SAU Honors College

The SAU Honors College was founded in 2003 by Dr. David Rankin, president of SAU. Dr. Lynne Belcher served as founding director and is retired from SAU. The Honors College seeks and admits qualified students who seek to pursue a serious academic program with equally gifted peers and committed teachers. Honors classes are small and provide academically enriching opportunities for students and the faculty who teach them. Currently, SAU enrolls nearly 170 honors students and graduates about 66% of admitees in four years or less. Anyone interested in applying to the Honors College or seeking further information should contact the director, Dr. Edward P. Kardas at epkardas@saumag.edu or at 870 904-8897.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Jett, Rachel: Credentialing


            Job security wise, America is being controlled by an oligarchy; one percent of the population is forcing the rest to become highly educated. That one percent contains the college graduates with the highest honors, the ones that earn the terminal degrees. The number of people becoming educated is higher than ever before in the United States. Sooner or later, high school graduates are going to be forced to obtain a master’s degree, or maybe even a doctorate to secure their careers. Is this fair? The degree(s) one has now has a great effect on one’s job security in America. Is this a good thing? 

            College is expensive. And if college is vital in order to survive, students must come up with the money to pay for it. Parents are then forced to pay for costly ACT and SAT tutors to aid their children in securing scholarships. If financial aid fails, students are forced to turn to student loans, which turn into long-term student debt. Just think: one can’t just stop at a bachelor’s degree anymore. Students have to earn a second or third degree to survive, adding to their debt and guaranteeing that they will be unable to pay it off before they die. 

            So what should we do? Should we convince students to ignore college altogether? Yes, that might lower the bachelor’s degree prices by a good amount, but that would leave the college un-bound high school graduates with associate’s degrees or less, which tend not to lead to well-paying jobs; or worse yet, leading to terrible, annoying, time consuming, minimum wage jobs. This also wouldn’t alter the one percent oligarchy immediately. If anything, it would make it worse. It just might lower the one percent to a terrifyingly low decimal rather than raising the percentage. 

            Maybe there isn’t really a good answer. As a college student who received tons of federal aid and was already planning on earning a master’s degree, I can’t say that the system is all that terrible yet. It’s not as bad as China’s Confucian system where only 0.16 percent made the required terminal degree. Perhaps when the system does become that bad it will be the least of America’s worries. We’ll have an even higher national debt, no social security, no job security, and much else to stress about.

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