Why Go To College?

I am a college graduate. I received my degree a number of years ago and I have been working in my chosen field for most of the years since my graduation. I attended 3 different schools as I floundered about trying to decide exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I learned very little that was of real value. This begs the question: why do most people continue to push kids to go to college?

Attending college or not was never really in question for me, I was placed on the path very early on. There was no debate about it...I was going. I took all of the advanced placement courses offered in my school and decided on the vague profession of "engineering" as my aim. I knew basically nothing about what I was doing and I was about to spend massive amounts of someone else's money (scholarship!) on this decision. Naturally I hated everything about these courses within two months of beginning and I found my way out of there and eventually into information systems.

Somewhere over the years there seems to have been a shift in the perception of education in the US. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this shift started, but the results are evident. You may have seen the "Education Connection" advertisements on television. According to them you will potentially earn ONE MILLION more dollars over your lifetime with a degree than someone without. Has college become merely a glorified vocational school, is it sliding into complete irrelevance, or is everything A-OK?

Technical education has started to present a very unique set of problems for higher learning institutions. Look for posts about these issues later on, perhaps as part of a series.