Try again. And there are plenty of other examples. And I'm not offended, but I do find it rather odd that formal education has to be defended.
Many years ago, I worked in the hops fields in Idaho. It was cheap farm labor that started in the early spring, and went through all of the summer, to the hop harvest in the fall. We had a lot of families that worked in the hops, and it was great for mothers because you could bring your kids along, and older kids were able to work and earn money on their own. Much of it was piece-work, so the faster you could work your way down the row of hops, and the longer you could do it, the more money you made. Most of us worked from daylight until it was too dark to see. The interesting thing was that we had a whole lot of college people who thought that now that they had a collage degree, they would get the high paying job and make lots of money. That didn’t happen, and they ended up out in the hops fields because they could not find a job that went with their degree unless they had a lot of job experience to go along with it; so they were stymied. They couldn’t get the experience without the job, and they could not get the job without the experience. Years later, after my divorce, I needed to find some kind of a job, and had no experience that was helpful. I ended up getting hired by Combined Insurance Company, because they would accept anyone who was willing to at least try selling life insurance on commission. It turned out that it was a good fit for me, I traveled over several states, saw lots of interesting places, and made what was (for me), some excellent money, back at that time, usually somewhere between $500-$2,000 a week. With sales, you never know how things will go; but overall, it worked well for me. I didn’t even finish high school, because I got married in my senior year, and back in those days, if you were married (or pregnant), you were immediately expelled from school.
Please do go back through the posts and copy/paste where someone wrote that an education / degree is worthless. Of “little worth” is not “worthless”. The example you gave is almost as bad as a CNN broadcast whereby conclusions are drawn by taking a statement completely out of context.
lol - if you want to quibble about semantics, you will have to argue with yourself. I'm not interested. OTOH, I suggest you go back and read all posts except mine, including your own, and tell me how many said anything positive about higher education. Here's an example: : A degree doesn't mean or prove anything except that you can pass tests
Are you sure you do not work for CNN? Do tell me which word in that sentence means “worthless”. You’re skewing stuff and taking everything out of context just so you can be offended. Now, do tell me how in the world can I properly reply to you if I do not refer to your posts? Note: I DO NOT argue. I state facts and nothing but facts. If you do not like the facts then believe any fairy tale you like if it makes you feel better.
Again, you are trying to quibble about semantics. Not interested. Do you think the post in question was an endorsement for higher education? And I never said that you couldn't reply to my post - I just asked you to look at all the other posts and show me which ones supported higher education. But you haven't done that because you can't. btw, your opinions are not facts, and of course you argue. Your last post is proof of that. Sadly, at this point all you are doing is making personal attacks directed at me because I value higher education. Hmmmm
semantics [səˈman(t)iks] NOUN the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics, which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning.
I did and as did several others such as Don and John. All of us have incorporated substances which give credit to a higher education but none of us limit ourselves to that nor totally on the merits of experience. All of us have written in one manner or another that some doors are opened due to ones advantage of going to a better university or college. I myself have admitted to my obvious love for a higher education by the mere fact that I have 2 master’s degrees. If I didn’t see value I would have stopped at one. Now Hoot, where have I lied? You wrote that I wasn’t stating facts hence you are calling me a liar are you not? (sniff).( I am soooo offended too!). I stated that I am giving facts for which there cannot be any argument hence, I am not arguing. You, on the other hand, are arguing because you can’t get the facts straight because you are obviously not reading the posts and / or are transposing them into what you want them to report. Truthfully, I do submit to you sir that all you have managed to do is to prove that you are indeed fit for writing on CNN, CNBC and any other outfit which confounds the truth by using a large degree of tunnel vision. READ and study first. Then reply. After all, isn’t that what getting a degree demands of a student?
I agree that all a degree means is that you passed the test. What does passing a test prove? It proves you know the subject and that is a positive thing. What you are missing Hoot is that what I said is that a college degree is NOT an accurate assessment of intelligence. All any degree means is that you completed the courses in a satisfactory manner and passed tests. How much study, personal thinking, or maybe rote memorization isn't indicated. Since the topic here isn't about higher education, but if you knew anyone that had a degree from a "prestigious" college, I think a more relevant discussion would be discussing if a degree from Harvard is worth more than a degree from the University of Texas. In many affluent circles, a doctorate from Harvard is more worshipped than a doctorate from any state university. Why? Do Harvard doctors have higher IQs than other doctors? Have Harvard doctors accomplished more for humanity than doctors from other schools? While the blanket statement " a degree doesn't mean or prove anything except that you can pass tests" is accurate in general, it isn't the crux of the matter. How each individual passes those tests will differ. The ability to retain and analyze information differs in each individual. A college degree is necessary to obtain specialized employment. That degree represents that the employee candidate has satisfactorily completed the curriculum required to perform the job being offered. It, in no way, represents the candidate's intelligence, other than they aren't mentally retarded. Some considered to be slow learners have college degrees. It might have taken them twice as long, but the degree represents the same accomplishment. If the job requires above-average intelligence, then one might be asked to submit documentation of accomplishments in that field. Just showing that Harvard PhD wouldn't be enough and the person with a state university PhD that had performed documented cutting-edge research would get the job instead.
Well, I see that there are those that don't think to highly of a degree, whether it's from a major college/university or not. As for me, I fully believe that a degree will definitely help a person get a great paying job and that many, many companies do require at least a Bachelors Degree for many of their jobs. We are living in 2021, not 1970 when a college degree wasn't nearly as wanted as today. Just try to get a job as a teacher, in the criminal justice area, doctor, nurse, engineer and any of the other highly professional jobs without a degree. Just isn't going to happen!
Again, no one has written that there is no value with having a college degree. You guys are reading that into what has been written but it just isn’t there. You can mix and match and even say it’s only semantics but in truth, everyone here knows the value of a good education. As @Faye Fox indicated, a degree is almost mandatory in most specialized vocations. A medical doctor Has to go through the necessary steps to become a physician but the degree doesn’t guarantee how smart that doctor really is. I would almost bet that everyone on this very forum has traded off his or her primary health doctor for someone they thought was better. That doesn’t mean that both doctors do not have the same information or access to that information but rather, one knows how to use that information better than the other and is probably smarter. Where the downplay comes from is that some vocations do not need a college degree to become successful. Education from a good apprenticeship is invaluable for most certainly, I would not trust the crane operator on a high rise building to be able to do his job without the necessary OJT it takes to be that kind of operator. And incidentally, that crane operator probably makes more than some degree’d engineers make and doesn’t have the back expense of paying for a student loan. He may have gone through a vocational school for heavy equipment operation but a guy fresh out of a school isn’t going to be running a crane 30 stories in the air. He’s still going to be spending some time as an oiler and work his way up to be a master operator. It’s a matter of what a person wishes to do with their life and how much institutional education that person feels they need in order to start their journey in whatever part of society they wish to participate in. Regarding your statement of what year it is, in truth, many students who are accepted into some major schools aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer any longer. Schools used to base their applicant’s acceptance on SAT’s and their high school academic standings but nowadays more than ever, a student’s athleticism might be their niche and a full or partial scholarship guarantees only that they went to a major university but doesn’t say what they actually learned or how proficient they were. Some are accepted to fill a quota and some are legacy entrants so merely saying that a place of higher learning means that someone will learn higher things isn’t necessarily true.
The medical profession is rather unique in that the length of training hasn't changed for a century or more, but medicine has become almost infinitely more complex. I know this is off the track of the thread, but it has wandered from the original topic in any case. Doctors spend huge amounts of money and time to get a degree after which the lawyers and politicians (generally of much inferior intellect) spend time telling them that their practice is a "right" for other people to have at their disposal, and the government and Big Pharma will control what you do and, in many cases, how much you will get paid for it. Hilary Clinton even proposed that the government should control what specialties are practiced by what doctors and where their practices should be set up. Should lawyers have the same restrictions? Legal representation IS a legal right and people in Sturgis, South Dakota should be represented as well as those in New York or L.A.