The Value Of College
by What is the value of a college education and how can you maximize it?
Take this from someone who entered college nearly 46 years ago. What you take out of college that is the most valuable will not be the paper they hand you at graduation, the friends, the social experiences, the fraternity/sorority letters but what you learn. More than just the facts you cram will be the ability to think, to reason, to evaluate, to judge and use the facts you remember.
If you cram it to pass a test and don’t really learn the material, if you forget it the day after the test, that piece of paper will get you a job. It will also put you in a place that every day you say to yourself, “If they really knew how little I know they would get rid of me.” Living with that is scary. The alternative is to go into academia where nobody will ever question if you know anything once you join a union and get tenure. If you become a part of the academia collective that thinks like everyone else you will be next to worthless. BTW, there are people in academia who are not like that. Most of them can be identified easily, they are the ones who are treated as eggheads by their colleagues that are playing the game.
The real test of your education is not if you can pass the tests the professors give, it is whether you can pass the comprehensive final after you leave college. It is called day to day on the job.
I’ve been in the work force all but 4 months of the 51 years since my 16th birthday in December 1959. Nearly every job I have had prepared me for something I would do later. Nearly every class I took in college has contributed to my success later in some way. I’m not sure about the music class but the art class did give me some confidence in doing things that would later help me. You see, not everything that is of value is on the course syllabus. Sometimes professors actually teach something by accident. This is good because some have a hard time doing it on purpose.
My degree is in Math but one of the math items I used to my advantage in 1986 was covered in detail in a Psychology class in the summer of 1962 – twenty four years before. I pulled the book, I still had it, and reviewed material I had only used briefly to pass a Statistics (math) test in 1964. I really learned it’s value in the Psych class. I solved a business problem overnight that had stumped everyone in the work group for weeks and proved the solution in three days. My reputation that got me continual large raises was built on just such events, this was not the only time I was able to use something like that.
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Post Commentvelvetdreams
On February 26, 2007 at 12:13 am
Thanks. Good article, good points. I know this, and you know this, but how do we convince employers to look beyond the obvious?
velvetdreams
Ralph Brandt
On February 26, 2007 at 6:54 am
There are two kinds of people who are interviewing. One is the scardie cat who needs everything in order so that when the person doesn’t work out, they can say. “It isn’t my fault.” They are generally the 4.0 average Psychology majors who don’t know didlysquat about life. The other kind knows people, they can talk to someone and know if the person is worthwhile.
I interviewed in a team with a 40 year old gal, a single mom, a shop supervisor at Cat from Joliet, and incidentally a pretty gal. We interviewed nearly 30 people in about 6 weeks – we would interview two people each night, after working 12 hours (doing macine shop work) in the shop. (OK, we were a couple of hard… ) By the time we got to the interviews we were both tired and wanted to just finish the interviews and go home. We both volunteered for this, we were both afraid to let someone else do it for fear they would screw it up.
I developed nothing but resspect for this gal – 15 years younger than me – because she could talk to someone, not brow beat and interrogate but just talk and get them to tell her about themselves.
We generally came out with near matches on the categories – we were using a method called targeted selection which is GREAT…. When we didn;t match, one of us got something significant that the other missed.
We hired most of them. As far as I know we didn’t make any bad judgements. There were at least 3 that someone other than us would have rejected because there was a blem on the record, we found out what it was and it wasn’t important. One woman went AWOL and was kicked out of the army. Part way through my interview, the first one, she spilled why. I never asked but I knew there was a big hole in her work experience. That filled it. She felt comfortable telling me. We hired one good employee who made a GOOD DECISION to go AWOL (can’t tell you why but you would agree) and I am one who looks generally on AWOL as a serious thing.