College-Schmollege. It's so Overrated

Read this article (I'll wait):


http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/11/education.apprenticeship/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

I've been saying it for years. Jamie Grumbrecht is late to the party because I've been saying it FOR YEARS. But I'll take her argument one step further. Or I'll expand on it rather. Not only should we expand out apprenticeship programs and increase recruitment to these programs, higher education should transform many of their four-year programs into vocational/apprenticeship training programs. Because, frankly, many professions in the U.S. that require college degrees shouldn't.

Grumbrecht said it herself, "50% to 70%" of working people in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were apprentices at one time. Are there only construction jobs in those countries? No doctors, lawyers, or Indian chiefs? According to Grumbrecht, they have all those things, accept maybe the Indian chiefs, with apprenticeships available in areas like finance and health care, fields that demand four-year-college educations in the U.S.

It's like a night at Charlie Sheen's house.  You always feel dirty and you always get screwed.

It's an issue of wasting time and resources. By forcing students to attend an extra two to three years of college we jam-pack college classrooms, keep those students from making money, and allow them to become buried under a mountain of student loan debt. For what? A degree that says you can now effectively mow a lawn (turf management) or manage a sports bar (business management)? Was that going to be so hard coming out of high school with just a little on-the-job-training?

And it's not entirely the fault of higher education. In fact, it's not even mostly the fault of higher education, though they've played their part, willingly taking millions and millions from people who could be spending their money more efficiently and demanding they take some classes that mean absolutely nothing to those people. Much blame must fall on the consumer-driven, money hungry America that demands "highly educated" worker bees straight from college and tells all youngsters, "If you don't go to college you'll wind up a homeless vagrant with no hope in life."

Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. By the time my tenure in college is over, I'll have been studying for roughly 10 years. Yeah, that's not a typo. I will have been in college longer than the Beatles were together, longer than any president can serve, and just slightly longer than Friends was on the air (Ross and Rachel my ass). I have a friend who went to a trade school to be an electrician for a year. He makes much more now than I will ever make in my life.

I know Grumbrecht has data that says college students end up making $20,000 more on average, and while that's true, if we make a lot of current four-year programs into apprenticeships, those jobs would pay the same. A journalist would still be a journalist. A farmer still a farmer. A businessman still a businessman.

I'm not saying college has no value or that we should apprentice out every graduating high school student. I'm only saying that college is over valued. I simply see a terrific opportunity to streamline and enrich the post-high school experience by calling spades spades and gym teachers people who don't need four years of college. By realizing that it doesn't take four or five years to learn how to become a journalist (my undergrad degree), or a parks and recreations supervisor, or a turf management guy.

Think about all you people who spent five years taking classes only to be given on-the-job-training in your first month of an entry level job that essentially taught you more than all those classes combined. Think about it all you.