Obama said "...and where we expect all our children not only to graduate high school, but to graduate college and get a good paying job. It's time to ask ourselves why other countries are outperforming us in education. Because it's not that their kids are smarter than ours..."

Why should all children be expected to graduate college? College should be expected of the most intelligent 30% (IQs above 110), everyone else should be getting vocational education and work apprentice or if their IQs are quite low (below 85, as is the case with about half of blacks and Hispanics) they should probably get a job in unskilled labor. A good new book about the concept that not everyone should aspire to college is Real Education by Charles Murray.

How can we be sure that the populations of some countries (e.g. Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Germany, Sweden) are not on average smarter than our country? Immigrants from these countries, and their descendents, tend to score significantly higher than average on all measures of smartness (academic achievement tests, admissions to colleges etc.). Liberals like Obama and illegal immigration amnesty proponents like McCain seem to be very enthusiastic about the fact that our country is absorbing tens of millions of low-IQ Hispanics. Of course our country is going to become dumber and dumber.

Fuck off, cumrag.

What is your IQ?

Mine, or his? I haven't been tested on any of that shit since early in college (about 15 years ago), but I think it was around 135. I know it was in the 98th percentile of those my age tested that year.

His appears to be hovering around -2.

Sidestepping the out of nowhere racist and IQ based rant, I agree that all children should not be college bound and wince every time I hear that. If college were free, sure, maybe it would be great to let everyone have a try, but at this point it will most likely put you thousands of dollars into debt. And if you have the debt and no degree you're in an even worse place than when you started (in terms of being able to find a job that pays well enough to pay off the debt). The majority of people who start college find themselves in that situation, they do not graduate in 6yrs.

College doesn't prepare people to take well-paying (union) jobs like electrician or plumber, tech schools (or if there are any left, apprenticeship programs) do that. That is the ideal route for a lot of people, much less school debt and an actual career field (I'm having a great time finding all those political scientist jobs).

The intellectual enrichment of college is great and should be available to everyone. But college is not just enrichment, it is also a way to get a certain type of job and (often) requires taking on a great deal of debt. That's not the post high school solution for everyone, and I wish that people would acknowledge that more.

Agree. I see so many districts gutting their practical courses at the junior and high school level, it seems the only way kids can go now is up or out. I also think more kids should be directed to their community colleges for an AA degree which is more than acceptable for many careers, and also college level classes are a good way to see if they are up to the challenge of university without incurring the expense and debt. My daughter is at a highly ranked university now, but she got her AA at a community college which saved her money and prepared her for the university.

olethros:

Mine, or his? I haven't been tested on any of that shit since early in college (about 15 years ago), but I think it was around 135. I know it was in the 98th percentile of those my age tested that year.

His appears to be hovering around -2.

I beg your pardon. The question was for the doofus who wrote the top post.

I'm also skeptical of the link between "going to college" and "getting a good paying job". On average, people with college degrees earn more, but that covers a lot of people who got their degrees (and jobs) years ago. Today, a lot of "college" jobs are being outsourced overseas. I have a college degree (as well as a master's in science) and I've been laid off three times in the last four years. A lot of the jobs in my field are going to China. Many of my former co-workers are abandoning their advanced degrees and moving into fields that don't require college degrees - blue collar jobs, health care, etc. I have one friend with two advanced degrees who now gives facials for a living, and makes 3x as much money as she did as a scientist (plus, she's not getting laid off every other year). If I was looking for a new career today, I'd be thinking "what kind of job can't be moved overseas", not "what job can I get with a college degree".

(Not to mention, if everyone got a college degree, it would become meaningless, and any job that needed extra skills would require a master's degree - something that's already happened in many science jobs. Jobs that were once given to scientists with BS degrees now require an MS - no change in job requirements, just degree inflation.

One thing colleges won't tell you is one of the main reasons (maybe even the #1 reason) a college graduate earns significantly more than a high school graduate is than the average college graduate is smarter and more ambitious than the average high school graduate BEFORE he (or she) starts college. I'm just talking averages here and have no doubt that there are many ambitious/smart high school graduates out there. But give me a high school graduate who is smart and ambitious but for whatever reason didn't go to college and give me a college graduate who went to college for all the wrong reasons (to party excessively, to avoid a 9 to 5 job, etc.) and I'd bet the high school graduate ends up doing better.

Although I agree with the posts here that college isn't necessary for success, I think Obama, like any other politician, was just saying what most people want to here. I can't imagine an education speech with a "certain people shouldn't go to college" theme would have gone over well.

That's the problem with making the subject of education so political. Politicians are more interested in telling people what they want to hear than in actually coming up with realistic solutions to problems. So Bush has his underfunded NCLB with the unrealistic goal of making ALL students proficient by 2014. It's not a realistic goal, but it's what everyone wants to hear. It's also why politicians never mention parental accountability in education. Don't want to anger voters by saying that they have responsibility in their children's education.