The Duggars and CollegePlus

[Publius]

There's a core of this argument that I like and respect, but there are two elements that really don't sit right with me.

There seem to be implications here that a younger job candidate competing against older candidates should
• cite their age as a reason to favor them
• imply that competing candidates who have been to B&M college are more likely than the candidate to spend time drinking

Whoa! It's one thing to think these things privately, another to bring them out as "you can say" material for the job search.

In any case, rather than building yourself up, these two points seem to me to lean a little too heavily on cutting others down, (a) based on age, and (b) based on some sort of Animal House stereotype applied to people who attend B&M school, at least secular B&M school, as a group.

First, I wasn't trying to build myself up, but pointing out that there were several reasons why someone out of highschool would benefit from getting a degree via distance learning compared to B&M. Forgive me, you're right about those implications. I wasn't saying they SHOULD cite them though, but there are going to be times when it could benefit them. If nothing else, being 2-3 years younger, you have more time to find a job. With how hard it is to find a job, period. If it's going to take say 6months to a year to find a job, regardless of how you got your degree, you're still going to enter the job market sooner then your peers.

Well, so you do recognize that this is a stereotype. But although you allow exceptions, you still seem to be applying the stereotype to B&M students generally.

To what degree and what means time is wasted, I won't deny that you're not wasting time attending a B&M school. More extreme types of the stereotype, the drinking and partying, though still widely practice, are not done by many students.

Are you sure about this?

Let's look at just the first two years. If the hospital serving your family stopped hiring new associate's-level nurses but instead hired new high school graduates to do the same work, no material difference? The graduate of a grade 12 chemistry course can solve college organic chemistry problems comparably well to someone who took one year of gen chem and one year of organic chem at the college level? If you were hiring an accounting assistant, you'd count an associate's in business as indicating no more preparation in business than reviewing a high school business course?

Generally speaking yes... personally speaking absolutely. Everything in my first section for my degree, I knew a large amount of it even before finishing HS. The exception probably being, some more advanced/complex economic issues for Macro and Micro, and Managerial Communications. Everything else, English, W Civ I & II, College Math, Algebra, Precalc, Stats, Biology, American Gov, History of US I & II, SS&H, A&I Lit, and Intro to World Religions. I'm not saying I didn't need to study for those, but I had a great foundation and needed more of a brush up cause 75-90% of the info I already learned. BTW, I even specifically said, there are exceptions specifically pointing out med school, not 2 sentences later "The first 2 years of college are a review of highschool. The other half of the classes, you'll never use, which boils things down to not much actually being learned. If you're going to be an engineer, go to med school, fine. For me, again personally, my accounting degree is checking a box and what is necessary to move on to the next level." If you want to say, "Oh you said med school and not the medical field". Fine, but my point was there are exceptions and the medical field is one.

It boils down to, you're saving time and money. Why is it okay for adults to go down this path, but not regular aged college kids? Are kids all of sudden not allowed to step outside the box and apply themselves? If possible, must we go down the college road, for 4 years, and like the average college grad, graduate with over 25K in debt (btw, that's not my opinion, that's a fact... http://projectonstudentdebt.org/state_by_state-data.php)? When we could of knocked out the same degree in 1-2 years, and for a fraction of the cost. That's all. The pros simply outweigh the cons.