Demise of the Four Year Degree

I got my degree in four years.

That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

No, okay, it isn't. I'm also glad it only took me four years to get a degree. Very happy about that, because if I had stayed for one more minute, I would have gone crazier than I already was (and continue to be). And why not? You can't stay in college forever, no matter how much you might like to. I have numerous friends who all got their degrees in four years. And a few of my other friends didn't, but they wished they had.

Of course, once you leave your four-year degree training, most people wind up going back for more. But that doesn't mean that they wanted to take five years to get a four year degree. I'm unclear why people seem to be taking longer and longer, but I bet it has something to do with the same reason people have more and more homework in the primary grades; we expect too much. If everyone simply expected to take six years, even seven, and return with not only a Bachelor's degree but also a Master's, it wouldn't be so bad. But we try to cram more and more into a program which was never designed to be the end of higher education.

Then, when people finally graduate, they find that no one wants a graduate with a Bachelor's degree because everyone is judging the degrees by the assumed amount of time that went into them: four years. Never mind that today's Bachelor's degree includes schooling that yesterday would have been sufficient for part of a Masters; it's the name that you get. And people are still expected to graduate in four years, even if, according to the news media anyway (although certainly not according to my own personal experience), no one does.

What's to be done? Well, charging less for college so a five or six-year program could be feasible, money-wise, would be a start. Changing the attitude of employers, lowering unreasonable expectations, even perhaps simply saying that the program will take longer than four years, these things would be good, but the money is a large portion of the problem, especially since it makes people who can't afford college work harder to graduate earlier so they can afford it. But wait; to afford college, these poor people have to work full-time jobs in addition to college. So it's even more unfair.

I would declare class warfare over this, but it just isn't worth it, especially when I managed to graduate in four years. Ha. Ha ha. I mock you slowpokes.