College Student Debt. Is It Worth It?

Is college worth it anymore? For all the graduates and twenty-somethings I know, a sheepskin is no longer any guarantee of a job and increasingly they’re looking at it and saying, “So WHY did I go in to such debt for this diploma?“

Roger Schank

I began to pay attention to a guy, Roger Schank, an artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneurafter he wrote a book released in 1991 called, “The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent“. It was incredibly thought provoking and helped me understand how our brains work to enable us to learn and helped me to understand why “experiential learning” is so vitally important for young kids (I had one at the time, soon to be two).

Over the last several years, I’ve not been paying attention to his work but, as my daughter went off on her college adventure and I saw the actual cost of her education (she’s at the University of Minnesota) I was stunned and dismayed since it is SO high and has increased far faster than inflation has since I attended the UofMN.

Then today I saw this tweet which led me to this blog post of his and it stopped me cold:

This is one, incredibly accomplished man who knows what he’s talking about and puts forth one hell of an argument. In part he says:

• Tuition does not actually even cover the cost. Universities must constantly ask for donations from alumni and rich people.
• Colleges and Universities don’t care about the students…the faculty cares about their research
• Sitting in a classroom, or doing required reading, and parroting it all back on a multiple choice test or in some research essay is not actually education.

…and there is A LOT more good stuff in this post. Read it. Follow him on Twitter. Read his books or any of his articles. Then get in the conversation about the future of education, its cost, and what it means to our kids future and that of our nation as a whole.