Not only are kids expected to stay in school until their early/mid 20's, depriving them of necessary real-world developmental experience as discussed in the article, they are expected to accept decades' worth of debt to pay for it. The American education model is poison.
I believe it's the worlds greatest deception. At 16 I was working as a reviewer, I worked as an assistant (note: not apprentice) electrician for a couple of years doing identical work to my father who was certified (on several jobs he did solely the testing to pass the work as legal) and right now I'm working in windows and siding. I presently earn more than any of my friends, and job prospects still land me at the head of my group of friends in 10/20 years, only my wife is likely to be earning more than me. I've done virtually everything involved in building a house save for foundation work, and was taught this all by my father. Nothing I did in school prepared me for any of this. Outside of manual labour, I'm a writer, I repair and upgrade friends and acquaintances for cash on the side . . . all of which I did not learn from school.
Nothing in my life has really come from school. I'm only indebted to three teachers, my English teacher who encouraged me into writing, my science teacher who taught me to watch and question everything and my woodwork teacher who encouraged me to hit nails into things all class. For 11 years of education, little in retrospective appears to have been useful. My greatest lessons were of casual knowledge, not of information or education by any institutional standard. Persistence and intrigue.
Well there's a lot of cuts and scrapes in my work and First Aid training was required, unlicensed doctor was just a natural progression . . . lol no, there was supposed to be a 'computers for' in there, but a lack of proofreading bit me in the ass.
Ironically, my mother was a nurse and I just picked up on how to patch minor injuries up. Nothing sutures better than sterilized royal blue thread in a hurry.
Early/mid twenties nothing; I'm 28 and have never been out of school! Why? Because I'm interested in research, and the career path for research is school->school->moreschool, until you get your PhD. It's possible to do others, of course, but that's the default one. And PhDs take longer now than they did a generation ago, too (in science/engineering, they averaged 5 years in 1965; 6 in 1975, and 7 in 1985; been holding steady at 7 since). On the plus side, it's a lot easier to do side projects in grad school, and they sometimes spin off into startups; whereas undergrad is much more by-the-book.
Do Phd's really take that long? I've never know anyone to take more than three years of pure research if they are full time, but this is in the biological sciences or computer science.
Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas (http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis...) discusses time to degree extensively, and the short answer is "yes." The longer answer: I think the average (or median?) time-to-degree for Ph.Ds in the humanities is 9.7 years, while in the sciences it's now hovering around 6 years and trending upwards.
Note that this merely measures the time from start to finish, including breaks.
That's the average from a National Science Foundation report, counting only active semesters (wall-clock time is more like 9 years on average): http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf06319/ [Figs 4-14 and 4-15]. It does include the years of classes, not just the research years, but classes are usually only two full-time years or so (less if you got a master's first).
It's quite possible to do it in less, if things go right, though in the areas of CS I'm familiar with doing it in under 5 is a stretch (maybe if you're doing a pure theory thesis). But often things don't go right. Lots of people end up writing their PhD on their 2nd or 3rd project, not their first, either because it turned out not to interest them or turned out to be fatally flawed. Or they end up having to switch advisors for reasons ranging from personality clashes to the advisor leaving their university.
Things can also go faster or slower depending on how funding goes. The ideal is to be funded on a grant or fellowship to do your own research full-time. Less ideal is being funded on a grant to do something other than your research, often code-monkey implementation for some big DARPA project or something, which means you basically have a separate part-time job; or if you're supported by TAing, that's a different kind of part-time job.
Yeah I understand how it works (I have done postgraduate research) - I didn't know you were including undergraduate/postgraduate studies, I thought you were meaning thesis only!
Err, I wasn't including undergraduate, just graduate. At least at the schools I know about, there isn't really much of a distinction between "thesis" time and PhD time generally. There's quals, but they aren't that important at a lot of places. Mostly if people say "I'm a 4th-year PhD student", it means they entered the program 4 years previously. They probably spent most of the first two years taking classes, though that varies too (I spread my classes over three years to have more time to start research earlier). I'm not even really sure how much time to allocate to my thesis, because there wasn't some official point at which I stopped doing classes and started doing thesis.
Edit: Actually, it just occurred to me you might be in Europe, where the norm is a three-year PhD thesis, in a pretty time-defined program. The PhD program norms are pretty different between Europe and the U.S. overall (I'm in the U.S.). Is that an accurate guess? If so, that'd explain the confusion. =] The U.S. program is fairly ad-hoc: you enter grad school and then there's various things that you can do in various orders, for various durations, depending on the school. Often you don't have to get a masters first either, so you sort of get that along the way, and you might be doing PhD research at the same time as that too.
Good guess. Where I'm from you can start on your phd work in your fifth year of study normally (for some earlier), and it takes 2-3 years after that to complete your project + thesis.
I think the worst part is that they're piling more and more school on top of the higher performers, depriving them of the chance to explore outside of school.
For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?
You can have both, but chances are it's still going to eat into the other activity.
Business is just one thing you could do in the time not spent on advanced courses. It's nice to have the option but it also pressures students towards more curricular learning as opposed to self-motivated learning. For example you could spend 3 hours a day making iPhone apps, or spend that 3 hours studying. Chances are unless you become famous for your iPhone apps, those 3 hours acing your courses will seem more advantageous if you're college-oriented.
You'd be lucky if you're so well as off academically as to have free time and still ace courses.
I'm taking 3 APs and a few past-AP classes (classes for which APs don't exist), and in my free time working at making iPhone apps/mobile contractor work with a few of my similarly motivated friends. It's not exactly what people around here consider a "business" (i.e. startup), but it does show that it's possible.
Most things are doable if you're motivated enough. That's not the problem at hand though. The problem is how can we make it easier for students to do what they do best.
I think it's a good idea to focus less on standardized curriculum. For those laissez-faire lovers, standardized curriculum are the equivalent of tight-controlling governments. Some students may need the control, but to those who are self-motivated, a strong regiment just hurts learning.
That's true even if you have a great background and plenty of funding. Few businesses make more than the founders would have made working for someone else for the same number of hours. This is not to say dropping out of high school is a bad idea, just far more risky than successful people might think.
The debt burden for most students in higher education is a major problem. We're almost at the point that getting a college degree is not an economically viable option. This has very bad long term consequences.
I think at $35k/degree the public university route is probably the most bang for your buck. I wonder how these schools compare to similar state run schools in Europe/Asia.
One thing to keep in mind is that around 50% of all students fail to complete their degree in 6 years. We're talking about 4 year degrees here. I believe around 30% never complete a degree. The opportunity cost of getting a degree for many majors makes it, from a monetary point of view, not worthwhile.
If I could do it all over again I would have gotten a two year degree in nursing and been in the workforce at 20. I ended up going to graduate school in mathematics and was in school until 29. I lost 9 years of earnings and my pay as a community college instructor is less than what my nursing friends make. There are other factors to take into consideration but here I'm only considering things from a money point of view.
Rather quickly, all meaning would vanish from our work. Even if we enjoyed the activity of our job, intrinsically, it would rapidly lose depth and relevance. It’d lose purpose. We’d become bored, lethargic, and disengaged.
Very true, reader5000. And this would not have happened without compulsory education.
We're spending huge amounts and losing big time. As usual, the nanny state is a fail.
Instinctively, we knew this was true when we got that first job. We felt a sense of real work getting done and hopefully a lot less bored out our skull than in the classroom.
The real world is always more of a challenge than the documented world. You can read music all you want, but won't know a damn thing about making it til you strum a guitar. And you can sit in a classroom 5 days a week for 4 years and not know German as well as would fully immersed in it for 2 months.
