The Purpose of College is Employment

[tuxthepenguin]

Employment is the important thing.

Education is not job training.

Yes: Higher ed, particularly undergraduate education, should be completely predicated on future employment goals.

No: There's more to life than 9 to 5.

Well...kind'a...: This is what I think...

I'm not on board with this framing of the issue.

We take lots of classes while in college, so we accomplish more than one thing. I don't talk to a lot of students that only hope to get a job out of their college experience. Even the biggest Trump supporters enjoy taking history classes and learning about things that will have no direct financial benefit to them in the future.

One of the outcomes we should be striving for is employment opportunities. College is expensive. It only works if we're able to transform students from low earners to high earners on average. (We do a remarkable job of this now.)

Something that we should not be doing is job training. It's great to offer classes that have an intellectual component and a job skills component like making pretty graphs in Excel. Degrees that are nothing but job training are not likely to have much value in the workplace. There are better ways to get that type of training.

tldr: There's no one purpose for college and no conflict.

[financeguy]

I wanted to address a related issue. When you are in a field where the degree is a legal requirement or a requirement of the body that grants the main professional designation of the field, it doesn't really matter if you can justify attending in some other way.

In my field of finance, there is much more value placed on the professional designation associated with one's specialty. If one wants to be a CPA, CFP or CFA, for example, no one will care or even ask if they studied accounting, financial planning or investments in their bachelors program. They will, however, be required to have an undergraduate degree of some kind (or more) to actually use any of those credentials even if they have passed the exams prior to attaining a degree. Tons of licenses have similar requirements of just holding "a degree."

I'd be curious to hear what the situation is from others in different professional fields.

[apl68]

If you want to be a professional librarian, you have to have a master's in library science/information science.  Your undergrad degree doesn't matter.  The MLS very much does.  Our state's largest public library system hired an experienced politician and business type to run their system, because they wanted somebody who knew how to handle big money and build public support--and he STILL had to go back to school and get the MLS.

[Ruralguy]

Many engineering jobs will require  job candidates to pass debugging tests (coding tests for coders, circuit tests for electronics people, etc.).  These  probably have some standardizing, but I bet some employers just make them up for themselves. In addition, there is ABET certification of programs, but plenty of employers hire people from programs without ABET certification if they have the skills.  Probably others have different experiences.....

[Aster]

I love looking at this graph. It resembles a middle finger.

This is an excellent example of form fitting sentiment.

[marshwiggle]

I love looking at this graph. It resembles a middle finger.

This is an excellent example of form fitting sentiment.

Are you surprised?
The outcome probably would have been equally predictable if the question had been something like:
"Is Employment a Ridiculous Reason for Education?"

Absolutes get knee-jerk responses, but prevent the kind of nuanced analysis that is much more productive.