Links for 10/6/10

Mike Mandel

Government has been the main hirer of young college grads over the past year…

the distressing category: Hotel and restaurants. We hear anecdotes about young college grads being forced to work as waitstaff in restaurants, and here’s one indication that might be more common than we would like–the number of young college grads working in hotels and restaurants is up 33K over the past year…

Which sector is worst? Finance, of course, which has been shedding young college grads like crazy.

John A. Byrne

Josh Kaufman… thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money.

MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students "must effectively mortgage their lives" and take on "a crippling burden of debt" to get what is "mostly a worthless piece of paper."…

"If you want to work in an industry that uses the MBA as a screen, you are effectively buying yourself a $150,000 interview," he contends. "If you want to do anything else in business, if you want to start your own company, get a job in another field, you don't have to have an MBA. It's better if you don't because of the debt."…

William Deresiewicz

We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major…

The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist…

It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy…

Rick Hess

From the dawn of the Western tradition, dating back to Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries, education has been regarded as essential to the formation of good citizens and the cultivation of a proper attachment to the state… one of the main functions of schools was producing democratic citizens. In Rush's telling phrase, schools should mold "republican machines" who will support and defend their nation.

In recent decades, however, as education has come to be seen as the path to personal and professional advancement, the private purposes of schooling have assumed a heightened import…

When citizenship is spoken of today, it is more and more in a "transactional" sense--with citizenship understood as the basket of skills and attitudes (how to shake hands, speak properly, and be punctual) that will help students attend prestigious colleges and obtain desirable jobs…