How To Improve American Education?

College universities as a whole do more harm than good this day in age, and that it’s very possible that the American standard of education as a whole is flawed at its very foundation. In 1995, a bachelor’s degree from a state university might have been all the rage, but at that time one household in the neighborhood owned a computer with a dial-up internet connection. In 2018, every household thrives under the blanket of Wi-Fi. We now have the world at the tips of our fingers.

Today, thanks to previously unimaginable advances in science, technology, and this awesome revolutionary place called the Internet, anything you can read in a college textbook can be found for free online. Lectures, labs, lab kits, even exams and quizzes – all online. So if these universities are attempting to sell us on the idea of education, they are simply making fraudulent claims in an attempt to persuade the American Dream seekers out of their hard-earned money.

So let us suspend the education factor, and it becomes more evident that what these universities are truly selling, or attempting to sell, is publicly recognized accreditation. Only this recognition comes at a massively disproportionate cost to the person attempting to even have a chance in gaining it.

Can We Reform the American Education System Before It Is Too Late?

Background:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 30.8 percent of those students who did graduate from high school in 2015 had not enrolled in college. Those young people are left to find a job or vocational school.

Get quality help now

RhizMan

Verified

Proficient in: Education

4.9 (247)

“ Rhizman is absolutely amazing at what he does . I highly recommend him if you need an assignment done ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Yet, K-12 administrators focus solely on getting students into college, rather than preparing them for the choices they’ll face when they get there or when they enter the workforce. In order to compete in the twenty-first century, individuals and countries will have to add value in the workplace to command a high standard of living and be competitive in the global marketplace. Education is the key to adding value to our society and continuing to prosper and progress.

From birth, American children are taught etiquette, to follow the steps and paint by the numbers while staying inside the lines. One of the very first basic concepts we are taught in life is to accept limits. We are instructed that we can’t always think for ourselves, do for ourselves, and we are taught that hard work might not be enjoyable but you have to do it. And in all of those instances we have all of our power stripped from our being and we feel vulnerable. The quickest way to gain power over any given population is to make them feel vulnerable and then capitalize on that vulnerability.

The Story:

Student loan debt is nearing $1.4 trillion in outstanding federal loans. It is now the second-largest source of consumer debt, just behind housing. The latest evidence suggests that more borrowers with large balances will not be repaying their debt anytime soon. This will create new hardships for the borrowers that face financial penalties for failure to repay, but also the taxpayers left with the large unpaid bill.

In a new Brookings paper that uses administrative data to look at large balance borrowers, it was found that the share of students graduating with more than $50,000 in student debt has more than tripled since 2000, increasing from 5 percent of borrowers in 2000 to 17 percent of student borrowers in 2014. That group now holds the majority of outstanding student debt owed to the government. Among these borrowers, economists are seeing a troubling trend. Today, borrowers are repaying their loans more slowly, if at all. As a group, large-balance borrowers have been slower to repay their loans, and repayment rates have been falling. At many institutions, even five years after leaving school more than half of the students have failed to repay a dollar of graduate debt.

The Analysis:

The concept of the university as originally intended can be described as a human repository of knowledge and the attempt to expand it. If this is true then we may already live in an age where the university as we know it may have spread outside the limits of these institutions we call universities. So in that vein of thinking, just because an institution calls itself a university doesn’t mean it accomplishes educating young adults on how to be lifelong learners. More and more we see that public and private universities alike are becoming less about education or the expansion of knowledge and more about being an ideological factory. So then where does one go for an education? University as a concept is anywhere where anyone is attempting to expand their knowledge. That has never been more evident than today. With the internet came a more open line of communication between you and every other human being with an internet connection. Billions of ideas exchanged at an exponential rate, and we found out are traditional forms of American education statistically don’t seem to be working. We send so much homework home to our middle school children that they learn to think of expanding one’s mind as a chore rather than a gift.

Conclusion:

It’s a terrible thing to say that I believe the universities and the American education system is doing more harm than good. It’s also terrible knowing that over the last thirty years the cost of this education has drastically increased, consequently bringing about a massive increase to student debt that many students will be paying off well into their fifties. The rise means that the few people at the top of the mountain have just effectively bought this coming generation’s future earnings. You can legally declare to the government that you are fiscally unable to cover your debts on a given item or business, with student loan debt being the sole exception.

The act of immediately burdening the youth of your society with a massive debt at the peak time where these young people are positioned and able to make entrepreneurial decisions is not a fantastic idea. No one is going to take entrepreneurial risks if they’re weighed down by so much debt they can’t get themself off the ground. Our young Americans who have gone to college or are currently in college are holding a debt of a few hundred thousand dollars at the least, and they’re lucky they might make on average forty to fifty thousand dollars a year. So this debt over their head would take roughly eight to ten years of working if they paid no taxes and had no expenses. All things considered, perhaps it is time to turn off the sitcoms and look away from social media long enough to have a serious discussion about the state of America’s education system, before we’re all too buried by our collective student debts to pay for a Happy Meal from the local McDonalds.

References:

1. Looney, A. (2018, February 20). More students are taking on crippling debt they can’t repay-it’s time for higher education to share the risks. Retrieved January 18, 2019, from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/02/16/more-students-are-taking-on-crippling-debt-they-cant-repay-its-time-for-higher-education-to-share-the-risks/