Is a college education still cost effective?

No

8 of 11

by Francesca Grace

Write now Print Invite a writer™ Add to Favorites RSS Feed Contact this writer

Getting a college education in America has become a bit like buying a computer that is pre loaded with everything you need. Or should I say what the seller wants you to think you need. And at a whopping cost of more than $20,000 per year, for most four year colleges, all that other stuff is a phenomenal waste of money.

Pre-requisite courses for undergrads or even, sadly, advanced degrees have very little to do with what a student will actually need when they work as a psychologist or a hotel manager or whatever their course of study supposedly prepared them for. Those classes you must take are determined by a bunch of professors who are trying to keep their jobs. These same professors, some of whom have never worked out in the real world in the fields they supposedly know so much about, must publish or perish and their books clog the classrooms of campuses everywhere with redundant, antiquated and sometimes wrong information. They write these not because they have something new to offer about the ancient history course they have taught for 35 years, they write because they want to continue to collect their paychecks.

Even after receiving consistently bad scores on Rate The Professors and other sites, from a majority of their students every year, professors keep their jobs and keep teaching, badly, because they are protected by a system that would make the Sicilian Mafia families smile and say, 'Now that's what I'm talkin about.' That system is called Tenure. Once a professor has been granted this status it protects them like a spoiled child of an ambassador with diplomatic immunity.

If a group of math professors must have enough students in their classes each year to justify the university paying them, then they band together and create a pre-requisite math classes for every student, thus insuring themselves a continued teaching post. Like a giant sausage factory, all students, English majors planning to become novelists, anthropology majors, artists and even future high school volleyball coaches are forced through the feeding tube of algebra classes. If they should fail that class, the repercussions are harsh. They bought the required $125 text book, which, once it's purchased is now worth far less than half that amount. That same ridiculously expensive book, often, is not used at all by the instructors. The class itself, taught in a giant lecture hall that held 550 students, and was actually taught by a foreign born teacher's aide with a heavy accent that the students could barely understand. Failing means they must repeat the course. Of course, they will have pay another $200 to $500 for the 3 credits they need to graduate.

What a scam! It's Vegas, baby. You pay your $35,000 and even though you think you are taking a class with Professor KnowItAll, you find out, after your checks clear, that most of your classes are taught by those teacher's aides and most of your required textbooks are little more than vanity publishing.

Perhaps we should institute a buyer protection program for students, like the unions protect the instructors. When you sign up for a class taught by professor Johnson, and if, of the 45 times the class met, Johnson himself taught only one quarter of those classes, the student should be reimbursed three quarters of their money. In any other setting, advertising that you are selling X and then delivering only one quarter of X and three quarters of Y constitutes a Bait & Switch tactic, is illegal and considered consumer fraud. Why doesn't that law apply in this setting? I would love to serve those same missing professors a meal charging them $500 each and serving them one quarter filet mignon and three quarters soy meatloaf and claiming the same privilege they assume in the value of the products deliver to their buyers.

That guy who runs the Hotel School, yeah, he's never worked in a real hotel. But he's great at fund raising for the University so he is the department chair and makes all the decisions about who gets the magical Tenure cloak of invisibility that is hiding a rag tag collection of professors who would never be hired out in the real world to do anything in the area where they teach. Once again, buyer beware.

It will be a very good day when the Tenure process is overturned and teachers/professors everywhere are hired and retain their positions depending on their real world experience, ability to teach, to stay current with trends in their area and most importantly by the success of the students they purport to guide on their way to careers.

In a perfect world, students would be given a course menu and the pre-requisite classes they should have to take should be directly related to their major. For example, a psychology major should be taking Psych 101, Human Behavior, etc., and that algebra component should be completely optional- at the student's discretion.

Sorry math department. You should exist on your own and not off the blood of thousands of incoming freshman like vampires at a rave. If the University has trouble adjusting to the new system, then perhaps students should be given the opportunity to cash out of classes they do not want to take. They can pay $100 as a donation to the math department so some salaries can be covered. Perhaps, when there are only six students in the 550 capacity lecture hall, the Board of Directors might get off their well fed rear ends and sit in on the nearly empty class to see why no one wants to take that class. Maybe when THEY can't understand the instructor's thick accent, they will get a clue as to why students chose not to set their parents and their own money on fire each semester by taking one of these useless hour long torture festivals.

One day, when the agreement made between the textbook publishing companies and the school systems has reached its termination date, every course will be on a CD Rom and will be downloadable to not only students at that institution, but to anyone on Earth who decides to study that topic. This goes for elementary and secondary schools as well. Right this very minute, every single textbook is already on a computer and could be burned to a CD in minutes. All printing companies print from computer files. These CDs can be made available for a reasonable amount of money so the authors continue to receive some royalties, but let's get real, a marketing textbook is a marketing textbook, not a leather-bound, signed, first edition masterpiece. Forty five dollars is plenty to pay for that book, thank you very much. Sorry dude, you'll have to find another way to buy your sailboat.

And if Universities are truly eco friendly, why on Earth would they take part in this process that requires the destruction of forests for paper textbooks when a student's entire college career of materials could fit inside an iPod? Have you ever picked up a forty pound student back pack and tried lugging it around with a laptop bag balanced on your other hip? The publishing industry keeps the chiropractic industry in business.

No, our current college education system is not worth the money they take from students. There is no more arrogant or irresponsible a group of people than one whose sole function is to bring in more cash any way they can. Together, their decision making wrecks havoc on eco-systems, human psyches, financial infrastructures just to feed the egos of a few wealthy alumni that want their name on a building on the campus where they drank their first beer.

Perhaps one day, Universities will admit that if the student had good enough grades to get into the school in the first place, that forcing them to repeat what they covered in high school is a waste of time and money. Maybe they can then step into a new millennium of education where students will custom design their own majors and their own masters programs. This new education system will allow each and every student a unique background and not just the current smoky link packaging of the sausage factory where a bunch of almost-weres collect their pay checks.

Learn more about this author, Francesca Grace.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.