Argumentation

Live and Learn: Why We Have College who are part of the educational system of America have almost similar goals. That is to be able to attend college. Their reason for this is quite simple. They want to eventually get a well paying job that will help them support their lifestyles in the future. But, if we take a closer look at our current college programs, we will see that college is no longer cut out for what it was originally meant to be. College was originally meant to help students gain proper learning and training in the field of expertise that they were interested in. This meant that they would be well prepared for that particular workforce upon graduation. But with the modernization of the college educational system, things began to change and eventually, misled the very students who were paying tuition fees in order to be trained for potential jobs.
Louis Menand wrote about those differing schools of thoughts pertaining to college education in his article “ Live and Learn” which was published in The New Yorker. He also mentioned that the college system was meant more as a filter for the workforce rather than the training ground. College education became a series of classes and tests that had nothing to do with the actual degree that the student was aiming for at the end of four years, and yet it was supposed to be the yardstick by which the employers were supposed to gauge a job applicant by. This mindset shows me that the college educational system is broken and is in dire need of reforms.
We need to go back to that era when college meant actually training for a job that you hoped to have in the future. In my opinion, the theoretical part of the education of a student should have occurred and was completed during the grammar school and high school phase. By the time the student begins to attend college, he must already know what it is he wants to do with his life and be prepared to throw himself into four years of preparation for it.
By definition, completing a college education means that a person is being taught ways of doing something or a better way of doing things in his life. It shows that he is highly trained and educated. It prepares him for the life that he has chosen to lead. That means that he has chosen an occupation, and is well prepared and looking forward to living his life along the lines allowed by his job. Yet most of our college students find themselves taking classes that do not have any direct effect on their line of work. Take for instance the case of an English student majoring in British Literature. Instead of focusing his studies on the written word, he finds himself also being forced to study courses in Chemistry, Economics, and Advanced Algebra. Do any of those courses look like they will ever be used in the life of work that student has chosen to major in? So why is the student being forced to complete those courses? How exactly do those courses prepare him for the future he has set his sights on?
These days, college does not really serve much of a purpose. I believe it is already losing its relevance. As life gets harder, tuition fees escalate, and finding a job later on in life becomes even more difficult to come by, we will see a steady decrease in college enrollment. This is because college takes too much time to train a person for the workforce when those who badly need the job in order to survive can learn the same things on a more massive, shortened, hands on scale when they get in on the ground floor of the occupation of their choice. College is all about theory and other unrelated course subjects when it should be concentrating on work applications instead. That is what will eventually kill the college enrollment in most schools.
In the end, I believe that college is needed only as a companion to actual job training since most people who go to college now do so only because they already work in the job they are trying to get an education for. It is just a stamp of approval that proves that you know your job. But that is something that your employer can tell, even without the piece of paper telling him so.