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In a recent study, we investigated how many of the wealthiest and most influential people graduated college. We studied 11,745 U.S. leaders, including CEOs, federal judges, politicians, multi-millionaires and billionaires, business leaders and the most globally powerful men and women.
We found about 94 percent of these U.S. leaders attended college, and about 50 percent attended an elite school. Though almost everyone went to college, elite school attendance varied widely. For instance, only 20.6 percent of House members and 33.8 percent of 30-millionaires attended an elite school, but over 80 percent of Forbes' most powerful people did. For whatever reason, about twice as many senators – 41 percent – as House members went to elite schools.
For comparison, based on census and college data, we estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of all U.S. undergraduates went to one of the elite schools in our study. The people from our study attended elite schools at rates well above typical expectations.
Why waste $150,000 on an education you could get for $1.50 in late fees at the public library?
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Friday April 21 2017, @07:44PM (1 child)
College is a waste of time and money. I've heard all the excuses for it, like it proves you can "do something". However, it's very expensive and costly, and not the only way to do that.By the time you finish with a college degree, you've pretty much been spent and exhausted just with the work and the stress of it. Its basically 4 years of terror and 4 years of the best years of your life blown with simultaneous and agonizing boredom and anxiety . The mindless repetition and rote memorization of anything stamps out the creativity from people. It is like being put through a wringer.
I am much more in favor of apprenticeship type programs, certificate tests and self study which would be just as good and would cost a fraction of the cost of college and lead to far less exhaustion. With college its basically 4 years of your life gone without doing anything at all productive or close to what you want to do. Its far better and makes better use of peoples time for them to learn while they are doing what they want to do in apprenticeship programs. Life is too short to waste years of it with nonsense.
Rote memorization is not the same as learning and thinking. I believe too much of it leads to people being lost in a textbook. I think thats why you see so many college graduates run companies into the ground and why there is such a lack of imagination and common sense among them, its been pounded out of them with the years of regurgitation of endless and meaningless data. Look at the software products on the market developed by "professionals", the endless parade of security problems and bugs, the IoT devices that are basically put together by college educated people who lack imagination or a passion for what they do, and are doing it because its a job for which they spent a good sum of money for a college degree for the right to do. So you end up with people that just want to throw it together and don't really have the depth of passion or understanding to really get into making it work right.
The brilliance of many shareware and open source projects developed by people who never went to college, and the fact they are in case better than propreitary software really speaks volumes about how fruitless college can be and how years of studying things that have absolutely nothing with what you want to do with your life really gains nothing for the person.
I do think that people should learn and study arts, sciences, music and so on but you can do this in your free time and for a fraction the cost of college with books that are far less expensive than the overpriced college textbooks. And you can actually enjoy it because you are not in a state of panic in trying to rote memorize for the next test.
The rote memorization and wringer of college in my experience causes premature burn out and a loss of interest and passion in what one is studying. It is such a drudgery that one ends up never wanting to look at or deal with it again and thus when one has to use it in a job, its just job, the lack of passion and interest is not there, and the innovation is lost.
Apprenticeships and self study can get people into jobs immediately and will allow them to start applying themselves right away avoiding years of wasted life and burnout with the college wringer, for a fraction of the cost.
Basically, you shouldn't have to subject yourself to the college money extraction and mental abuse racket in order to get yourself a well paying job. We should phase it out and put people into hands on learning experiences with apprenticeships for most of the jobs in our economy.
My college experience, you see, was years of abject misery that left me depleted, exhausted and burned out, and I would be glad to see college phased out except for a small number of fields like medicine. I could have done without it, and actually ended up using the brain capacity I have for things with real world value, and made better use of my time with hands on learning and apprenticeships. As someone who went to college, I am one of its greatest enemies and we really should look towards apprenticeship alternatives and stop subjecting people to years of this mental and financial abuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @09:59PM
Perhaps you should have taken a course on organizing your thoughts into writing.I kid! I kid!
The world of education sucks because Government declared itself to be the service provider, and then promptly went about politicizing the process, which ultimately resulted in the separation of education from productive labor.