Many high tech companies will pay for tuition and other expenses associated with completing a degree or getting an advanced degree. So if the computer science student gets hired by a company that offers education benefits, he/she can end up with real work experience, a real income, and a degree that was partially financed by their employer. Sounds like a good move to me, even if it did take another year or two (and a lot of exhausting evening and weekend studying) to finish the degree.

College completion on the other hand takes four years of not flunking out. A 15% failure rate each year gets you a 52% four year graduation rate. Thus you are really working on reducing 15% not 50% and now it looks a lot harder.

It is certainly worth trying to improve, but as a lot of it depends on prior education, starting with the HS graduation rate and level of achievement might raise all the percentages. From my point of view as a prof in engineering at a big U, students’ math skills could use a lot of improvement.

If the middle class continues to be slayed as it has for the past thirty years, you will find educational attainment will fall. In my immediate family of four there are 9 college degrees and only one job… and it’s at kinkos. Think about that before talking about educational attainment. 4 BA/BS’s, 2 MA’s, 2 JD’s and 1 MBA = 1 job at kinkos for $8 an hour.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement. I came to learn this very early on in school and even now, being in college there really hasn’t been much of a fundamental change. I believe theirs a correlation between that realization and the fact that once we’re tested on something, whatever it is that we were tested on completely leaves our brain because we only learned to pass said test and it no longer holds any true value afterwards.

The sort of attitudes we are teaching children about education are not indusive to producing STEM graduates who can be productive. There is a significant drop in quality of STEM workers between those who choose to be in the fields vs those who had a desire to be in them.

Children are very quick to learn unwritten rules and since teaching to the test doesn’t have a very subtle message they quickly learn education isn’t about learning its about meeting some arbitrary standard.