Monday, January 5, 2009

Work Study

Charles Murray, writing in the New York Times, says the typical undergraduate degree is meaningless as a career starter.  He says we should discourage the B.A. in favor of professional certification, which would tie education directly to employable skills. Why demand students get a degree they neither need nor want, when most of them just want a job?

Read it here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A great article that serves as a sort of companion to this, by Victor Davis Hanson in the Autumn 2008 issue of City Journal: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_classical_education.html

The contempt for western civilization and its canon and traditions of inquiry all but ensure that a classical education is not attainable in most institutions. If it's not in the cards to attend Hillsdale, colleges could at least turn out students who can use excel spreadsheets and know 'how' to work. But Charles Murray assumes that most kids actually want a job when they graduate! By the time these students in the liberal arts complete four years of multi-cultural indoctrination, they are not only unfit for a career-oriented job, but have come to view entrepreneurialism as a pathology, a criminal means to exploit 'the other.' Imagine the classroom hours spent on man-made global warming for example; to think what that time and tuition could have spent on, its quite breathtaking!