bajacalal said:
Yes. I recently graduated though I have not been working at a job yet that relates to my degree. Your college degree will be something that can't be taken away, you will have if for the rest of your life. You are a more educated, insightful and well rounded person because you went to college and having a bachelors degree will set you apart from a significant portion of society. Try to look at it this way, the job is a fringe benefit of having something that is a concrete statement of your years of hard work and accomplishment: your degree. Do what it takes to graduate even if you are unsure of things to come in the future.
Debatable. I've talked to a few highly educated and reasonably intelligent college grads (that came out of school ten or fifteed years ago...) but I've talked to far more "intellectuals" in the Heinleinian definition - of an intellectual being an individual educated beyond his intelligence.
I don't mean to run down higher education - but when some damn fool gets a job that I'm more qualified for, I tend to wonder. I've also been told at several job interviews that I was "overqualified and undereducated" - meaning, yet again, that some yoyo right out of college with
no work experience would get the gig, while I was perfectly and totally capable of doing the job and would
not get it because I didn't have another scrap of paper.
So, I'm back in school. It took me this long to decide what I wanted to do - I'm gearing up for Mechanical Engineering with an Automotive emphasis. I couldn't see the point in getting something like a four-year degree in "Liberal Arts" or "General Education" that would, now, involve learning considerably less than I did in high school.
Sadly, since high schools out here are releasing people generally untaught (a combination of the "touchy-feely" lunatic fringe that doesn't want to fail someone because it might "damage their self-esteem," and the PC lunatic fringe pushing bilingual education...) we're ending up with college-educated idiots who are less educated than I was when I graduated high school (and I was ready to graduate a few years early already - due to a streak of autodidact...)
So, I would think that a degree in some relatively specialised field would be useful - but if all you can handle is LA or GE (or, Gawd forbid, PoliSci! Is there a more useless and misnamed area of study?) you should get your arse back into high school somewhere, and get your basic education done.
5-90