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Thursday, 14 April 2011

Curbing College Costs

Posted on 08:23 by hony
I'm pretty much on the same page as Freddie in regards to his ideas for curbing college costs, except for one thing. Freddie writes:
Penalize taking longer than four years; incentivize taking less. Student debt figures are inflated by the fact that so many students take more than four years to finish college. Since there clearly isn't much in the way of social expectations pushing students to finish in the traditional four years, it may be time for schools who have to start to enact penalties for students taking longer than four years.


It took me five years to graduate from college, I won't deny it. Between a bad semester, a major change...and the fact that I had to work a full-time job to afford to stay in college I simply had to be there five years. Was I just one of those people, as Freddie suggests, who just wasn't meant to have a college degree? Should I have enlisted in the military instead of going to college? What, exactly, would have been the solution, in this "penalize your fifth year" world?

Freddie's idea that a fifth year should be penalized relies on the assumption of perfection; that everyone who goes to college knows (at entry) exactly what they want to do when they get there, and that no extenuating circumstances will occur. Halfway through my second year, I realized that biochemistry was the very essence of what I didn't want to do the rest of my life, and smartly changed majors. About 2/3rds of my credits transferred to my bioengineering degree program. The others were lost. My last four semesters, I took 18, 17, 18, and 18 hours to get finished. Should those 36 hours my fifth year been penalized? Made more expensive? Or just denied to me? That would have been so much worse.

One might argue "But Alex, you're a bright kid, you definitely prospered." That is true but it is precisely because "really, really smart, borderline ADD kids who aren't very mature when they get to college" like I was exist that we must not penalize that students take different paths in life, and we must not try to corral everyone through a single mold. The general consensus outside the United States is that primary and secondary education works better the more individualized the curriculum is; students simply learn differently and at different rates. Why wouldn't this be true in college too?

I am not trying to defend the partiers. A fair share of the fifth-year seniors at my school were there because taking light semester loads allowed them more party time. The people I am trying to defend are the people who know that they need an education in order to fulfill the American dream and prosper. The ones who are smart enough to know that manual labor is a dying art in this country and if you want job security and health insurance you better have a college degree. Those kids, like me, head off to college without a clue what exactly they will do with that degree. Usually they figure it out, later rather than sooner. I think Freddie would agree with me, sadly, that the time when good jobs are abundant for people with high school diplomas is effectively over. Freddie champions self-determinism. Why penalize it?


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