Live and Learn: Why We Have College - Essay Example

College was originally meant to help students gain proper learning and training in the field of expertise that they were interested in. This meant that they would be well prepared for that particular workforce upon graduation. But with the modernization of the college educational system, things began to change and eventually, misled the very students who were paying tuition fees in order to be trained for potential jobs. Louis Menand wrote about those differing schools of thought about college education in his article “Live and Learn” which was published in The New Yorker. He also mentioned that the college system was meant more as a filter for the workforce rather than the training ground.

College education became a series of classes and tests that had nothing to do with the actual degree that the student was aiming for at the end of four years, and yet it was supposed to be the yardstick by which the employers were supposed to gauge a job applicant. This mindset shows me that the college education system is broken and is in dire need of reforms. We need to go back to that era when college meant training for a job that you hoped to have in the future. In my opinion, the theoretical part of the education of a student should have occurred and was completed during the grammar school and high school phases.

By the time the student begins to attend college, he must already know what it is he wants to do with his life and be prepared to throw himself into four years of preparation for it. By definition, completing a college education means that a person is being taught ways of doing something or a better way of doing things in his life. It shows that he is highly trained and educated. It prepares him for the life that he has chosen to lead. That means that he has chosen an occupation, and is well prepared and looking forward to living his life along the lines allowed by his job.

Yet most of our college students find themselves taking classes that do not have any direct effect on their line of work. Take for instance the case of an English student majoring in British Literature. Instead of focusing his studies on the written word, he finds himself also being forced to study courses in Chemistry, Economics, and Advanced Algebra. Do any of those courses look like they will ever be used in the life of work that the student has chosen to major in? So why is the student being forced to complete those courses?

How exactly do those courses prepare him for the future he has set his sights on? These days, college does not serve much of a purpose. I believe it is already losing its relevance. As life gets harder, tuition fees escalate, and finding a job later on in life becomes even more difficult to come by, we will see a steady decrease in college enrollment. This is because college takes too much time to train a person for the workforce when those who badly need the job to survive can learn the same things on a more massive, shortened, hands-on scale when they get in on the ground floor of the occupation of their choice.

College is all about theory and other unrelated course subjects when it should be concentrating on work applications instead. That is what will eventually kill college enrollment in most schools.