It was inevitable. A student at Monroe College, a business school in the Bronx, is suing the school for $70,000 because she didn’t find a job.
The 27-year-old information-technology student accuses the school’s Office of Career Advancement for not living up to its end of the deal and offering her the leads and employment advice it promised, according to The New York Post.
“They have not tried hard enough to help me,” the beleaguered Bronx resident wrote in her lawsuit, filed July 24 in Bronx Supreme Court.
Wow — getting a degree = guaranteed employment?
If only!
It doesn’t seem she is suing because her degree failed to get her employment, but because the advertised post-degree help from the organization did not materialize. Seems reasonable to me; if a school does not have the resources to find graduates employment in the real world, they should not use that claim to make themselves attractive to potential students in their advertising materials.
Precisely. I’ve had a somewhat similar experience to that of the woman who is suing, and blogged about it here:
http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/wp_blog/?p=1510
I am waiting for the time when a college gets sued by a parent/student because the student screwed around and didn’t earn the degree at all. As a college professor I see the “I paid my tuition, you owe me a degree” crow all of the time.
I meant crowd
Crow works too
Got news for you, sweetheart, lots of people — people with more education and experience then you — are having trouble finding work right now.
Maybe she can get a job sweeping out the Office of Career Advancement.
I am not at all surprised.
Man, I’d love to be able to go to a good university and learn. She acts as though the education she received has no value.
I can see her point of view, too. I’d certainly be bummed if I was $70,000 in debt. Part of that is the fact that education is too expensive in the US. (In the country where I live, all the best universities are free for citizens to attend.)
But also, people seem to be so nonchalant about taking on debt in the US — until the bills catch up to them. It’s not good money handling…
This has been said before, but it is a good time to do it again.
When people discuss anti-intellectualism and how bad it is for society, they usually talk about the anti-intellectualistic and anti-science attitudes of the general public, as exemplified by your typical Joe Sixpack in some backward region of the South or Midwest.
Truth is that it runs much deeper than that and it has permeated even higher education on every level. Because it is nothing but anti-intellectualism to view your education as a means to get a job. In essence, people today are going to school to get into college, and then are going to college to get a job or get into medical or law school, and if they go to a medical or law school, they do, again, to get a job. Very few people go through the whole process with the goal of actually getting an education, which is what the purpose of it was supposed to be.
Indeed, it was just a matter of time for this to happen, given how widespread this attitude is. Unfortunately, it is just as widespread among university administratos and even a lot of professors, it is getting worse and worse, and it is very hard to see how the trend will be reversed
I have been rambling about this exact point for a long time now. I am a high school teacher and an adjunct college instructor and I just can’t get over how little people actually care about the information they are “learning.”
They are all worried about the destination with no regard for the journey.
I know I wasn’t perfect, but I do know that I was more often interested in the process than just trying to push through as fast as I could.
How can this trend be changed, or can it.
As long as the poor and middle class must pay their own tuition, the only successful students will be the ones with their “eyes on the prize”.
I was one of the few interesting in learning for its own sake, and I was anything but rewarded to it. In a way, my attitude was narcissistic and selfish. I had an elderly uncle and elderly aunt who gave me money after I graduated to pay off the bills. As the oldest of 6, my parents certainly didn’t have the cash, and with two jobs all the way through college I still hadn’t made enough to pay as I went. I lived at home 3/4 years and bagged lunch so I can’t say I was spending that dough on partying.
My point is that the anti-intellectualism is not the minority of students who are looking out for their own future economic survival; it is the fact that students must pay to go to college in the first place. Even the state schools (land grant institutions) charge outrageous tuition these days so the presidents can pull down 7-figures in salaries & other compensation and the football coaches can get $4mill/year.
“not a gator”:
What point(s) are you trying to make in that comment?
I see three separate paragraphs that do not relate to each other. Your first paragraph makes a statement with nothing to back it up.
Your second paragraph looks like you want sympathy and your third paragraph does not tell us what you think causes anti-intellectualism, unless you imply that paying money does. But that is nonsense.
As far as I know (and I think I know that as well as anyone) the best universities admit you regardless of your financial status and if you can’t pay, you get a basically free ride, with some minimal amount you have to contribute yourself (which you easily make by working in a lab, which is, needless to say, the best possible way to earn those money).
In other words, those students who have the ability and the passion to really learn, have the opportunity to do so and it makes no sense to cry about how expensive education is. The selling price of a product is determined by the forces of supply and demand; however, this only works when a product is being sold…
I am sure it has always been human nature to try and escape one’s own responsibility when making decisions that you have to live with. Obviously, her University education didn’t teach her anything about who is responsible for what. I am surprised that her majored wasn’t psychology or sociology, the two fields where their product is a victim with loads of resentments. I am sorry for her condition, but finding out what she got for her tuition may be her best education for her future life.
Monroe is not exactly selling itself as a bastion of intellectual purity.
With their “Academics” described as
“The Monroe College mission of providing career-oriented education and training has been consistent for 75 years. Monroe academic programs have been custom-designed to maximize student success. Students who are serious about their goals do best, especially because the college is prepared with well-developed support systems both in and out of the classrooms.
Monroe College Academics are an important first step toward a lifetime of success.”
I can see where somebody would get the notion that they should see something for their inestment.
http://www.monroecollege.edu/academics
I found a course called EN-209 – Literature and Work on the Monroe College website. I can’t find a course description, so I may write to ask for one. No doubt the course examines how to manage a mortgage and loan company through reading _The Merchant of Venice_.
That’s hilarious. On what grounds is she suing the college if she is not personally employable?
If her experience was anything like mine, I can completely understand this. In 2001, I was enrolled in a course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute that was sold with promises of job placement assistance and bogus numbers regarding participants chances of getting a job through the course. The reality was that we paid our tuition, passed the course, and that was it. There was no job placement assistence. They cashed our checks and were done with us. While I did learn things, I couldn’t help but feel I was scammed. It felt like a glorified “buy our tapes and your guaranteed make money” infomercial.
Yeah, she is a whiner, but it’s about time someone took these b-degree mills to task for their inflated claims about how great your job prospects will be when you graduate.
ITT Tech, for example, runs TV ads all the time implying that you will get a great job right away. Some of these smaller schools, as the lawsuit alleges, claim they will help place you in a job and brag about their graduate placement rates.
So, yeah. They need to stop lying in their advertising. College degree ain’t what it used to be.