Blog post #3
Austin Parker
What is college good for?
This is the question that many
people pondering the decision to attend college ask. Many people are simply
raised with the expectation that they will g to college and others are raised
in a way that they don’t see the importance of college. In both cases you will
find yourself wondering why you need to attend college, and if its really worth
it. In my opinion college is a fast track to getting into a career. If you
decide to forgo college how will you know for certain that you’re equipped to
go into the career that you desire? Not only do I think that it shows yourself
if you can do the job the specific career requires I feel like it’s a major way
that potential employers separate potential employees. This doesn’t mean that
someone without the college education isn’t equally as ready to begin a certain
career as someone who has gone through college, but as an employer your can’t
know every applicant well enough to figure that out but when you see on a
résumé that the applicant has completed college your first thought will most
likely be that that person is more ready and more intelligent than another who
didn’t attend college. As Louis Menand puts it in her article Live and Learn “Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its
more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team
needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes
from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so
that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to
get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is
sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.” The
way that Menand states that is very profound but I feel like it’s a spot on
analogy for how society views college, it simply views college graduates as
more intelligent.
Another things that college does for
you is it prepares you for the ‘real world’ socially. While your in college you
will have to work with people you may not particularly like and you will have
to learn to get along with them in order to complete a task at hand. This skill
alone is valuable enough to attend college in my opinion. I say that because
when you enter your desired career path you wont always see eye to eye with an
associate, and you will most likely have disagreements with people that you
need to help you complete a project by a deadline in order to feed your family.
Professor Mike Rose is cited in the article Professor: Value of
College extended beyond Paycheck stating the social benefits
from attending college “There are also social benefits, he
says: learning to think together, learning to attack problems together,
learning how to disagree.” Rose is a professor who teaches an area of education
at a public university and he even sees that college is beneficial beyond the
obvious job opportunities.
Although a college education can
prepare you for many things there are also things that college cannot do for
you. Bobby Fong says “A college
may not always be able to anticipate what technical skills students will need
ten years from now. Thirty percent of you will one day work in jobs that don't
yet exist. Studies show that nationally, 60 percent of students graduate in
majors different from those in which they began. Your generation will change
careers seven times over a lifetime.” in his article Don’t Miss the College Forests for the Career Trees. Just like Fong says, there is a chance that one day you
will be working outside of your degree area and really outside of your main
area of knowledge but this doesn’t mean college has failed you. If you do face
such a situation one thing that college has taught you is how to face an
adverse situation and how to surpass it and succeed. Not only is college
beneficial for your future career and job, it inadvertently prepares you in
many more ways than that. In my opinion the non academic part of learning you
get in college is the true value because it prepares you for many things life
will throw at you.
