What is college for?

 My parents were both college grads. My dad was an MIT-trained chemical engineer. My mom had a bachelor’s degree in psychology. After she finished college, she got married and became a homemaker, eventually raising five children. Needless to say, during that time she wasn’t earning the average salary of a high school grad—she wasn’t earning anything.

What a college grad earns depends as much on them and their motivation as it does on their major.

“Indiana legislators hope to build upon Congress' "Do No Harm" earnings test with Senate Bill 199, which seeks to end college programs whose graduates don't earn more than those with only a high school diploma. While the bill has support from the state commission, it faces opposition from faculty who argue it threatens academic integrity. Roughly a dozen public institution programs would fail the proposed test, based on recent federal data showing that the average salary for a high school graduate in Indiana is slightly above $35,000.”*

This strikes me as silly. What you major in in college doesn’t mark you for life. College isn’t a vocational school. The goal of college is to be an educated person who can train themselves. Or it should be.

 

The most important fact about college grads is that they’re finishers—they completed course after course on time and at standard. What they do with that is up to them.

*is this the mean or median salary for a HS grad?

https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/indiana-proposes-stricter-accountability-for-colleges-7035388/



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more