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From: vin@meccsd.MECC.MN.ORG (Vincent J. Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,soc.college
Subject: Re: Qualified vs educated (was Re: Student preparedness)
Message-ID: <1224@meccsd.MECC.MN.ORG>
Date: 19 Jan 89 14:04:23 GMT
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Reply-To: vin@meccsd.UUCP (Vincent J. Erickson)
Organization: Minn. Educ. Comp. Corp.
Lines: 43

The present state of education in the US is of great concern to us
all. I found both secondary and post-secondary education to be rife
with shallow, meaningless trivia. True, we do learn enough to get us
our first jobs, but basically 90% of what we "learned" was either
wasted or just wrong. Especially in technical fields like engineering
or computer science, colleges are usually teaching methods and using
equipment years behind the times. Upon leaving college, I found that I
had it all to learn over again on the job. If I had known that I would
have had to do this before college, I could have saved myself the time
and money and just started right out of high school. Unfortunatly, we
have a new brand of discrimination in this country which says that if
you didn't go to college, you basically don't know anything. I have
been out of college now for 12 years, and in that time have seen many
new employees from high school, college and technical schools come
into mt field. There is basically NO DIFFERENCE between them, except
that the college grads THINK they have nothing to learn, having spent
enormous sums of money to learn it in college. This makes them a tad
more difficult to train than say, a tech school grad who realizes they
still have some training to do.

This is not intended as a flame against college grads, only as an
indictment of the college learning experience. They are not any better
at preparing young people for careers than a good high school or tech
school program. Therefore they shouldn't try. Colleges should be for
preparing people for research or teaching careers. We have instead a
society which thinks that in order for a person to get a "job" they
must go to college. This is wrong and should be changed. Employers who
think that a person is more qualified for a job because they've gone
to college are also living a dream; they get peace of mind but they
don't really get a better, easier to train employee.

My last comment is that if secondary education weren't viewed as being
so non-existent, we could alieviate a lot of the above problem. There
was a time in this country where a person could get a good job right
out of high school. A time where a talented person could advance
themselves by working hard, gaining experience and proving themselves,
not by simply paying money for a piece of paper which says "I paid
lots of money for this piece of paper - hire me!"

Please forgive my little tantrum, I've just recieved another new
employee to "train" in and I'm not looking forward to it. After all he
just came from college and want to "teach" me instead, all about the
wonders of punched cards.