Читать книгу Paying For College For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 22

Increasingly, surveys show that students’ biggest objective for their college education is not surprisingly for their job, career and income prospects. And for good reason — a four-year college degree is time consuming and costly and parents and students rightfully want to see a return on that huge investment.

Unfortunately, many existing degree programs are not well aligned to graduate’s first jobs and only 16 percent of students believe college is preparing them for their first jobs. I’ve known plenty of students who end up at a particular college because they or their parents thought the name and image it carried was good. I can’t emphasize enough and it’s a point which will recur throughout this book that you should take the time and effort to explore what it is you’re actually signing up for at a given school that on the surface seems appealing.

With regards to college not actually prepping students for their first jobs, in his book, “A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College” (BenBella), Ryan Craig cites the former Computer Science chairperson at Yale (where both Craig and I graduated from) Roger Schank, as saying that the faculty in that department are mostly theoreticians who don’t now do programming anymore and instead are interested in teaching about new ideas and their latest theories. Schank was hearing increasing numbers of complaints from Yale undergrads who were being snubbed in hiring by Google. Schank also cites how the head of Columbia University’s economics department told him that calculus is required for the major simply to reduce the volume of students who want to work in finance and seek out the major.

“Many faculty members resist the idea that teaching should be aligned to employment opportunities,” says Craig.

He provides numerous examples of colleges failing to ever solicit input from employers as to what they should consider teaching undergraduates.

“The implication — one that is absolutely in the mainstream of faculty thinking — is that updating curriculum to reflect current labor market needs may not be a worthwhile pursuit because such needs will change in five to ten years. Can you imagine similar thinking in any other sector of the economy?”

This is, of course, ridiculous. Even though colleges like my alma mater Yale charge big bucks to families for the educational services they are providing, they don’t think enough of the students and their parents who are paying the bills as their customers. Hence, the disconnect about best preparing their graduates for the modern job market.

Career services is another area where colleges and universities too often fail to meet the employment imperative. I frequently hear this complaint from parents and college students alike including from top name schools. With increasing recruiting and hiring being done online, fewer employers are finding the need to recruit on campus and go through career services.