Suing Colleges Because Job Prospects Stink

August 2, 2009 / 11:29 am • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier

I think this is a fabulous idea, actually. This woman is upset because her $70K education is netting her a big, fat, donut. So, sue ‘em!

1. Many people accepted to college are dumb as stumps and shouldn’t be there to begin with because they don’t have the chops for the schooling or if they do, don’t have the chops for a job after college.

2. Anyone in the humanities departments should be paid to go to school for all the job offers they’re going to get.

3. Colleges have no incentives to make sure they create a good product.

Do I think that the woman is inane–considering that the economy stinks and no one is having good luck with jobs? Of course she is. But hey, she could be the start of a trend. Stupid, expensive education is a problem even in good economies. In a good economy, though, even idiots get a job, falsely giving the impression that the college education is actually worth something.

Mostly, a college education proves a person can endure for four six years. It’s also like an extended Grade 13 because public school education emphasizes all the wrong things.

Anyway, this lawsuit brings up the whole notion of accountability. Do colleges have to show any evidence that their educations produce a good product? Not really. Maybe they should.

UPDATED:

Lawyer says it’s frivolous.

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  • http://growingbolder.com/238288/blog sherry gray

    I recently had this exact discussion with my sister-in-law. Some people slack and excel at college, and some people work as hard as they can and still can’t rise above mediocre. And yet, many tech jobs still demand pedigree as a requirement. Imagine Bill Gates trying to get a job without mentioning Microsoft. “self taught” would land his resume right in the circular file.

    Any company hiring people based on degree deserves exactly what they usually get, and any college taking money from people who should be in trade school deserves to be sued.

  • fncViewer

    Information Technology (her degree) is an excellent field to be in now for experienced / “entrepreneurial” minds. If, in addition to her education, she worked her butt off to gain experience, then she should consider freelance.

    She sounds like she’s entitled to a job now that she’s paid for an education. Maybe if she squawks loud enough, O will hire her as a czar in his administration.

  • http://www.marlettsmith.com/blog BurkeanMama

    Funny you should mention it Dr. M. Recently I have been thinking about my college years. I majored in Plitical Science but was never assigned the works of Burke or Locke or The Federalist Papers. I have educated myself far better after leaving college than I was ever educated in college. I was thinking maybe I should demand my money back. I recall at one point high schools were being sued for graduating students who couldn’t read. I wondered what ever happened with that.

  • 11B40

    Greetings:

    Back in 1993, almost 20 years after receiving my first B.A. degree, I returned to college to study printing management. As an older and self-supporting student, I was on a compressed schedule and wanted only to take courses that I felt had a specific benefit to myself. Unfortunately, there was a college requirement that I take an English Composition class and I preferred to take a computer course instead. So, off I went to see my guidance counselor.

    When I arrived, I laid out my case and presented samples of my previous academic and professional writings. Regrettably, my counselor remained not only unconvinced but also somewhat didactic. “Well, you know,” she began, “we cannot let you graduate from Cal Poly not knowing how to write.”

    “Well, then,” I replied, “things have changed since the last time I went to college. Back then, you didn’t get into college not knowing how to write.”

    I failed to accomplish my purpose that day, but I felt I had earned my degree in “smart-aleck-ology.”

  • http://www.sufficientscruples.com Kevin T. Keith

    Do colleges have to show any evidence that their educations produce a good product? Not really. Maybe they should.

    Both you and this student seem to have implicitly decided that the “product” she was seeking, and entitled to by way of paying for it, was a job. That is her entire complaint, and that is the sole focus of your discussion of the value or impact of an education, or of the evidence that hers was deficient.

    Apparently neither of you believes that the salient result of getting an education might be . . . having an education.

    I’m prepared to believe you’re telling the truth, but I can’t think why anyone would want to be that way.

  • http://photoncourier.blogspot.com david foster

    Kevin…that’s the primary way that education has been marketed for at least the last couple of decades. It’s not “go to college so you can learn interesting things” or even “go to college so you can learn skills that will help you in your career”—it’s “get a DEGREE so you can get a better job.” It’s all about the magic piece of paper.

  • Chris Leach

    Melissa, I have to disagree with you on this. A college degree is simply an indicator that a person has some level of knowledge in a specific field. As a manager who has hired many people over the years, I can assure you that (1) a degree is no guarantee that the person actually has that level of knowledge, and (2) possession of a degree does not mean the person is capable of meeting other requirements of employment (e.g., ability to work as part of a team, ability to apply “book learning” to real-world situations, etc.).

    A greater problem is that with the “everyone should go to college” mindset, a college degree is a much less differentiating factor than it was a few short years ago. It has become the *expected* level of educational attainment; the former student must now go beyond this expectation to differentiate him/herself from other job candidates.

    Finally, I cannot on the one hand cry for tort reform as a mechanism to rein in health care costs, while at the same time encourage lawsuits for people who think their college failed them. Such suits would have the effect of increasing college costs, just as they have increased health care costs.

  • http://photoncourier.blogspot.com david foster

    Maybe what colleges *should* have to do is to provide prospective students with statistical data showing the career paths and incomes of graduates..broken down by major and by years since graduation. We could require the college president and other senior officers to certify the truth of this data under heavy penalties for falsification, just like corporate officers have to do under Sarbanes-Oxley.

  • Chris Leach

    @david foster: The problem with that is that it is extremely difficult to get that sort of information. I work in higher ed administration, and one of the things we see year after year in our academic program reviews is a lack of data on students’ post-graduation activities. Without legally compelling them to respond to info requests (and I don’t want to go there), your dataset is necessarily limited to what people choose to report.

    The best school administration could do, and it would be next to worthless, is request the information, and certify that what is reported represents all responses received, and that the reported information is what respondents reported, no more and no less.