3 Potential solutions for America’s university problem

 I don’t doubt you’ve seen all the discourse over the years about The higher education system in America. From being ridiculously overpriced, to not really being valued anymore in the job market, to churning out young graduates with useless degrees in pseudo-sciences. Some of those problems are easier to fix than others, and some of the more deeply ingrained problems tend to not be seen as problems. I thought up a few possible solutions on a whim a few days ago and thought I’d share them with the world. These are three ways to fix the American university system.

So from least to most extreme, here are my ideas:

Only pay if you get employed in that field

My first and least extreme of these ideas is fairly simple. If your degree is in a particular field, you only have to pay for the degree if you get a job in that field within 5 years of finishing your degree. If you end up not getting a job in the field of your degree, the college is responsible for the financial burden of their service. This is meant to be the same concept as getting a refund for a product or service that didn’t provide what it promised. An easy concept for retail but apparently too hard to implement into something that requires such inordinate sums.

This would likely solve issues with colleges overspending on unimportant things, as they would have less funding to work with, and state schools that get federal funding would have to maintain high placement rates to maintain that funding, could encourage more schools to improve their placement programs.

Make everything Liberal Arts except hard sciences and Trades

This is one that might upset some college-goers, but there are so many degrees available in hyper-specialized fields of language arts and Social sciences that just don’t need to exist. I’m saying this as someone who majored in History. I essentially spent 2 years getting a liberal arts education and 2 years just writing research papers in slightly different contexts. We don’t need Social science and language arts degrees, just lump them together into a liberal arts education and let the specializations happen after college.

I believe this would alleviate a lot of decision paralysis some people get when trying to decide what to study, particularly in Liberal Arts fields. There are also some trades and Hard sciences that could be lumped together in a single degree. It would do away with things like business and marketing degrees as well, since almost all the skills you’d need for those jobs can also be acquired from a liberal arts education. There are so many jobs out there now that specifically require business degrees that really don’t need to, sure there are some specific skills for that field but then you could take specific classes for that as part of a Liberal Arts education and not spend 2 years basically just learning the same things from a different professor.

Topple the whole system and give the responsibility of education to employers

Obviously, this is the most extreme choice, though I do believe it is the option with the most potential to fix a lot of problems.

First, just completely do away with colleges, maybe keep some art and trade schools because those fields do require a bit longer of a specific education. Second, make employers have to foot the bill to educate their employees. I know, I know, greedy corporations would never do that. Go on this journey with me to a time in the future when there isn’t anyone left with actual experience to hire for that job. Your options are to throw new employees into the fire until someone picks it up, or to actually bother to train them.

There are two major problems this solves. The purpose of this post: The university problem. This option simply does away with them almost entirely. If companies want higher educated staff, they can do it themselves. They can put the money and resources into it instead of expecting their employees to foot a $50-100k bill to get a piece of paper that says they did more school.

Another problem this could handily solve is the problem the job market faces now with many companies saying they require 1-5 years of experience for what is supposed to be an entry level job. In the world where the company is responsible for the education of the staff, said company would be forced to hire people solely based on personality for entry level positions. Not that there would be NO more experienced candidates in the job pool, but if the expectation is for someone entering the job market to not have any experience instead of already having experience, even just that could go a long way to fix the current job market.