Feb 12 2013: As an employer I would be willing to hire someone with the correct skills and experience regardless of whether or not they had a degree. As long as they can prove that they can perform the duties required for the job, I would be willing to hire them. However, I think that if you wish to get into a certain industry without getting a college degree first, you have to start at a young age and build your portfolio.
As someone who is currently attending college, I spend my spare time teaching myself useful skills. I believe that it's something that people are going to have to do from now on. Just having a degree really doesn't necessarily mean that you will get a job. Networking is probably the most valuable tool in getting a job. If you have the right skills and you know the right people, you are very likely to get a job.
Nov 19 2012: There will always be some bias. The best we can do is to offer as many different sides to a story as possible. We owe it to our students to give them as many different perspectives as possible. Right now I do not believe that we even attempt to do that in the US. A majority of what I learned in high school had a pro-US and pro-government bias to it. When you have a government institution dictating the curriculum, this kind of thing happens. College is where I started to get a lot of different perspectives on a subject. It is also the responsibility of the student to seek out knowledge for themselves. I believe that any good teacher seeks to motivate the student to do this. They do not just give out information, they motivate someone to look things up for themselves and to come to their own conclusions. One of the things that helps this is offering several perspectives on a subject. When you get to see a subject from different perspectives, the subject becomes more interesting. It becomes a lot more complex which tends to peak a student's curiosity.
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A comment on Conversation: What's a degree worth?
As someone who is currently attending college, I spend my spare time teaching myself useful skills. I believe that it's something that people are going to have to do from now on. Just having a degree really doesn't necessarily mean that you will get a job. Networking is probably the most valuable tool in getting a job. If you have the right skills and you know the right people, you are very likely to get a job.
A comment on Conversation: Can we ever have an unbiased classroom.