this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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True, but there's a certain set of STEM students who resent that their BS degrees are not simply technical certifications. The idea of college is supposed to be that you come out a well rounded person who had exposure to a lot of fields of human endeavor at a sophisticated level compared to high school.
Now, can we argue that not everyone qualified to pursue a technical subject needs a well-rounded education? Sure, but I don't want to work with or for those people. Even for someone who rolled their eyes through English Comp 101, you can expect that they've been taught how to write a damn paragraph and how to engage with a narrative beyond the surface level.
This is such a weird idea to me. For my money, the people I've met who have a more well rounded understanding of the world aren't the people who've attended expensive colleges and been tucked away in the lap of privilege their entire lives, it's the people who've been through some shit and come out the other end.
Life will round you out if you go out and live it. And if you do the kind of research and study on your own that anybody poking around on some obscure Lemmy instance is more than capable of, you can do plenty to expand your horizons far beyond anything you'd learn in college.
I'm not against college, I think education is great, but people seem to think the only way to learn anything is to listen to lectures and take tests. Like, yeah, that's a way to do it, but it certainly isn't the only way to do it or even the best way to do it.
What it is, almost certainly, is the most expensive way to do it.
So like, to me, when you imply that people who didn't spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to have someone else read to them can't be every bit as educated as those who did, it's a little classist and a little insulting.
I think should be normal to expect that basic level of all-around competence from high school graduates.
Obviously high school systems have their own significant failures, though.