12 thoughts on “College”

  3. I graduated high school in 1975, the year the first personal computer kit hit the market. I never touched a computer until 1982. I’ve made my living working on computers – programming, office work, enterprise architecture, etc. for decades. Since I graduated high school, I’ve worked a variety of jobs. I was a soldier, an airport lineman, electronics technician, Air Force communications specialist, teacher, Air Force satellite and space operations officer, and a defense contractor doing a variety of jobs. The point of all this is that at no point did I plan out my career. Life provided opportunities and I took them. As an enterprise architect, just about everything I’ve done professionally has proven useful in the work I do now. Kids in school today will encounter new technologies that we can barely imagine today. Getting a broad based education with the ability to learn and absorb new information is probably the most useful thing kids can do to prepare for life.

  4. I think going to community college for the first two year is a good idea even if you got good grades in high school.

    1. Yes and no, Community college good way to defer the cost and for the most part skip the repeat of a Good High schools Junior to senior year curriculum to bring everyone up to speed. In the first year and a half of college.
      Very useful at big universities where first years foundation courses are taught in auditoriums of 100s of students that could essentially be done by Video and where most of the hands on teaching is done by TA Grad students in recitations. At least at the Community College courses are taught by post grad and with a few years experience teaching and smaller course sizes.

      But some of this could be skipped with a good high school curricula and graduating college in 3 Years. The other piece is under-graduate research at least at Technical schools could be very useful . Don’t believe their is a ton of availability for Undergrad research for Transfers. Provides additional potential useful “real world” experience as much as granted research is to to the real world and earn a little stipend .

      1. We homeschooled and all of our kids could dual-enroll at the community college starting at 16, so they could turn 18 and have two years under their belt. This made for a bit of awkwardness when it comes to such things as national certification. Things like taking the national tests for B-EMT & A-EMT meant waiting until you turn 18 (because-rules).

        The last one out of the house will have finished his dual enrollment in a few months with a pilots license and FAA certs for airframe & powerplant maintenance. Not a bad accomplishment for an 18yo. He plans on continuing into a 4 yr aerospace engineering program and working in the field/building professional contacts on weekends.

  5. All of this stuff smacks of Malthusian death-march desperation. The Confucian countries already have this in spades: You have to be the best of the best of the best of … just to survive.

    It means there isn’t enough opportunity for the reasonable competence that the jobs/life actually requires, so people are fighting over credentials to claim their spot in an overcrowded/narrowing world. (The narrowing and overcrowding is mostly economic IMO, but it’s harming us nevertheless.)

  6. Education – the study of philosophy, history, literature, etc. – is great, but people who want to be free should learn a trade or profession before spending much time with Aeschylus and Alcibiades. Pushing every person who can read onto the “college prep” high school curriculum is destructive. For that matter, college is not really necessary to learn a profession. It is still possible in a few states to become a lawyer by apprenticing.

  7. How could the parents have been so irresponsible as not to have all of their applications through grad school in place by the kid’s first birthday. Failure to plan is planning to fail!

    Larry: You have to be able to show 5 years experience in things that have only existed for 6 months.

    1. There are stupid managers like that. They then wonder why they can’t fill their job openings. Everyone else laughs at them.

  8. I graduated from HS in 1968, in the bottom tenth of my class, and took a year off waiting to be draft. Thanks to the Nixon lottery (and a high number) that didn’t happen. So I toddled off to community college because a) I had nothing better to do, and b) I was missing the girls.

    I wrote and sold my first novel (to Ace Books) in 1972, sired a child in 1974, and worked as a mechanic until computers started being widely available. I quit my shipward job in 1984 and became a programmer, which paid a whole lot better. I did make one other attempt at higher education, some time at UNH between working for Firestone and going to the shipyard, but I was too old for those girls, and the U didn’t pay its janitors enough to live on. I did learn to speak Japanese, though, and that was fun.

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