Allow me a rant, if you will, about the effectiveness of post secondary universities. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree. Disclaimer, I do not claim to know everything, but I sure try to!
Here is my beef - they're worthless, for the most part. If there are some time tested formulas you need to know to get a job in a field once you're out of school, university can help you get the basic technical skills (e.g. calculating taxes, knowing where the heart in the body is, etc). Unfortunately, for technical jobs such as finance and medicine, you still need much more than what you're learning in school, and for non-technical careers such as teaching, business administration, etc, the topics raised in university are not only not furthering our knowledge of our field, but giving us the delusion that we might actually know something after 4 years of long nights and empty wallets.
This is, of course, untrue. Interestingly, one of my profs wrote about the disconnect between school and work, and how students are coming out unequipped and have no guarantee of employment. The article notes that the bachelor degree of today is the high school degree of the past - except the high school degree is free.
The result is graduates who think they deserve a 6-figure job and corner office right out of university, but have no real life skills to back it up, and on top of that, employers and professors are doing nothing to remedy this chronic underperforming and continue to require these degrees while making no changes to them to make them more useful for students.
Why are we being prepared for the world of 1991, when most of those textbooks last had a major updating? What are we paying for?
In short? To be screwed.
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