What do they really owe?

Compact mag says colleges owe students transparency about the actions and investments of their endowments.

Maybe, but that’s not the FIRST thing colleges owe students.

For 70 years all media and culture and corporations have been falsely advertising college as necessary for life and work. Purely false, and most parents and youngsters have figured it out by now.

What colleges owe students is the same thing any advertised product owes its purchasers. The product should live up to its advertising, should keep its promises.

Part of the professional training in colleges IS useful for a few specific jobs. The useful part is the practicum or internship, which is UNRELATED to all the theory courses that come before the practicum. The factual part is wasted because it comes before the USE of facts. Proper training brings in the facts and math AT THE POINT WHERE EACH FACT IS NEEDED, as an integral part of the job experience.

If colleges wanted to keep their promise, they would lengthen and strengthen the internship, and reduce the pre-internship stage to a simple AUDITION. Experienced teachers know what it takes to succeed in their specialty. A few days of exercises in a simulated situation is enough to determine if this student will succeed.

This change of priority, coupled with gentle and kind advising, would make it EASY to switch professions BEFORE you waste a major part of your life on the wrong kind of work. (Busting a dream or an expectation is tough, and needs to be accompanied by an immediate replacement. Here’s a better way to use your special talents.)

In the current layout, students spend at least two years of memorizing before they even get to the audition stage, let alone the more serious internship. This is hugely wasteful at best, and plain old fraud when the student is known to be mismatched for the profession.

In other words, Duane Jones. REPEATS WHEN SAMPLED.