March 14 (UPI) — The news on the college admissions scandal involving wealthy people and Hollywood celebrities, bribes and fake test scores — all done to get children into the premier colleges and universities in our nation — should not be a shock to any of us. I could have told you this without any law enforcement investigations. Colleges are a big business and they are all about one thing: making money. They are motivated to maximize revenue and too many traffic in degrees that fail to prepare people for the workforce.
This is more proof that colleges care less and less about getting the best candidates and providing a best-in-class education. This falls behind the need to generate maximum revenues and this results in behaviors that create vacuums like this to occur.
Take a look at college athletics and the problem is rampant as well, as schools do whatever it takes to recruit athletes in order to help with a school’s bottom line. Follow the money and you will always find your problem. That’s the bottom line.
It is time we hold colleges accountable. They should do a better job ensuring that if they have a real admissions system…it should not be influenced by bribes. Otherwise, cut government funding and let them become an online university and just let everybody in.
We don’t need regulations here. We need to shut down colleges that are not getting the job done. The ones that are failing to place students, failing to produce graduates who get jobs and failing to update their curriculum (that is still stuck in the 1990s in many schools). Colleges get a blank check from the fed for students who are getting loans to attend classes to earn a degree that is diminishing in value and more and more doesn’t deliver on the promise it makes.
Today, the average college graduate is more likely to find a job that doesn’t even require a high school degree, and 2 in 3 Americans graduate college with some form of debt, with the average being $25,000 per graduate. All this while a recent poll found that over 40 percent of recent graduates feel that college did not prepare them for today’s market.
Colleges and universities need to offer more practical, current and effective training programs that prepare students to perform the functions that will be expected of them when they are hired.
With better training and more focused programming aimed at fundamental skills for real-world job opportunities, students will be better equipped, companies will better perform and our economy will be better off.
I recently wrote a book on how colleges have not prepared a generation of students for the workforce. It’s time that our colleges faced some scrutiny. They need a closer look and we need to make sure they actually deliver on the promise they make to their customers because unfortunately the numbers tell a different story.
Sam Caucci is founder and CEO of workforce training platform 1HUDDLE and author of “Not Our Job: How College Has Destroyed a Generation of Workers and How to Fix It.”
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