Currently I’m a STEM student at a public university and I’ve seen so many of my friends struggle to get an internship and I’ve seen post-grads struggle to find jobs with their degrees. Many STEM students have to get experience outside of class just to get internships and to have a chance in the job market. This creates problems because many students skip class and sacrifice their GPAs in order to get this experience and some of them take longer to graduate due to this being the case.
I believe that colleges should help students get internships and find jobs by teaching them applicable skills in classes rather than teaching them a bunch of theoretical concepts. Classes should teach students the basic fundamentals of their field in the first 3-4 semesters, then the classes should shift to teaching students the required skills for getting internships and jobs in their field. For example, if a student studied Computer Science and chose the career path of Software Engineering, all they would have to do is take the classes in that field of CS and they could land a bunch of Software Engineering jobs just by taking college classes. Classes would teach them applicable skills for that job and there would be a direct pipeline between college and a bunch of companies that offer that job. In addition to this, colleges should be ranked based on how well they prepare students for internships and jobs, and the types of jobs that students land after college. This would solve the problem of students going to top universities and still not landing great jobs. If students are paying thousands of dollars a semester, then they should at least learn the skills to succeed in the job market.
My solution would solve the issue of students skipping class in order to gain experience for internships and jobs. If classes taught them these skills, then I gurantee you that students would stop skipping class. It also puts less stress on students to find a job after college.
Thoughts?
Comments
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Those rankings exist and are highly correlated with the overall rankings. And quite frankly, you can just choose to go to the best school for your career if that’s what you want. But university isn’t job training and we shouldn’t treat it as if it is. Academic excellence and research impact are rightfully considered because that is one of the primary things of value universities add to society.
In today’s day and age with how hard it is to find a job, this should not be an unpopular opinion.
College is not a job placement program.
Job placement outcomes should absolutely be a factor in rankings. Of course lots of departments will be shut down because they are not applicable to jobs that exist.
High schools should be teaching personal finance skills and entrepreneurship to help inspire people to create their own jobs.
I have a job managing a hotel and event center with no college degree. Most people that apply for my position have at least a bachelors in hospitality plus a few other non requisites. Also universities don’t always afford people the right track for success especially if they fall under the poverty line. So unless you’re going for a very very specific degree that is only offered at a few universities around the world, who cares what you rank them?
Employment statistics are absolutely factored into college rankings
College is NOT for getting jobs. That may be why you want to go to college, but college is there and funded by the government because it produces research that goes into making our lives better. That’s why people don’t rate colleges by job prospect, but by how much research they get done and the quality of that research.
The reason why you’re learning those theoretical concepts is because that’s what college is for. It’s for sharing the results of research into the theory.
You might think that there’s no value to learning theory, but let me put it like this. You wouldn’t want to a hire a lawyer who thinks the world is flat. Even if they are the greatest lawyer in the world, that’s always gonna bother you that something is fundamentally wrong with his understanding of reality and you’re always gonna doubt how much that will impact his performance in court when he has to talk about evidence that reflects reality.
A non college educated person is exactly that to a hiring manager. You might not ever actually build a binary search tree from scratch, but the fact that you don’t know how to do that leaves a team concerned about your aptitude. If you can’t do something as basic as that, why would they trust you to write code for API’s that collect data protected by law?
Universities should be on the hook for delinquent student loans. Offer valuable degrees based on the expected outcome, or be on the hook for the uncollectable debt
The quality of education from one 4 year institution to the next isn’t as huge as most people probably think. It’s the networks these schools have that matter…
If students know what they want to do they to do and can’t get into an elite school they should go to a normal school in close proximity to what they want to do and have a strong local network.
San Jose State is a normal school but because of proximity puts a lot of people into Silicon Valley tech companies. Whereas similar students from peer institutions struggle to get eyes on them.
They are.
They just don’t rank BS majors because the data is so hit and miss