my certificate proclaiming me a member of the Triple Nine Society. That’s a bit more exclusive.
Now I must go off for a day of interesting activities.
@ Der Schtumpy: But the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo astronauts had for the most part only bachelor degrees and many of them finished their degrees while they were already combat pilots. Neither Carpenter nor Glenn completely finished their undergrad work when they were chosen as astronauts.
My father became a mechanical engineer without a 4 year degree back in the early 1960s and rose to become a manager at a defense electronics plant and retired in 2005. He had Navy electronic school and an Associate’s Degree and that was all he needed. I studied mechanical engineering for two years and had to leave because of financial issues. I have the equivalent of an Associate’s Degree. The best I can be in the same plant my Father worked is an engineering technician. I’ll never become a full fledged engineer much less a manager.
I’ve been involved in metallurgy, thin film deposition, adhesives and polymers for over 20 years. I actually advise engineers that are fresh out of school on material selection. Can I sign off on the drawing or procedure? Nope, I’m not an engineer. Best I can do is ghost write for someone else. I know that if I could pass a test to become an engineer, I’d ace it but it doesn’t work that way. Even the PE exam requires an undergrad degree nowadays.
Andrea, I’m pretty sure People Who Matter™ have always cared about where other People Who Matter™ went to college, at least going back to 1960. JFK had gone to Harvard; Nixon had gone to {{{shudder}}} Whittier College.
In fact the elitists’ attitude toward Nixon (pre-Watergate? Hell, pre-Checkers!) was very much like the current attitude of elitists and their sycophants toward Sarah Palin, different mainly in that communication technology in the 1950s didn’t allow the Great Unwashed to see the attitude’s genesis in living color as we can today.
Oh, I know that there has always been a class in America to whom credentials, getting into the “right” school, belonging to the “right” clubs, has been of paramount importance… but this used to be just a small slice of society, not the entire country. When I was a kid if someone got into an Ivy League university it was considered a big prize, but no one thought of the bulk of people who didn’t as somehow lesser individuals who weren’t as smart and who shouldn’t be allowed to govern their own future. The whole idea of “everyone should go to college” is a legacy of the whole post-war GI Bill thing along with the push for more women in college, but most people still thought of college grads as just regular joes who were college grads… I blame the whole credentialism thing on the insecurity of the late Baby Boomers who supported Clinton. That’s where all this big deal about the “best” colleges and Euro-culture is better and liberal arts trumps boring old business degrees and hipster cred and the whole lot of it came from.