this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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As the father of a college student, I see a lot of kids going to college for a "college degree" like it's a token that provides a job. If you ask them what they want to do as a profession when they get out, they don't have an answer. That's a fundamental disconnect in the purpose of college. It's technically the student's responsibility to determine what they need to become employable, but these young adults simply don't have the world experience to know what is necessary. Corporations are looking for relatively specific skill sets when hiring, and the average swath of humanities and science degrees doesn't fulfill those needs. For the price of tuition colleges should be guiding them, but they mostly wash their hands of any post-graduate needs. The system devolves into a gamification of the experience where "success" is navigating the various and sundry graduation requirements and the end result is a degree rather than a person with intellectual skills they can market directly.
That's not to say college is useless, just misguided. It's like getting the best tailor in the world for your next public engagement. You and your college/tailor may have produced the finest 17th century Russian ball gown ever seen but now you need to find a 17th century Russian ball; you can't wear that as an intern to an accounting audit. Not to pick on 17th century Russian gowns, you can't wear a fabulous business suit (which might be okay for an accounting audit) as crew on a civil engineering/surveying team or at an archeological dig.
All that said, I'm going to go as far as to say a pretty large helping of value should have come from parents or mentors. We, as parents, have spent most of our children's formative years either entirely ignoring the need to have a focus, or hyperfocusing to the exclusion of a bigger picture. It's always been this way, of course, but screwing up in college didn't used to result in life-burdening debt, and parents need to step up a lot earlier.
(apologies for not reading the article, I was determined to be a robot at the capcha)