Love the Cranky Professor's take on whether or not everyone should go to college:
Graduate from high school, have a modicum of intelligence, go to college immediately. Otherwise see yourself in Washington Post Sunday feature stories as a potentially alienated and angry poor white male...Laura Sessions Stepp wrote an article that is an odd combination of sociological concern, condescension toward white people, and human interest profile. What it’s not about, of course, is why someone should go to college.
In fact, Ben Farmer, the subject of the interview, has a better idea than Ms. Stepp does about what college is. Her opening paragraph pictures him thinking about: the buddies he graduated from high school with last year. They're off at college, probably partying tonight, the beer, the girls, at Virginia Tech, Radford, wherever...He says in paragraph four:"It was going to be this big, tough, hard, hard time in which all you'd do is write papers, which I don't like to do."
Yes, it was going to be like that. And if he doesn’t like that kind of thing he would have focused on the partying, the beer, and the girls instead of the papers. So going to college, despite the fact that all rational people should want to go there, would have been a waste.
Mr. Farmer is the only person in the article who suggests what college should be about – work. Writing papers. Learning. Every consideration Ms. Stepp provides – from sociologists and high school guidance counselors, from community college administrators to her own presuppositions – is that college is a preparatory step to a ‘good career’. It has no content or purpose of its own....Ms. Stepp says: “Those who hold bachelor’s degrees have a hard time understanding why anyone wouldn’t want one.” She’s projecting that thought on the administrators at Mr. Farmer’s high school in part to criticize them for not encouraging students to try vocational schools or community colleges. I think she’s right about the substance – we should send more people from high school to those kinds of institutions rather than shipping them off to Virginia Tech, but I’m including Ms. Stepp among the ‘those’ who can’t quite get their imaginations around why not everyone wants or needs a bachelor’s degree.
Well said.
Posted by kswygert at October 29, 2002 11:23 AM