When people think about this subject in the U.S. they usually think about universities.
While I don’t regret my university time for a moment and feel I gained a lot from it, as an educational experience I felt it…lacked.
From a purely economic perspective, I think university education is not so great. Without a scholarship, you really have to consider if four years tuition (plus interest usually) plus four years of *not* working is worth your enhanced earning potential.
Also a lot of prestigious universities tend to be very graduate/research oriented; from what I’ve observed, it’s uncommon to see a university really focused on undergraduate education.
Also, university education is stupidly expensive. When I think about it, it is baffling that it can possibly cost what it does. Then I think about the ridiculous amount of infrastructure a university maintains, and it starts to make at least a little sense.
So my idea is to create a chain of subject-focused post-secondary academies which also double as HR firms. They teach only one subject, teach it as well as they possibly can, and find jobs for their graduates (and also possibly pre-graduate internships). By keeping the number of students relatively low, the infrastructure costs should be much more manageable. There’s also the added revenue of being an HR firm (% of first 6mo-year salary as finder’s fee to business). Another possible business connection is to foster relationships where we accept business’s new hires as students and their employer pays for their education.
Instructors would be hired based on their capabilities as teachers, and paid to teach. It would be necessary, I think, to focus a great deal of revenue into instructor salaries, given the probable low supply of qualified and interested applicants. However, since the academy is so focused in intent, some level of instructor training may be doable, and as the academy expands to multiple locations, it can maintain a single general structure for its program of studies and teaching materials. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.
I would probably just start with software engineering academies, because I can see the need there (it is my field after all). If that worked, then possibly it could expand to other subjects. Also we might be able to harvest the near-graduates for free software development as class projects (if it’s not good enough for us, why should we expect it to be good enough for anyone else?).
EDIT: I took out my money calculations, because I think I did them at 2 in the morning and they were really wrong.
1 comment so far ↓
Being out of college for 2 and a half years now, I realized some things about the job market and college. If someone who doesn’t want go on to graduate school, they would find out that there isn’t much with just a bachelors degree with little experience. Now, even though they can turn to the career center for help but they aren’t exactly the best people to help with you to finding a job.
Reflecting back on it now, I feel that this process could be a lot better. For one, HR people should have been in the industry that they are trying to find positions for. They aren’t the best people when determining qualifications for possible hirings. I learned that the hard way when I went on a job interview where I was extremely under-qualified for.
Two, there should be a meeting with your adviser along with a representative from graduate school and career center after your second year about on where you want your career to go and have regular meetings about it. I felt that if I knew what I know now back then, I would have try harder to get into graduate school.
Overall, I think there should be changes about life after college. Instead of trying to figure it yourself and getting answers individually, it should be a collective effort about it. I probably would have benefit from it instead of believing that I would be ok with just a bachelors.
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