Against College Is State-Sponsored Secondary

¶ … Against College Is state-sponsored secondary education justified? Should taxpayers subsidize higher-level schooling? There are those who believe this is an investment in overproduction and waste. Educator and writer Caroline Bird, for example, questions the entire value of college let alone the fact that it should be supported financially. "We've been told," she states in her essay "The Case Against College," "that young people have to go to college because our economy cannot absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds.

But disillusioned graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds either." Bird also stresses that true learning does not have to take place in the classroom: "Of all the forms in which ideas are disseminated, the college professor lecturing a class is the slowest and most expensive.

You don't have to go to college to read the great books or learn about the great ideas of Western Man." Just go to a library, listen to a tape or read books on the topic and teach oneself. In fact, when students talk about their on-campus learning experience, it is a "personal" rather than "intellectual" knowledge gathering.

Also, why should the hard-working United States citizens pay for this learning this education that only goes to some of their youth? Says Bird: Taxpayers now provide more than half of the astronomical sums that are spent on higher education.

But less than half of today's high school graduates go on, raising a new question of equity: Is it fair to make all the taxpayers pay for the minority who actually go to college? We decided long ago that it is fair for childless adults to pay school taxes because everyone, parents and nonparents alike, profits by a literate population. Does the same reasoning hold true for state-supported higher-education? There is no conclusive evidence on either side.

A line, notes Bird, it is only the minority of students who go to college for intellectual growth. The rest of the high school graduates should think more clearly about their reasons for heading to college. Perhaps this is something that should be postponed to when ideas about future direction are better formulated.

"The rest of our high school graduates need to look at college more closely and critically, to examine it as a consumer product, and decide if the cost in dollars in time, in continued dependency, and in future returns, is worth the very large investment each student and his family must make." In "College Pressures," William Zinsser writes about the burdens that college students have while they are in school.

Students are torn: Part of them wants to enjoy their college days and take courses they most enjoy -- even if they do not offer a successful future -- and the other part feels guilty for not meeting parental expectations. Most students also feel very pressured to fill every minute with studying -- how horrible it would be to fail! Zinsser agrees with Carlos Horta who stated: "Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience." Adds Zinsser: "College should be open-ended; at the end it should open many, many roads.

Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along." Zinsser's thoughts, therefore, are somewhat similar to Bird's in that many teenagers (for that is what they still are) are often too young to know their ultimate direction. They have to take several detours and trips around the block to know where they are actually headed. Russell Baker adds his two cents about this topic, as well. With typical wit, he states in "School vs.

Education": "By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments." So, why then do youth need to go on to college? For Baker, going to school and getting an education are two quite different things. Similar to Bird, he notes that going to college does not.