IMO...
1. Elementary-high school teachers should be paid at the same level as lawyers and doctors, because their jobs are equally important to the economic and social growth of this country.
2. The field should be highly competitive. Accordingly, there should be no such thing as tenure, and it should be easy to replace teachers who aren't performing well.
Totally agree. And just to add on, it's piss poor that the people that we entrust with our kids are often among the least well paid (for their educational level and responsiblity). Not only with teachers, but also with day care workers. I mean who the heck wants an untrained minimum wage employee caring for their kids.
3. Kids should only go to college if the training is actually necessary for their profession/career. Training purely for the sake of intellectual development should be taken care of in high school.
Totally disagree. I think that high school should mostly be about teaching students to function in the real world. This may vary with the individual students needs, sometimes it may be academic, sometimes vocational, sometimes home economics, child raising, basic 21st century life skills (like changing a tire on a car, or navigating the internet, or filling out a job application) or money managment. We probably need to do more of all these things. That doesn't leave much time for higher academic learning just for the sake of learning.
4. Higher education costs should be linked to the program's success at producing employable graduates. Schools should be on the hook for their alumni debt if their graduates can't find work.
No, I believe in more of a libertarian model for college. Students choose majors based upon whatever they want to study, how much study that they can afford, and their individual needs as far as how long they should spend in college. This may be different for every student. Liberal arts studies may make perfect sense for someone planning on going to grad school, but for someone with no interest in grad school, a BS may be more logical. Students and their parents should recognize the most employable fields, and those who have interest in and the aptitude for those fields will typically go into those fields. People who don't have a specific interest or aptitude may opt for a BA, and either go to grad school for a more specific specialty, or just look for one of those jobs that requires a college degree but no specific college degree (like I got fresh out of college).
Right now, engineering is the big thing to go into for college students. Our engineering programs are bursting at the seems with students who may or may not really be interested in engineering. Now imagine if every student decided to go into an engineering program because it was cheaper than maybe a BA in Ethnic Studies. We would be producing tons of C students who have no real interest in engineering, who would still have a hard time finding a job because their is simply to many of them. We would end up with colleges making wild swings in the pricetag of different programs because colleges are no better at predicting the future balance of supply and demand for any one particular job.
When I was growing up I was told to become an architect. Makes a lot of sense right, I mean it is a STEM major. But right now it is one of the least employable job fields that there are. On the other hand, we all know that psychology is a useless field, yet the unemployment rate for licensed school guidance councilors and school psychologist is near zero. During the last decade or two nursing was the big thing to go into. Now we have an oversupply of recent nursing school graduates who aren't able to find jobs. Law used to be a field in high demand, but not any more, unless you go to a top law school and have a GPA near perfect. New lawyers average starting salary is now no more than teachers.
Generally BA degrees primarily qualify one for grad school, while BS degrees are thought of as "professional" degrees which once completed qualifies a student to directly enter the job force. For someone with a BA to be employable, it is supposed to take additional training/education. Like someone with a BA in English or History might consider getting a MAT (Masters of Art in Teaching) to qualify them to become a public school teacher, or they might have a minor in education and take an extra semester to do their student teaching so that they can be certified to teach, or they could go to law school, or get an advanced degree in the same major as their undergrad degree so that they could teach at the college level or get a job writing or in a museum or whatever people with English and History degrees do.
BS degrees are considered a totally different animal, with the possible exception of BS degrees in math or science. Someone with a BS in engineering, or business, or nursing, or even music performance/composition/education (usually called a BM degree - not to be confused with a BA in music which is something totally different) is considered qualified for an entry level position directly in their field with no additional education needed.
BS degrees in science or math, much like BA degrees, typically don't have an immediate and direct employment track into the field of their major. Again, like the BA, they need some sort of advanced degree, or add on major/minor to have a direct track into the workforce. Let's face it, while a BS in math may typically be considered fairly impressive (compared to a BA in Sociology, or Womens Studies, or some other nonsense), I've never seen a job opening requesting someone with a BS in math. It usually takes some sort of very specific concentration in math or science to really qualify someone who has a BS in math or science to be employable.
There are always exceptions.
