Obama: College Degree Not Needed for a Good Career

[JDPriestly]

36. No matter what field you go into, you have to learn all your life.

In my case, I got an undergrad degree in a very specialized field in which I worked very few years of my life. But as an undergraduate, I learned to study and learn. So when I worked and studied in other fields, I had the basic skills that I needed to adjust: I knew how to learn. I could learn almost anything thanks to my training in how to learn.

While college may seem to be an extension of childhood, it isn't. That is because the college student is not a child. The college student (most anyway) has the maturity to observe him- or herself. That is one of the things that makes the college experience worth the money. An adult thinks more about what he or she is doing. That is the point of college.

Fact is, technological developments are moving fast. That means that most kids graduating from high school today will, like me, change jobs, change careers, maybe even states or countries a number of times during their working lives. They are going to have be even better prepared than I was to learn new things, to understand science (I don't), to understand languages (we are more international than ever), to understand things that we today can't even imagine will exist.

So, I think a college education is important if a young person wants it, and I think that states should invest in colleges, community colleges, adult education and provide every possible educational resource to the people in their states, not just the traditional college students. That is going to be the key to competing in the world of the future. Young people today should be prepared to learn new things all their lives

As for technical training. It sounds great, but remember, technology is obsolete nowadays almost as soon as it is packaged and placed on the shelf for purchase. So anyone pursuing a career via technical training needs to have, in addition to mechanical skills, excellent reading comprehension skills (to master new written instruction materials and to understand new scientific discoveries). If that person is to make political and social decisions that will affect his economic opportunities, he needs at least a basic understanding of government, business law and history, not just American history.

I know someone who at an early age and thanks to training by a family member was a master at a difficult trade. The industry that employed that trade no longer exists on any economically important level in this country today. His training did not translate into another line of work that would pay what a job in the field of his training paid his father. His life has been difficult because of that. His skill did not translate into a job in today's market.

So, technical skills and trade skills are wonderful as long as they are flexible enough to be marketed in our changing economy. Right now we have a lot of people studying computer science. Seems to me that many of those people will be retraining all their lives. They need most of all to learn how to learn. And that is what college, and it does not have to be a big university, and you don't have to complete a four-year degree, is all about. If you cannot read well and comprehend what you read, you may be left out at some point. It isn't worth the risk. Learning to read more than just the high school level literature is a big advantage in life if for no other reason than that it makes you sound intelligent (whether you are more intelligent than anyone else or not). So taking literature and language courses is well worth anyone's time.

Conversely, I think that children in K-12 in the U.S. need to learn how to work with their hands. We don't teach that to our children very much any more. Sewing, other handcrafts, woodwork or mechanical skills are useful for every child. They too help us prepare to continue to learn all our lives.

Back when there was more work than there were people to do it, K-12 and then off to work made sense. But today, there aren't enough jobs, so young people should study and make themselves as competitive as possible. I think that our children should be able to get an education for less money than they now have to pay. Cut the administrators our of the college administration. Let the faculty work together to run our colleges and universities and save on college costs.