College admission in the US -- is it really this insane now?

[Altherion]

On 3/18/2019 at 10:48 AM, lady narcissa said:

Well I went through the college admissions process in the US over 30 years ago and most of these things were normal to my experience back then.  Granted, I went to a small private high school.  And it had a full time college guidance counselor who met with us regularly over the course of the 4 years.  So it was very college focused from day 1.  But everything you mentioned was pretty much done - although, obviously the donating millions of dollars was extremely limited to certain families.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I went to a public high school and while we had a couple of guidance counselors, this was for a school of over 3000 students so they didn't interact with us unless there was something wrong. It looks like your high school's approach has gone mainstream.

10 hours ago, Ice Queen said:

I completely agree, and I'll add one thing. College has become four years of on the job training--it wasn't always that way. College was for refinement and a traditional liberal arts education. When did that change?

It changed when our economy changed from one with a relatively large number of blue collar jobs to one where more and more jobs require a degree. This is actually one thing I don't blame academia for; they had no real choice here. In fact, the problem is the opposite: they don't always match the training provided to individuals with what is required for a job that somebody with this financial situation needs (especially given the costs of the degree).

5 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I guess what I'm getting at here is I'd like to explore someway of getting students real world work experience fairly quickly into their college careers, maybe after their second year or something.

This actually exists in the form of summer internships. Many of them are paid -- and the best ones are pretty well paid. Unfortunately, there's nowhere near enough for everyone and the competition for the good ones is fierce (but on the bright side, the people who get in are probably all set in terms of job applications and interviews). That said I agree with your point about entry level jobs requiring more than they did.

[OldGimletEye]

25 minutes ago, Altherion said:

This actually exists in the form of summer internships. Many of them are paid -- and the best ones are pretty well paid. Unfortunately, there's nowhere near enough for everyone and the competition for the good ones is fierce (but on the bright side, the people who get in are probably all set in terms of job applications and interviews). That said I agree with your point about entry level jobs requiring more than they did.

I'm aware of summer internships. The problem is that as you point out is that there isn't enough of them to go around. I'm thinking of something much more expansive.

I guess to a certain extent, I can understand an individual firm's hesitation to pay a cost to train a new individual, only to have that individual leave and go to a competitor. But if every firm thinks that way, then in my view that pretty much leads to a market breakdown, that leaves everyone worse off and needs to be fixed.

[Alarich II]

Dual college education already exists (at least here in Germany). In practice it means that you apply with a company that cooperates with a college and then you'll go to classes for two months, then go to work for two months etc. Of course the college education is already focused on a specific career, for example engineering, accounting, marketing etc. This does not work for political science, history or German philology.

[DMC]

On 3/18/2019 at 8:18 AM, maarsen said:

I have been a reader of science articles and of the history of science for many years. One thing I always did was to look at where the author of the article went to school.  More often than not they came from small unknown universities or colleges. Once they make their mark the upper tier universities hire them on as faculty so that they can justify their reputation and keep building the myth that paying to get into that elite school will make your kid the next great thinker.

I've followed but avoided this topic for two reasons:  1. it just seems like another avenue for Altherion to shit on academia, which actually he hasn't done thus far, and 2. it just seems a platform for everybody to talk up their own academic credentials - or in a few cases their kids' academic credentials - which ultimately isn't particularly useful for anybody.

However, I do want to respond to the above.  I can't speak for any other discipline, but within political science this isn't really how it works.  Yes, a lot if not most interesting work is published from scholars outside of the top ten schools.  But I'm at a program that's in the 20-30 range, and have attended/been exposed to literally ~60 job candidates, and they're all from one of the top 10 programs.  There's a bottleneck. 

The people getting hired at my university are from that first tier, and then it's turtles all the way down.  Does that mean they're "better?"  Fuck no.  The most recent Americanist hire, man, I had the one cohort I respect the most tell me my work makes her's laughable.  But that's how it goes - I could never get a tenure-track job at the department that's about to give me a phud.  Such is the reality of the bottleneck.  All bow before it.