Blog Post #3

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.