Lowering the Bar :: College Education School Essays

Lowering the stymyWe have reached an era where everyone is evaluate to go to college, and educators are forcing this goal upon defiant individuals to their great detriment. According to Barbara Schneider and David Stevenson in The Ambitious Generation Americas Teenagers, Motivated still Directionless, only fifty percent of twelfth graders surveyed in the 1950s judgeed to attend college, moreover by the 1990s, that number had increased to 90% (5). frequently of this can be attributed to the increasing complexity of the American workplacemachinery has replaced about of the blue-collar jobs that existed five decades ago, and nearly every job requires some full point of technical sophistication.Much of it, however, can non. Almost half of teenagers expecting to attend college hope to cast degrees that exceed the credentials needed for the line of merchandises they want (Schneider 6). Schneider calls this an example of misaligned ambitions, as the absolute bulk of teenager s have high ambitions but no clear life plans for attain them (7). In the 1950s, high school students were segmented into different programsvocational, commercial, general education, and college preparativebut right off, 95% of high schools in America are considered spatiotemporal (Schneider 113).This situation provides a difficult dichotomy, as high school graduates now are better educated than those who graduated in the 1950s were but where our grandparents could expect that a high school diploma would gain them a job in a company where they could advance for the rest of their career, modern adolescents believe the college diploma is the basic credential needed to obtain meaning(prenominal) work (Schneider 52). What 80% of college bound students do expect, however, is a professional occupation after college, compared to only 42% of previous generations (Schneider 5).So, while more state expect to go to college than before, more of those who expect to go to college also ex pect to be better rewarded for it than students in the 1950s. This is another example of misaligned ambitions, but were the majority of those students successful, it could be overlooked. Instead, what we are finding is that todays students are not prepared to succeed in a university environment. Only 34% of students who were freshmen in 1989 finished their bachelors degree in four years, with an spare 24% finishing in five years.To look at these poetry on a smaller scale, my freshman suite can be considered as an example.