Well, it’s official-ish: college is overrated.
Or at least overvalued.
I guess two hundred grand doesn’t buy you what it used to!
Hmm…
I wonder why not?
Could it be that people in college are too interested in folding paper in half seven times, or (NSFW) getting it on with their profs (really NSFW), and that’s distracting them from their studies? Is it possible that we’ve gone soft as a society, leaving people unable to understand how to prioritize funny (seriously, NSFW) and useful (this one you can open at work)? Is it a problem when wasting time is so institutionilized that the Princeton Review reports on it? (That one you can open at work.)
If we assume that the source of the problem is indeed student apathy, I guess we could hypothesize a few ways to solve the problem and then test those hypotheses. It would probably make sense to start with the two most obvious and cost-effective ways to fix it:
First, students need to take studying more seriously.
Second, that’s not gonna happen.
So much for cheap and easy.
Moving along, and adding the parameter that stupidity will not magically disappear from student behavior any more than schadenfreude will magically disappear from society, we turn to more expensive and elaborate “solutions!”
- Remove doofustry from primary education.
- Create a year of compulsory national service after high school. You choose: military or civic, but either way, you spend a year rubbing shoulders with people from all across the nation, picking up trash, painting playgrounds, pouring concrete, toting a weapon overseas, protecting a forest, teaching elementary school.
- Scrap the 4-year college model and make a liberal arts education a part-time, life-long endeavor. I need to know history now, as an adult. I didn’t need it as an 18 year old. And writing/communicating should be a class that people never stop taking. Ever.
- Create more programs to help college grads get jobs.
- Teach more advanced reading comprehension in grade school. On topics a little more substantial than what Da Coach thinks about soccer.
- How many is this so far? If it says 6, then is this point number 6? Or 7? Don’t get angry, I’m a product of public schools.
- Sing about math. Or not. To each, his own.
- Pay teachers more.
- Convince Hollywood to make more movies about engineers and mathematicians. Movies that make people want to go into those professions. Like how Rocky made everyone want to go beat someone up, and how Star Wars made everyone want a light saber. Like that, except with spreadsheets.
Are some of these tactics a little skewed toward the “gee, how would we pull that off?!” end of the spectrum? Yessiree they are, no question about it.
But they’re still all easier than learning Chinese, which is what we may all have to do within a generation or two if we don’t hop to it!
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I'm Jason. I make people shine. My mission is to help 1 million people tell their stories better. 
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
You seem to really like mathematics, which is nice because that’s what I studied. I’m in two minds about how useful it really is though, beyond the basics that everyone should know – I think it would be better if more people understood Bayesian statistics, for example, because that would help people make better decisions.
On the other hand, I think that education can perhaps even be a negative in the modern world, because nowadays confidence is perhaps really important. There’s a lot of information to deal with and most people (perhaps) can’t tell the difference between someone who really knows their stuff and someone who thinks they do and acts accordingly.
To a large extent I learned in my studies to be humble, to realize my assumptions and intuition are often wrong and that there’s so much to know that I can’t be certain of the right answer in a lot of situations.
Perhaps I went too far and it has made me less effective at actually achieving stuff? Sometimes it’s better to proceed in ignorance and find out later that you probably couldn’t do what you thought?
So as a bookish, studious person I think sometimes people who were less so perhaps had the right idea. Good for them.