dbd33

If you live in BC and your children attend university in Ontario, they'll be hit with out-of-State fees for, at least, the first year. That's not as bad as the international fees but it is expensive.

loss

You don't need HE or Uni to make decent living and great life for yourself.
I dropped out of Uni after a Year and I make more money now than If I stayed at Uni and got job related to my degree.
There is to much emphasis that you must have a degree to do well in life and that just is not the case. If you have plan an idea know what your doing that is so much more important putting all your time and effort into that than wasting money on a degree.

so many degrees are set up as a product to sell and nothing more. I hate that this society believes in that we must have a degree in this world to succeed.

dbd33

Education is not about financial reward but about the furtherance of mankind's understanding of the world. It may be that an individual is better recompensed for hod carrying than for curing cancer, operating the large hadron collider or mastering Pate de Verre but society is not better for that choice to hod carry. Children should be educated until they can't fit no more knowledge in their heads; make 'em all, at least, literate.

Pizzawheel

That's true but strikes me as a very anglo-sentiment. To be a member of a profession in north America you do need that degree to get your license. In Britain you don't (although it certainly makes things easier).

Engineering firms have a distinct caste-culture in the office dependant on this, which is something I never witnessed anywhere in Britain.

loss

Life is Now not in 3 or 4 years time. From speaking to many Students over the years there thought process is I can't wait for my life to begin when I get my degree and First Real Job.

My Educations is all around me, every day I learn so much more than I could ever learn in a Classroom On Degree Course from Traveling to and learning as I go.

Degree is just piece of paper for many to get a job.

You should be able to learn and Educate yourself for most professions (Bar a Few).

If I want to be mechanical engineer. I should be able to learn in my own way.
Provided I am as capable as anyone else in my Field and can demonstrate this
A Uni or College Degree should not be needed.

Yes everyone needs to be educated all time and learn all the time and it should never stop. It does not mean we should to have to spend thousands of Pounds to do that.
or some cases spend it to Just to prove what we already Know.


I do believe the Education system is flawed from Infant school all the way To University.

One thing the Uk does better is having College / Sixth Form at 16.

christmasoompa

Depends on the job surely? My husband couldn't do his job without a degree, and he's studying a MBA now.

Education also means learning how to to spell and use correct grammar.

Howefamily

This is very naive frankly. Yes life is now but that attitude alone won't help you in 4 years time when you can't earn what you would like to because you believe in wanting to learn in your own way. There has to be some benchmark to a persons education hence a course is designed that covers required topics and ensures that future employers etc have an idea as to your capacity for learning and ability due to what you have learnt in theory. Sadly your opinion will mean you fall behind those with the required degrees when you are trying to obtain the career path you want.

HGerchikov

At the last place I worked in the UK we were having constant arguments about whether we should even interview anyone without a PhD, never mind a degree. Worked in a very similar environment here and had no such discussions. Being members of the relevant professional body does seem more important here.

SchnookoLoly

My job in the UK had an undergrad as a minimum requirement. Another team had a master's as a minimum.

Husbands's job in the UK was the same.

Oakvillian

It's good that we can always rely on Colchar's parochial view of life in his contributions to threads on higher education. Once again, he strikes with his sweepingly inaccurate statements. I love the fact that everything he posts is almost immediately contradicted by everyone else on the board. It's like one of those little clockwork toys...

Good is not the same as big. I can't answer for how extensive Laurier's co-op programs are, but I have employed Laurier undergrad co-op students on two occasions. Both were quite superb and have since gone on to launch successful careers. Waterloo may operate the largest co-op program "of its type" in the world, but there are many other types of cooperation between academia and industry. Consider for a moment that Waterloo has 18,000-odd students on co-ops, whereas roughly ten times that number in six universities (Loughborough, Brunel, Surrey, Bath, Aston, Bournemouth) are on various "sandwich" courses in the UK in addition to all the less formal internships out there in the wide world. For sure, Waterloo's undergrad programs in applied sciences and engineering are genuinely world-class, but outside of that narrow scope it's still a backwoods kind of a place, innit? Nobody would choose to go there for the best possible undergrad experience on a BA course in, say, history, would they?

Shard

Your post brilliantly disproves your points.

Shard

Of course it's possible for someone to educate themselves through reading, especially these days. However, most won't, and that really is the point. A stint at university or college often provides individuals with the tools for furthering understanding, develops reasoning ability, and a love of learning. As a Western adulthood now seems to stretch to 60+ years, spending an extra few years in education at the youthful end does not seem an onerous proposition.

scrubbedexpat091

Canada is pretty much the same for day to day living as the US in my view from living in both countries.

Both if you don't have a degree or at the very least a diploma in some sort of college subject, your pretty much relegated to low income work with not much chance of moving up.

Companies in both countries value a degree over significant experience but no degree. Have seen companies many times look past a current employee with more experience for the job and hire a 23 year old fresh from college with no work experience at all just because they have a degree.

There are exceptions of course, but those are just that exceptions.

As for paying for college, students can't work too much or the government just gives them less financial aid, and the financial aid that is given isn't always sufficient, and family is expected to help out if the student is under a certain age, meets certain criteria etc, but the financial aid program isn't ideal in Canada and burdens you with a lot of debt on graduation and if you don't get a good job quick enough to pay that debt, you can destroy your credit before even have a chance to build credit.

scrubbedexpat091

How will things be paid for if we keep eliminating jobs with technology? I still don't fully understand that part. If people have no jobs to make money, they can't buy the things the printers and robots can produce. Maybe the goal is to replace humans with robots?

scrubbedexpat091

plumbers, electricians and other trades would benefit from free tuition as well, while they may not be degree programs, those professions all have college programs so people can learn how to plumb and wire stuff, and those programs cost money and are essential in some places to get an apprenticeship.

Plumbers and electricians also likely end up making more then a lot of people with degrees do these days.

More to free education at the college and university level then just obtaining a degree.