Tag Archive | education

Over educated or ageism?

Mar5

Guest post by Linda Bradshaw

I keep seeing advertisements online for women to apply to Walden University to make themselves more competitive in the business world. Since I’m always looking for ways to increase my value to employers, I went to the WaldenU website to check it out.  I saw that President Bill Clinton was their keynote speaker a few years ago at their July commencement ceremony in Minneapolis!  How cool is that!

The thing that bothers me about getting more education, as in a college education, is that I already have two business degrees, and for the job market that exists in this area I keep hearing that I’m “over-qualified.”  I interpret that to mean that what they REALLY mean is that they think I’m too old, and that they are using this “over-qualified” excuse to disguise their ageism.  And yet I still am several years away from being old enough to collect Social Security.  Seems like I’m in between a rock and a hard place, and I’m afraid that more college degrees won’t help! What do you think?

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Scholarships are the best way to pay for college

May21

As far as I’m concerned, the absolutely best ways to pay for college is through grants and scholarships. With grants and scholarships, the student is receiving free money that does not ever have to be paid back. Student loans are nice to be able to fall back on if you can’t get enough grants and scholarships to pay the way, but student loans are difficult to repay. There has been a lot of discussion in the news about how one good way to stimulate the economy would be to forgive all of the student loans that are out there.

To be perfectly honest, I believe that all college education should be free – most of the young adults that graduate high school are ill prepared to survive in the real world. The public schools are supposed to be preparing the students to enter the work force, but that simply is not happening. One of the biggest reasons for that is the work force has become technologically more sophisticated than the public education budget can keep up with. I think that the large corporations that get such large tax breaks for being located in an area should consider finding a way to help to repay the community for those tax breaks by providing free training to the community so that the residents of the community will REALLY benefit from their presence.