How College Could Actually Teach You Something

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Many students spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars to get a piece of paper with some guy’s signature on it and little else; they learned nothing and are now condemned to endlessly send out resumes that are fit only to line bird cages.

There is a way that institutes of “higher education” could change all this: Getting rid of courses.

They’d be replaced with internships, lots and lots of internships.

Having actual skills (read: knowing how to do more than Microsoft Word) is a crucial part of getting a coveted career or landing a good job. Unfortunately, in most postsecondary education facilities, “skills” is just a buzzword in recruitment material — students don’t learn valuable skills that will set them on the path to success in any of their classes, really.

Unless you’re blessed by the genetic dice roll to be gifted in the “good” majors that emphasize hard skills (math, sciences, engineering etc.), you probably won’t learn anything in college besides the best way to explain why you chose your “pointless” major.

This could change.

Lots of courses are arbitrary and almost all students dread to attend them. Many of them are just “requirements” — gimmicks to keep students at the school longer, paying more money.

Students would learn more, a lot more, if courses were removed.

In the age of the tired phrase “in this economy,” entry-level jobs are entry-level in name only; they require experience in the given field, sometimes up to 2-3 years. If college students are to be competitive hires on the job market — which is a college’s job, preparing the student for the world and equipping them with what they need to be gainfully employed — they have to aggressively pursue internships in order to have enough required experience.

But students can only take on so many internships when they’re tasked with spending time on coursework that ultimately amounts to irrelevant minutiae (How many children had Charles the Bald?  What is it that made Gatsby great?) that they don’t care about anyway.

“Gen Eds” need to be axed, as well as having to choose a major.

How can a college freshman accurately choose what they want to do for the rest of their life when their biggest/most important life experience to draw from was the senior prom?

Now, majors don’t have to be banned entirely, but the byzantine regulations surrounding them should be abolished. Paying customers can learn the skills that they feel are interesting or would help them get hired, even if they fall outside of official “guidelines” for what the school’s interpretation of what that “major” should take.

This system would replace filler with relevant coursework.

The first year or two of college would be spent in courses that teach skills and practices directly pertaining to real-world careers. The rest of the time spent at the school would be spent away from the school, interning at various places.

This would be the optimal way to construct a college/university or close to it — students would actually learn more than all the different beer pong variations during their four years and $40,000 spent.

Students would focus on only the essential skills for given field, and then be sent into the “real world” to become professionals while still under the protective wing of the institution.

This system would create students who are interested and passionate about what they were doing in the classroom and who did more than just waste the time of HR departments across the country when they graduated.

No boring, pointless courses, actual skill building in a non-classroom environment, graduates that are capable of getting good jobs in their chosen field right out of college. It doesn’t get better than that.

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