Barrack Obama = Jimmy Carter 2.0

[Bishop]

I personally know many people who have degrees who could not find jobs. The problem with opinions is everyone has one. Same goes with a degree if everyone has one it doesn't mean sh*t. Democrats are smart to promise education because it's honestly just a scam. College degree has become the new high school diploma just you have to pay for it.

A degree in feminist studies or journalism doesn't entitle you to a job, no degree does. What the right degree does is allow opportunities.

[handofthrawn]

A degree in feminist studies or journalism doesn't entitle you to a job, no degree does. What the right degree does is allow opportunities.

I completely agree with your statement. My issue is student loans that have created a major issue in America. A 18 to 22 year old should not be able to borrow 100s of thousands of dollars to go to college period. Because as you say a degree does not guarantee you a job. Just like you can't walk into a bank and get a business loan or home loan without some kind of income. But our government backs student loans and guarantees part of them. So lending institutions just hand them out like candy knowing full well they shouldn't be loaning the money to 90% of the people. But you can't go bankrupt on student loans and there backed by the government so it's a safe bet. Why college tuition has sky rocketed over the last 20 years. It's one big scam created by our government. You have to get a college degree to manage a Mc Donalds or a store at the mall. In the old days only a few professions actually required degrees. So basically you have to pay for a college degree to get a job that 20 years ago you only needed a high school diploma for. Greatest scam of all time. Haha

[Bishop]

Fees in the US are crazy.

[Chanain]

Fees in the US are crazy.

It does go a bit beyond that. I wouldn't go so far as thrawn in saying it's a scam 'created by the government', but he's not totally off about the tuition increases being indirectly subsidized by a favourable legal infrastructure for lending. The US is a particularly dramatic example of tuition costs being disproportionate to the value added by the degree, where universities and tuition costs are subject to very little regulation, despite these indirect subsidies.

In Canada, it's less dramatic. We have the same kind of indirect subsidies, and more - domestic students have their tuition significantly subsidized by the government directly - but the trade-off is that most universities are public institutions with tuition hikes strictly regulated for most programs. Even so, outside of a handful of programs (most notably, engineering and medicine), new grads even with professional degrees find themselves in oversaturated job markets with tens of thousands (and sometimes over a hundred thousand) in student debt. The problem - in both countries - is a deep disconnection between the education system and the job market - you have schools that manipulate their job placement statistics to make their degrees seem more valuable than they are, trying to increase enrollment into programs with declining job opportunities, thus generating a mismatch between the availability of labour and the available jobs - and charging these students massive amounts of money to do it.

[JohnnyReid]

I completely agree with your statement. My issue is student loans that have created a major issue in America. A 18 to 22 year old should not be able to borrow 100s of thousands of dollars to go to college period. Because as you say a degree does not guarantee you a job. Just like you can't walk into a bank and get a business loan or home loan without some kind of income. But our government backs student loans and guarantees part of them. So lending institutions just hand them out like candy knowing full well they shouldn't be loaning the money to 90% of the people. But you can't go bankrupt on student loans and there backed by the government so it's a safe bet. Why college tuition has sky rocketed over the last 20 years. It's one big scam created by our government. You have to get a college degree to manage a Mc Donalds or a store at the mall. In the old days only a few professions actually required degrees. So basically you have to pay for a college degree to get a job that 20 years ago you only needed a high school diploma for. Greatest scam of all time. Haha

If you could stop pulling statistics out of your rear like no tomorrow, you'd have made a vaguely good point with regards to the bar creep of degree requirements for jobs which shouldn't require one.



(gif is in relation to your colourful axioms)

[brandonc204]

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[brandonc204]

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[Palem]

^ on that note, school choice should be based more heavily on total cost of attendance than the name or place.

The one exception to this is if a student gets into a school like MIT or Harvard. Hate them or love them, these types of schools open a lot of doors otherwise unavailable to students. (such as having supreme court justices and senators give lectures on campus to law students, or attending class with students with a lot of political and business connections)

On your top point, that's the biggest reason I attended my university over Ohio state University. It would have been great to attend and have that prestigious university behind my name (I know it's not Harvard or anything, but it's a fairly prestigious school), and I've been a fan of OSU sports my whole life, but the cost just didn't match what I would have been getting.

On your second point, I know that at least a few highly prestigious schools will offer free rides to students that are good enough to be there but live in a household below a certain income. They really want you to be there if it's at all possible

[Chanain]

For instance, without a computer engineering or computer science degree, good luck getting a high paying job with a major computer/tech company in Cupertino, CA. Google has a reputation for hiring people who learned how to code in their basement, but those people are still more of a rarity. For the vast majority of people, standardized training is required.

This is a relatively unique feature of the IT industry, to an extent. The top IT companies are looking for excellence. One of the best ways of showing excellence is to have performed well in a top IT program - and no, an IT degree from the University of Wyoming will probably NOT get you a foot in the door in silicon valley.

My brother - a graduate from inarguably Canada's premier school for computer science - works for Google, and used to work for Research in Motion (BlackBerry) as a manager. He once remarked to me that his team included people with post-doctoral degrees in computers and mathematics, and high school drop-outs, doing essentially the same job. These are the genius types.

But yes, if you're not some kind of genius, then teaching yourself to code in your basement won't only fail to get you a job at Google, but also won't really help you land the less-than-premier IT jobs - which the computer degree from the University of Wyoming might.

^ on that note, school choice should be based more heavily on total cost of attendance than the name or place.

The one exception to this is if a student gets into a school like MIT or Harvard. Hate them or love them, these types of schools open a lot of doors otherwise unavailable to students. (such as having supreme court justices and senators give lectures on campus to law students, or attending class with students with a lot of political and business connections)

Quality of program is important, too, and goes a bit beyond just 'ivy league'. There are certain schools which will garner name recognition within a specific industry, even if they don't have the 'prestige' of the ivy league. Strangely enough, the relationship of cost to quality in the US appears to be parabolic in some cases. If you go to an 'okay' school, you're probably not paying a whole lot. If you go to a top school, you're probably paying through the nose (unless you can get scholarships or bursaries). But if you go to the worst schools, some of them charge tuition close to the scale of the Ivy League. I've seen this in law schools, at least - the schools who take the absolute bottom students (i.e. who can't get in anywhere else) charge a massive amount of money...because hey, we know if you had options, you wouldn't be coming here, so we charge what we want. (I've occasionally come across lawyers from these schools. It shows. Quickly. But then again, there are only two reasons a Canadian goes to the US for law school - because they got into a really great school there, or because they couldn't get into Canadian law schools at all.)

[brandonc204]

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