Did you attend a college or university?

[Edward]

The cost of college today is what gets me. I was fortunate to attend at a time when it was affordable to anyone who wanted to go. Tuition was $4/hour. My entire undergraduate degree cost less than $5,000.

The saddest thing I see, year on year, teaching at a university are the kids who calculate their entire degree's value purely on whether it improves employment prospects, or likely salary. I don't blame the personally, that's the world into which they've been forced, but nonetheless, there's a whole generation out there woh view education in the manner of Wilde's cynic.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Neither of my parents were college grads, but it was drilled into me from Day One that to get anywhere in life you needed either a journeyman's card in a building trade union or a college degree. Of course, for all of their talk and vicarious planning, I never got any financial aid from my parents. Had a tough row of it, but I was able to work my way through as a full time student within the desired 4 years, graduated with high honors, membership in two national honor societies, ect. Not bad for a kid who was a C student in secondary school and who was told by one college dean that I really wasn't "college material."

I absolutely loved my years as an undergrad. After I finished my week's studying, I'd spend entire weekends in the university library, reading up on any subject that suited my fancy. Very little alcohol, and no drugs: my "high" was the rush I'd get from acing courses and making dean's list. I wished that it could have gone on forever: those were very happy times.

Law school, on the other hand, was a four year long dark tunnel where I gave up the best years of my youth for poverty, exhaustion, and the unrelenting fear of washing out- while holding down a full time job. No social life, and even less romance: it was horrible. I had my doctorate in law by the time I was 26, and passed my bar exam on the first shot, but gave up a lot of fun times to attain that end. And again: no help from my parents-- although I did have an uncle who did a lot to encourage me along the way: pep talks over a few beers and such.

I've always said that while I did "make it on my own" I was able to do so because others had faith in me along the way: gave me chances to prove myself in a job, or a classroom, knowing darn well that I could have crashed, burned, and embarrassed the hell out of them for taking that chance. But they did so anyway. At the end of the day, I'll trade that for anything that a trust fund baby was handed on a silver platter.

If there's anything I loathe more than a slacker, it's some privileged S.O.B. who was born on third base and spends his entire life reminding the world of how well he can hit a triple. Slackers and "dirty old hippies" I can deal with: they're fairly benign even when they're irritating. But the to- the- manor- born types, who have handed everything to them and preach the virtues of hard work, God, and free enterprise to the rest of us and have never experienced anything actually earned through their own toil or sweat? Robespierre and the guillotine are too good for the likes of them.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Left Michigan for the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, working as an overnite trade specialist for a commodity brokerage, then transferred to Oklahoma City University School of Law. )

I went through Marshall late 70's early 80's. Night school 3 years, then full time days. They were transitioning from the days of Dean Noble Lee- when about 3% of an entering One L class could expect to graduate- to a saner model: guess they finally figured out that 97% would never be cutting alum fund checks.

When I started, tuition was $85./ semester hour. Now it's well over $1300. I obtained a practical legal education there: very strong on the basics, a lot of required courses emphasizing civil procedure and property law, and very few electives. I took one first year course where I had to memorize all of the elements of the various causes of action at common law: of no use whatsoever to me as a 21st century practitioner, and even the Brits jettisoned that impedimenta for statutory definitions in the early 20th Century.

My happiest day of law school was the day that I graduated. Hell will freeze over before I send them so much as a nickel for any fundraiser.

 

[Guttersnipe]

I graduated from (The Jesuit) University of San Francisco with a BS in economics. I also studied graduate economics there, but didn't finish my MS. Part of what old time San Franciscans used to call the "West Coast Ivy League," USF is to Stanford what Dartmouth is to Harvard or Yale.

...in other words, it's old and there's ivy on the walls, which means it must be a good school, right?

 

[Nobert]

I'm finishing up my associates at community college now, actually. Don't know which school I'm going to next, though. I'm visiting Columbia in Chicago in April, and I hope I like it because I've heard a lot of good things about that school. My other options include Illinois State U, Bradly U, and Northern Illinois U. Pursuing a degree in Journalism.

Have you considered the University of Missouri at Columbia? I admit, I'm biased because it's where my grandfather taught, but it is, arguably, the world's premier journalism school.

 

[ChiTownScion]

The only formal post-secondary instruction I've had is a correspondence course in electronics I took when I was twenty, and I can't remember if I ever finished it or not.

When I was college-age, it wasn't an option for family reasons more than anything else -- and as I got older, I never could see the need for going back and getting a degree. I had a productive career in broadcasting without one, I've been a professional writer for over thirty years without one, and whenever I want to learn something new, I just pick up a book and read it without one. So there y'go.

I think that the real losers in a scenario like this are the students that you could have had as classmates. I only speak for myself here, but I learned far more from my peers in college than from my profs. The 50 minute lectures and the reading assignments are only the starting points. It's the discussions in study groups, over lunch or drinks, or even late at night in a dorm room, that were the real avenues of learning.

My best peer teachers were the older students- some were vets, some were moms whose kids were grown. They were able to take the raw course material and marinate it with life experiences. They were great motivators, and they could smell BS at ten paces. I count their input as far more priceless than 99% of the profs I had, simply because they were far more thought provoking than the lectures of those professors. Just as one example, it would have been worth a year's tuition just to see you, having survived that t shirt factory job and a few years in local broadcasting, hand some sheltered grad assistant his/ her head if the topic was the organized labor movement of the 20th century.

As I say: maybe not your loss that you never enrolled..... but definitely, theirs.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was basically a case of, the day I turned 18, my mother lost AFDC benefits for me, and couldn't afford to support the other two kids on their benefits and what she was making at her minimum wage job. I had to go to work, immediately, just to keep the food on the table, and that wasn't easy to do considering what the economy was like then. But one way or another I was able to find enough work to help keep us going.

The thing is, education wasn't particularly emphasized in my family -- even in the way Edward was referring to it, as a way of earning a qualification to a big money career. What was important was putting the buck on the table *now,* and we were all expected to work as soon as it was legal. I started helping my grandmother with the bookkeeping and office work for the gas station when I was fourteen, and all thru my last two years of high school I was working there full time because she just wasn't healthy enough to do the work anymore. The future was something other people worried about -- we had all we could handle with the right-now.

I do think I got just as valuable an experience, though, by working up from the bottom as I did. No classroom could teach critical thinking better than a few years covering all the dissemblers, charlatans, and frauds to be found in the smalltown political arena. And no classroom could teach the realities of modern labor relations more thoroughly than a year spent working the line in a factory.

 

[Stormy]

Got my BA in History/Art History 2002 from UCLA, with a minor in French. History/Art History is not a double major in my case. It is a single one.

Currently enrolled in law school, just finished my third semester (of six)! :beer: :beer::beer:

Wow! We've so much in common. I graduated from UCLA in 1994 with a double manor in English and Political Science. I minored in French as well. I am currently in my final semester of law school.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I do think I got just as valuable an experience, though, by working up from the bottom as I did. No classroom could teach critical thinking better than a few years covering all the dissemblers, charlatans, and frauds to be found in the smalltown political arena. And no classroom could teach the realities of modern labor relations more thoroughly than a year spent working the line in a factory.

Sounds as if you did. I think that to be educated requires determination and unrelenting perseverance- and that comes into play whether one is an EE undergrad at MIT or thrown into the adult world without ceremony and has to rely upon self education. What we really hope to acquire at the end are learning skills and thought processes: only a jackass would ever presume that we acquire all of the answers, but perhaps we at least begin to learn to ask the right questions. All said, it's how we've played the cards that we were dealt that really determine the education we receive.

 

[Harp]

I went through Marshall late 70's early 80's. Night school 3 years, then full time days. They were transitioning from the days of Dean Noble Lee- when about 3% of an entering One L class could expect to graduate- to a saner model: guess they finally figured out that 97% would never be cutting alum fund checks.

A grade grievance clash with the academic dean over a strange mark in Crim led me to seek alternative venue and somewhat
surprisingly the school later asked me to volunteer as a tutor, to which I normally would have done but for the upheaval in my
personal life the grievance caused. I have always looked back with regret on this episode.

Did you ever have Professor Aaron Banks at Marshall?
Col Banks founded the US Army Special Forces-of which I am an alumnus-and I heard a rumor when I was at UIC that
he was on the Marshall faculty. I should have checked further but circumstance and youth procrastinate.
And never met the man.

 

[ChiTownScion]

A grade grievance clash with the academic dean over a strange mark in Crim led me to seek alternative venue and somewhat
surprisingly the school later asked me to volunteer as a tutor, to which I normally would have done but for the upheaval in my
personal life the grievance caused. I have always looked back with regret on this episode.

Did you ever have Professor Aaron Banks at Marshall?
Col Banks founded the US Army Special Forces-of which I am an alumnus-and I heard a rumor when I was at UIC that
he was on the Marshall faculty. I should have checked further but circumstance and youth procrastinate.
And never met the man.

Never had him, or even heard of him as a member of the faculty. I did have an old prof who was an assistant prosecutor at the Nuremburg War Trials. I'll never forget his comment regarding the change of following orders from an absolute defense to a qualified defense under the old Articles of War:

"And sure enough, every one of those Nazzy bastards tried to pull that 'I only followed orders' crap. All except for Hermann Goering.....GAWD, how I admired that ba***rd !! HE went down fighting like a MAN !!"

 

[Nobert]

The saddest thing I see, year on year, teaching at a university are the kids who calculate their entire degree's value purely on whether it improves employment prospects, or likely salary. I don't blame the personally, that's the world into which they've been forced, but nonetheless, there's a whole generation out there woh view education in the manner of Wilde's cynic.

I don't know if it's like this in the U.K., but colleges here are doing their best to pretzel-twist themselves into that mentality. The trade schools and technical colleges are now community colleges and the Universities are axing programs like History to focus on more career-applicable skills. STEM is a mantra and the humanities are moldering away in the attic.

Switching subjects a bit:

What really drives me batty is when someone finds out you don't have a college degree and they look at you like you just said your parents were first cousins. It's just unfathomable to them that someone without a post-secondary education could possibly speak about something other than soap operas or W.W.E. wrestling (no offense meant to anyone who likes those things). The intellectual provincialism of it just leaves me nonplussed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What really drives me batty is when someone finds out you don't have a college degree and they look at you like you just said your parents were first cousins. It's just unfathomable to them that someone without a post-secondary education could possibly speak about something other than soap operas or W.W.E. wrestling (no offense meant to anyone who likes those things). The intellectual provincialism of it just leaves me nonplussed.

Or you get the whole "You're so well spoken!" condescension.

Interesting fact: only 30 percent of the adult American population has a bachelor's degree in anything.

 

[sheeplady]

Neither of my parents were college grads, but it was drilled into me from Day One that to get anywhere in life you needed either a journeyman's card in a building trade union or a college degree. Of course, for all of their talk and vicarious planning, I never got any financial aid from my parents.

My parents began early on stating that I would go to college. However, they also strongly mistrust college educated people. They are very critical about how college graduates do not do "honest" work, do not work hard, or work a full week. Since I work in education, I've seen this happen (to a lesser extent) to several first-generation college students who's parents both value on the surface but also deeply mistrust college educations.

Despite less than auspicious beginnings, I've graduated from 3 different universities with four different degrees. A bachelors, two masters, and a Ph.D. All at schools in upstate NY. My last three degrees were completely paid for through stipends and scholarships.

I deeply enjoyed my education, but I am formally done with seeking degrees. Unless I have a complete loss of mental capacity. The only way I would consider going back to school for a formal degree at this point is if it was part-time, if I got time off work to do it, and if it was entirely paid for by my employer. I may *someday* take a few college courses for fun, but not right now.

 

[Nobert]

Or you get the whole "You're so well spoken!" condescension.

Interesting fact: only 30 percent of the adult American population has a bachelor's degree in anything.

Really? That surprises me given that this poll is currently running 155 to 8 against. I suspect that may change as people from the generation where you could get an industrial, middle-class-wage job straight out of high school start departing from us.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I think that the real losers in a scenario like this are the students that you could have had as classmates. I only speak for myself here, but I learned far more from my peers in college than from my profs. The 50 minute lectures and the reading assignments are only the starting points. It's the discussions in study groups, over lunch or drinks, or even late at night in a dorm room, that were the real avenues of learning.

My best peer teachers were the older students- some were vets, some were moms whose kids were grown. They were able to take the raw course material and marinate it with life experiences. They were great motivators, and they could smell BS at ten paces. I count their input as far more priceless than 99% of the profs I had, simply because they were far more thought provoking than the lectures of those professors. Just as one example, it would have been worth a year's tuition just to see you, having survived that t shirt factory job and a few years in local broadcasting, hand some sheltered grad assistant his/ her head if the topic was the organized labor movement of the 20th century.

As I say: maybe not your loss that you never enrolled..... but definitely, theirs.

Sadly, there are quite a few in Academia who while long on theoretical knowledge are somewhat lacking in practical or applied knowledge from which forms the basis of wisdom because, in essence, from Kindergarten through Grad School to Tenure, they had never really left school. If I were in charge of hiring professors for a college or university I would want candidates with considerable work experience outside of academia as well as the requisite academic background and experience.

 

[sheeplady]

What really drives me batty is when someone finds out you don't have a college degree and they look at you like you just said your parents were first cousins. It's just unfathomable to them that someone without a post-secondary education could possibly speak about something other than soap operas or W.W.E. wrestling (no offense meant to anyone who likes those things). The intellectual provincialism of it just leaves me nonplussed.

It happens the other way, too with comments. Although I doubt with anywhere as much condescending. I've had people who have been completely awestruck at the fact that I am "highly educated" or went to an "ivy league" school because I am personable, friendly, down to earth, and so much unlike their vision of a college professor (which tends to be a stereotype of a wine sipping arrogant know-it-all idiot who can't find their way out of a paper bag). Most of the time they are shocked, completely and utterly shocked, to find out that am as educated as I am.

Essentially, it mainly boils down to a quote I got from one person that will forever stick in my mind:
"I would never believe you had a Ph.D. You actually know the difference between your head and your ***."

This is why I never lead with anything about my education- most of my neighbors don't know anything beyond where I work. I find that unless you have an established relationship with someone, knowing how much education someone has leads to a lot of stereotypes that get in the way of your interactions.

It also helps that my "native accent" (i.e. my natural accent that I only use in informal settings) as well as my life experience lends me a lot of credibility in these circles.

 

[HudsonHawk]

It's just unfathomable to them that someone without a post-secondary education could possibly speak about something other than soap operas or W.W.E. wrestling (no offense meant to anyone who likes those things)

As long as we're clear about that. We discussed rasslin' here once, and it was one of my favorite discussions.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Essentially, it mainly boils down to a quote I got from one person that will forever stick in my mind:
"I would never believe you had a Ph.D. You actually know the difference between your head and your ***."

How is this any less condescending or offensive than assuming your parents were siblings if you don't have one?

 

[ChiTownScion]

Sadly, there are quite a few in Academia who while long on theoretical knowledge are somewhat lacking in practical or applied knowledge from which forms the basis of wisdom because, in essence, from Kindergarten through Grad School to Tenure, they had never really left school. If I were in charge of hiring professors for a college or university I would want candidates with considerable work experience outside of academia as well as the requisite academic background and experience.

That was one of the refreshing aspects of going to law school at night. Most of my classmates were working people, and their day jobs ran the gamut: physicians, accountants, cops, a firefighter, truck drivers, school teachers, paralegals, insurance adjusters, active duty military (officer and enlisted), and many more occupations were represented. I was "the kid" at age 23, and one of my classmates was in his sixties.


I transferred to day division for my last year, and it was a whole different world. A lot of men whose wives were working full time while they went to school and didn't hold down a job. I could have done a lot of things in my life.... but "making it by the sweat of my frau" wasn't one of them. I was working 40 hours a week on a night shift while taking six courses a semester: a ballbuster of a schedule that'd kill me if I tried to do it now, but my grades were never higher.