I agree. But our society has completely bought into the idea that it is. Even the so-called educators have. And as we know from Gatto and others, this is not a recent distortion, but one that goes back to the origin of public education.
And, there's merit in an under-graduate degree. There is merit in going to prison too. But that doesn't mean we don't have better alternatives.
1. Most of the professors I had cannot teach as well as a well-written textbook. You can choose your textbooks on Amazon. You cannot (usually) choose your lecture professor. With MIT open course, Berkeley webcast, nowadays you can even choose your professor for without going to college.
2. The good professors and grad student that you met in college, why can't you meet them when you are not in college? What stop you from send them emails or just stop by their offices anyway? In fact, I've talked to far more professors who are not in my college than ones that are.
3. People who want more than a vocational education will actively go out and get their knowledge. The internet + a good library + Amazon is a far larger reservoir of knowledge than any college. Why do you need an excuse like college to learn more?
4. People who just care about a vocational education, and really don't give a damn about liberal arts or general education, why should they let a college force them to learn things useless to them, trick them into thinking that a degree is equal to vocational training, and rob them of their money so they had to spend the rest of their life paying back loans?
5. People who network in college, what stops you from networking in the real world? What stop you from talking to people on a bus, in a park, in the subway, in a conference, in a bar, in a farmers market, in your jobs? Most people don't learn networking in college. They are given their network by dorm assignment. Of course, there are exceptions, and those are the people who eventually learn how to network in the real world anyway, so why not start in the real world?
I can go on for a while. My point is under-graduate college has it's place, but it certainly shouldn't be the only way.
Yes the post author is generalizing. But the fact remains true that most people are not getting what they want out of their college degrees. If that's the way we educate the mass, then there's something wrong with that.
What this hell is "our society"? Is it the most common occurring opinion of a set of people magnitudes larger than the set of people you will meet in your lifetime? Our society is made up of a lot of people. If some, even most, have bought into a particular idea, it still leaves many, many people who haven't.
So even if 99% of our society has bought into the idea that education must be vocational doesn't mean that one can't go through life spending most of her time with people in the other 1%.
As I advanced through my schooling, I had more and more Renaissance-personalties as teachers. At Rutgers University, I had enough choice that I was able to pick classes almost exclusively taught by people who didn't think of my education as vocational. Sure, it took a bit of work at the beginning of each semester - adding and dropping classes based on the first couple of lectures and conversations with the professors, but it certainly wasn't some insurmountable feat. Independent studies helped a lot, also.
IMO, there's a greater pattern here - a large part of life is about avoiding the vast majority of people who focus their lives around petty nonsense.
PS - Unless you're talking about maximizing social productivity of some kind, in which case, yes, it is a shame that most people see themselves as slaves being trained to do a job. The average person would be a lot happier and productive if we were to pursue our interests for their own sake, but that's their mistake to make.
Certainly it's possible to deviate from the consensus, at least up to a point, and I'm all in favor of doing so.
I think that's the point that the blog is trying to make: college has become something of less value, even in the minds of the people who attend it. No longer is it some special thing, even though it should be a special thing. Now it's just an extra 4 or 6 years applied to the end of your existing 13 years in school. Some people apply to college just to go through the motions, and attend it in the same way, and I hate that. College has turned into another mandatory for most people.
I'm not saying there's no purpose to college - my first semester was all mandatory know-nothing classes, but this coming semester I'm in an advanced design course, an upper-level coding class, and I'm taking "intro to religion" for fun - but at the same time, there's a very important point being made with this blog, and that's "Only go to college if you really want to get something out of it." Otherwise, there are other more satisfying routes available.
I think it was Einstein who said one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too, after their own fashion.
When I'm in a beginner's coding class, sitting next to a girl who doesn't know how to program and hates the idea of programming, and she'd rather copy my stuff, then it lowers my ideal of what the class ought to be. When the professor cares more about making a joke and talking about her son than she is about teaching as effectively as possible, it lowers my ideal.
Not everybody's like that - I love my roommate and some of my floormates - but my point was that college is not for everybody. For instance, at this moment it's not for me. I've got an idea for something I want to do with my life - not my whole life, but my life right now - and I'm benefitting from planning parts of my life around that idea, and seeing it grow, and possibly seeing it succeed. After that, I'll probably end up back in college, but older and wiser and surrounded, hopefully, by people who've gone through similar experiences.
It may be different in later years, but that's my perspective as a freshman. College is built around the social. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't matter as much.
But Universities are big - surely, you can find people who are of the same world view. Again, at Rutgers, we had ~40k undergrads. Given that many people, it wasn't all that hard to get together a suite of 6 math majors, hang up a huge whiteboard (technically, shower wall from Home Depot), and geek it up :)
As far as classes, it gets a lot better after you finish the common pre-requisites (if your school doesn't offer "honors" sections of those). When you have the choices of picking one of a dozen classes each taught by a couple of different professors (I'm thinking across-semesters), smart people often start gravitating toward the same teachers - ask around.
Hopefully this'll be the first semester where I'm really going interesting stuff. One of my first-semester professors let me and a friend into one of his top-level courses, so I'm excited for that.
Any large university will give you enough of a selection of professors for you to be able to focus on the good ones.
College helps us learn new ways of thinking and teaches us a lot of the theory and some of the practice behind the profession we think we want to go into. A college education is no guarantee for success, but it does tend to say something about the person.
i agree, gwb got his mba from hbs, that should say something about the degree ... errr ... the person
I'm glossing over a lot of history here (the GI bill had several tremendous effects on postwar America; suburbanization is another huge one), but this was one of the main times when what it meant to go to college shifted.
* Though veterans of any race theoretically had tuition paid at any college, they were still mostly segregated.