As with many things in life, what people tend to get out of college is in direct proportion to the time and energy they put in.
But even for those who study hard, take more classes than they have to, utilize resources such as the campus career center and spend the rest of their time being involved on campus and making connections that will hopefully last a lifetime, the value of a college degree is decreasing steadily.
This is particularly true when the value of the degree is compared with the cost of obtaining one. The cost of a college degree continues to increase, despite wider access to information and resources. Without leaving your bedroom you can find university course schedules from Google, purchase textbooks on Amazon, download lectures from iTunes, and join an online chat discussions with students and professors from all over the world - all for a small fraction of tuition prices others pay to do the same from their dormrooms.
In his article "Is a College Degree Worthless?" Jack Hough from SmartMoney argues well that the problems with our education system aren't just those of rising costs:
A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, as I'll show. The employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards, you'll see, are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education.
The author does not argue against higher education, mind you, but rather of the degree system as it stands in America. He describes elite universities which have evolved into "machines that cull the bright from the dull and charge mightily to brand them for success -- which these students would have achieved anyhow, because they're bright."
He argues that we need a national, independent standard for certifying what students have learned, similar perhaps to the comprehensive AP exams given to high school grads with which students can obtain college credits in various subjects.
The system must change before students are made poorer, society grows less equal, the bright are left ignorant and "college" comes to mean a four-year pajama party intruded upon by the occasional group discussion on gender studies. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it.
He advocates "knowledge transcripts" which could be continually updated much like a resume or credit report, regardless of where a person learned the information or how much they paid for it. What would these standardized, independent reports accomplish?
Employers would have better proof of what students knew. Policymakers, too. Students wouldn't pile on debt. They wouldn't be misled by a college degree into believing they knew more than they did. They'd become true stewards of their own lifelong education.
A grand vision indeed.
