Sam CaucciThe news recently on the college admissions scandal involving wealthy people and Hollywood celebrities, bribes, fake test scores all done to get children into the premier colleges and universities in our nation should not be a shock to any of us. I could have told you this without any law enforcement investigations. Colleges are a big business and they are all about one thing, making money. They are motivated to maximize revenues and too many traffic in degrees that fail to prepare people for the workforce.
Getting the best candidates and providing a best-in-class education falls behind the need to generate maximum revenues, and this results in behaviors like this to occur.
It is time we hold colleges accountable. They should do a better job ensuring that if they have a real admissions system … it should not be influenced by bribes. Otherwise, cut government funding and let them become an online university and just let everybody in.
We need to shut down colleges that are not getting the job done. The ones that are failing to place students, failing to produce graduates that get jobs, and failing to update their curriculum (that is still stuck in the 1990s in many schools). Colleges get a blank check from the fed for students who are getting loans to attend classes to earn a degree that is diminishing in value and doesn’t deliver on the promise it makes.
Today, the average college graduate is more likely to find a job that doesn’t even require a degree, and two in three Americans graduate college with some form of debt, with the average being $25,000 per graduate. All this while a recent poll found that over 40 percent of recent graduates feel that college did not prepare them for today’s market.
Colleges and universities need to offer more practical, current, and effective training programs that prepare students to perform the functions that will be expected of them when they are hired.
With better training and more focused programming aimed at fundamental skills for real-world job opportunities, students will be better equipped, companies will better perform, and our economy will be better off.
I recently wrote a book on how colleges have not prepared a generation of students for the workforce. It’s time that our colleges faced some scrutiny.
They need a closer look, and we need to make sure they actually deliver on the promise they make to their customers because, unfortunately, the numbers tell a different story.
The latest college admission scandal is just another example that higher education is big business. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Sam Caucci is founder and CEO of 1HUDDLE and author of “Not Our Job: How College Has Destroyed a Generation of Workers and How to Fix It“
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“Colleges get a blank check from the fed for students who are getting loans to attend classes to earn a degree that is diminishing in value and doesn’t deliver on the promise it makes.”
Bingo. Running out of students, create a worthless degree, want to make money, have a career, then learn a trade.
What’s my share of the “Free College’ bonanza if I don’t go to college?
The incestuous relationship between the colleges and the feds has to be broken. College prices have risen faster than health care, which we are supposed to care about. Why does no one say anything about the high cost of college? Too many people are in on this gravy train. It’s time to pull the train into the yard for repairs.
Yeah some of these majors are just trendy follow the heards stuff to prey on the naive millenials. No tuition should be higher than $30k. I do understand that many students don’t pay the sticker price & that some colleges are giving grants. But the middle class may not have access to grants-you know the nuts & bolts students of our economy.