I have to disagree with much of this comment
> I think that college is great. But also, I think it
> can also be somewhat dangerous to one's ability to think for oneself.
> There is always one and only correct answer, and there is an authority
> figure who knows what it is.
I find this assertion to be very surprising. In my experience college, unlike high school, the entire point was to get students thinking for themselves, rather than accepting that there was a single correct answer. In my freshman year, and in the freahman year of each of my three daughters, there was always a required class which included a "colloquium" or "discussion" component. These classes were designed to break students of the habit of treating what was said, or read, as 'the answer' and to instead think critically about the facts being tossed about.
> University culture promotes reading and learning without
> taking action and making real impact. It also encourages
> that you seek to be told what is right and what is wrong,
> instead of endeavoring to figure it out for yourself.
Again, my experience differs. Were I or my kids to discover that the University they were attending felt that way I would immediately withdraw into a more traditional institution of higher learning, which starts with the premise "everything we know may be false, here are the tools we use to understand truth in the world around us."
> But I guess being a good employee requires a lot of those qualities
> that I mentioned above. You have to be a good follower.
Again, I would disagree. As an employer I value employees who think over those to simply follow orders. One of the things I try to ascertain in interviewing folks is whether or they do think. Can they reason to their opinion on a topic or do they hold it simply because someone else shared it with them? My experience in high school was that many people held opinions because they were "cool" or "expected" rather than holding them because they believed in them. It was one of the most depressing parts of that period of my life and I was so relieved when I got to college that people weren't like that really.
> College is valuable, but I think society would be better off if we did not
> focus so much on jobs, status, success, failure, etc. Why not focus on how
> to create value or make the world a better place? These are things that a
> college education alone cannot teach you how to do.
One of the interesting statistics is we passed 30% of the US having a college degree in early 2012 [1]. So if 70% of the people in a group don't have college degrees, it is difficult to reason about whether or not 'society' would be better off or not. You could ask the 30% of degree holders how they evaluate creating value in society, you could ask the 70% the same question, and then you could ask which of those two groups has a better idea of what kinds of things make the world a better place.
But a different approach might give better answer. Ask those two groups this question, "How would you go about figuring out if what you were doing was helping the world be a better place?"
College prepares people to answer questions of that form, ones that require the student to not only come up with an answer, but to construct a process for arriving at the answer that gives them confidence in the result. No pre-made formula, no quick peek at Wikipedia, but basic reasoning from first principles.
I know several people who have that skill and did not go to college, but pretty much everyone who graduated from college had that skill tested many times and had to pass that test in order to graduate.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bac...
But a different approach might give better answer. Ask those two groups this question, "How would you go about figuring out if what you were doing was helping the world be a better place?"
College prepares people to answer questions of that form, ones that require the student to not only come up with an answer, but to construct a process for arriving at the answer that gives them confidence in the result. No pre-made formula, no quick peek at Wikipedia, but basic reasoning from first principles.
I know several people who have that skill and did not go to college, but pretty much everyone who graduated from college had that skill tested many times and had to pass that test in order to graduate.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bac...