July 12, 2006

  • Because It
    Never Ends

     

    Every year, students breathe a sigh of relief when they finish taking the SAT (mostly on the Coasts) or the ACT (mostly in the Midwest and the South).  I get people asking me, “Do you think my score will help me get into so-and-so college?”

    And every year, I think, “Do they really want to go to so-and-so college?”

    Very few college majors are useful in real life (i.e. outside academia).  When I went home from University for the summer, my Uncle Danny asked me, “So!  What do you learn in chemistry?  Do you know how to make glass?”

    Despite 4 years of college level chemistry and biochemistry, and learning to make salts, plastic polymers, and plasmids encoding recombinant proteins, not once did anyone teach me something as useful as making glass.  So how did I learn to make glass?  I read a book that I found in a library — without paying $6000/12 months for tuition.

    I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.  College is a very expensive place to want to “search for oneself” unless one plans on hemorrhaging money, and then paying out the wazoo for the standardized tests (GME, MCAT, LSAT, USMLE Step 1, USMLE Step 2, USMLE Step 3, Bar Exams, Board Exams) that “prove” that you learned something.

    And then, once you enter a career based on something for which you went to school, they continue to make you pay for exams to “recertify” that you know what you know.  Not to mention the “Continuing Education” credits (read:  “Continuing Extortion” credits) for which you also must pay.  Where does this money go?

    Probably to pay for software for the computerized tests — on a PC with an operating system, developed by someone who didn’t finish college.