How to Choose a College

[luminado]

Hey fellows here is my discussion about to choose a college. For me you should talk with current students and also some senior students. Check other student opinions about the things you want to know about that. Check graduation rates as most of the students pick up without ever researching graduation rates. Check out that how happy the freshman are. Make sure you can afford the schools so you could come out with less burden of debts then usual.

[MOWOG]

That's all baloney. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where you matriculate. What matters is what you do while you are there.

[strad]

That's all baloney. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where you matriculate. What matters is what you do while you are there.

That and how Obama rates it.

[Lycoming]

Step 1: Get a pencil. Make sure it's nice and sharp.
Step 2: Get a list of schools you can afford to go to and set it down on a table in front of you
Step 3: Stab yourself in the eye with said pencil
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit

Note that stabbing yourself in the eye with a sharp pencil is significantly cheaper but only slightly less painful than going through a 4 year engineering degree at an accredited institution. Thus, you spend less and get more out of it. Therefore, you profit. This works in pretty much any country.

On a marginally more serious note, unsolicited advice is unsolicited.

[KeithYoung]

I really, really wish we lived in a society where College wasn't so "necessary". Practically everyone goes to College now. The fact is I could have spent twice as much on books as I did, learned 3 times faster, not have to relocate 1/4 across America, and still have been TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars ahead.

Me and a few guys avoiding college could have bought our own wind tunnel with the money we'd save.

I could have bought a mini supercomputer and a full seat of commercial CFD software (instead of the open source stuff I use now).

My advice is avoid college as much as possible. In the end I went since I was competing with degrees for jobs. It was just sort of bad timing getting into automotive in Michigan when I did. I wish I could have avoided it. I landed some business and paid off most of my debt, but a lot is still there and that money could have been put to better things and I could have learned faster than the bottom 25% of the class.

[luminado]

I really, really wish we lived in a society where College wasn't so "necessary". Practically everyone goes to College now. The fact is I could have spent twice as much on books as I did, learned 3 times faster, not have to relocate 1/4 across America, and still have been TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars ahead.

Me and a few guys avoiding college could have bought our own wind tunnel with the money we'd save.

I could have bought a mini supercomputer and a full seat of commercial CFD software (instead of the open source stuff I use now).

My advice is avoid college as much as possible. In the end I went since I was competing with degrees for jobs. It was just sort of bad timing getting into automotive in Michigan when I did. I wish I could have avoided it. I landed some business and paid off most of my debt, but a lot is still there and that money could have been put to better things and I could have learned faster than the bottom 25% of the class.

Sorry to hear about your experience. Well buddy it is not only with you but let me tell you one thing that if something has gone bad with you that does not mean that it would happen as it is with some one else. My experience was quite good so i shared my tips here.

[MOWOG]

It seems that most people don't realize that college is an industry now, just as running prisons is now an industry. (Some might say there are certain parallels between the two).

When my daughter graduated high school, I encouraged her to take a year off before starting college. As a divorced father, everyone thought I was just being cheap and not wanting to kick in for her tuition. It is only recently, and now that she has young children of her own, that she has acknowledged the wisdom of my advice.

Spending all that money to "find" yourself" is ridiculous. If you don't know what you want an education for, then you are wasting your time and money going to college. Go find out what the real world is like and THEN decide what sort of education you need to support your goals.

The notion of "getting a good education so you can get a good job" is obsolete. There ARE no more good jobs for people with a liberal arts degree. The good jobs are for those who have had the specialized training necessary to be useful in today's economy.

For many, college is just a stall, a way to dodge becoming an adult for a few more years. It's a time to get drunk and get laid and pretend that your adolescence will never end. At least in the US, the federal government encourages this irrational behavior with its student loan programs, which are similar to the government backed home loan programs that exploded in such spectacular fashion about 6 years ago. The colleges and universities push those programs because, frankly, they make a lot of money on tuition. These are now huge corporations with their beady little eyes on the bottom line more than on the quality of their product.

I would postulate that the majority of money and time spent on college is wasted. There was a time when we went to college, got a good job, worked at the same employer for 50 years, then retired. Those are the days of Ozzie and Harriet. That world imploded many decades ago. Most folks change jobs many times in their lifetimes. Companies feel virtually no loyalty to employees any more. The world has changed. But the college industry has succeeded in making people believe that nothing has changed and that it is still vital to get that BA degree at all costs. And it costs a LOT!

T'aint so.

The future of higher education is in online instruction.

[Richard]

Let's not tar all degrees with the same brush.

Doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc need broad based training that is conveniently bundled into what is called a degree at a facility where experienced people (called tutors) answer questions and provide insights that can't be found reading a book. They also have facilities to test theory and explore natural laws in ways that we can't do at home.

Those are the obvious examples, there are also pure subjects such as maths and sciences that level of training so individuals have the skillets to be effective in their careers.

Of course there are exceptions and it is not helped by the word "engineer" being ridiculously broad from the person fixing the washing machines (no degree required) to the person designing nuclear enrichment processes (PhD required).

[MOWOG]

I don't disagree with your comments, Richard. But I suggest that for many, spending a year or two in the real world before dashing off to law school or business school might be the right thing to do. As a former attorney, I can attest that many, many people who become lawyers wish they had chosen to do something else instead. The level of dissatisfaction among attorneys is staggeringly high. And while law school may be great intellectual training, by and large, the newly minted lawyers re not taught the first thing about how to make a living with their hard won (and expensive) knowledge.

I guess my point can be partially illustrated by own daughter's experience. In her junior year, she took a semester abroad in Italy. Now, I happen to think that travel provides the best education there is and I was all for the idea. When she got back, I asked her what the highlight of her experience was. She said it was seeing the Rolling Stones in concert outdoors somewhere near Rome. "Mick is cool", she pronounced.

Sic transit gloria..........