I think we (as in, the whole species) need to reflect on what the purpose of education is and what it should be, because in theory there's no reason why anybody should pay for a college tuition and then undermine their own mastery of the subject. Obviously 90% of the student body sees it as a ticket to being taken seriously by prospective employers and the other 10% definitely does not deserve to be taken seriously because by prospective employers because they can't even admit an uncomfortable truth about themselves.
Anyways this isn't actually useful advice because no one person can enact change on a societal scale but I do enjoy standing on this soapbox and telling at people.
BTW academic success has never been a fair measure of anything, standards and curriculum vary widely between institutions. I spent four years STRUGGLING to get a 3.2 GPA in high school then when I got to undergrad we had to take this "math placement exam" that was just basic algebra and I only had difficulty with one or two problems but I knew several kids with >= 4.0 GPA who had to take remedial algebra because they failed.
But somehow there's always massive pushback against standardized testing even when they let you take it over and over and over again until you get the grade you wanted (SAT).
You mean the 10% who really want to learn should give up and embrace the degree mill merry-go-round game?
I’m as cynical as they come, but even that’s a bit too much for me.
i was actually trying to accuse the 10% of lying to themselves on a subconscious level, because the portion of undergraduates who actually came there to learn and not just because it's a roadblock in the way of gainful employment is a rounding error.
More to the point, the universities need to realize they're more like job certification centers and stop pretending their students aren't just there to take tests and get certified. Ideally they'd stop co-operating with employers that want to use them as a filter for their hiring process instead but even I'm not dumb enough to think that could ever happen, they'd be cutting off a massive source of revenue and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Like I said I don't actually have a viable solution to any of this but as long we all lie to ourselves about education being some noble institution that it clearly isn't (i mean for undergrad and masters, it might actually still be that at the phd level) then nobody will ever solve anything.