Lowering the Bar :: College Education School Essays

Lowering the Bar We have reached an era where everyone is expected to go to college, and educators are forcing this goal upon unwilling individuals to their great detriment. According to Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson in The Ambitious Generation: America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, only fifty percent of twelfth graders surveyed in the 1950s expected to attend college, but by the 1990s, that number had increased to 90% (5). Much of this can be attributed to the increasing complexity of the American workplace—machinery has replaced most of the blue-collar jobs that existed five decades ago, and nearly every job requires some degree of technical sophistication. Much of it, however, cannot. Almost half of teenagers expecting to attend college â€Å"hope to get degrees that exceed the credentials needed for the occupations they want† (Schneider 6). Schneider calls this an example of misaligned ambitions, as the majority of teenagers â€Å"have high ambitions but no clear life plans for reaching them† (7). In the 1950s, high school students were segmented into different programs—vocational, commercial, general education, and college preparatory—but now, 95% of high schools in America are considered comprehensive (Schneider 113). This situation provides a difficult dichotomy, as high school graduates now are better educated than those who graduated in the 1950’s were; but where our grandparents could expect that a high school diploma would gain them a job in a company where they could advance for the rest of their career, current â€Å"adolescents believe the college diploma is the basic credential needed to obtain meaningful work† (Schneider 52). What 80% of college bound students do expect, however, is a professional occupation after college, compared to only 42% of previous generations (Schneider 5). So, while more people expect to go to college than before, more of those who expect to go to college also expect to be better rewarded for it than students in the 1950s. This is another example of misaligned ambitions, but were the majority of those students successful, it could be overlooked. Instead, what we are finding is that today’s students are not prepared to succeed in a university environment. Only 34% of students who were freshmen in 1989 finished their bachelor’s degree in four years, with an additional 24% finishing in five years. To look at these numbers on a smaller scale, my freshman suite can be considered as an example.