What Has All This Education Gotten Us Again?

I have a college degree.  I spent four years earning that diploma and it even helped me get a great job when I graduated from college.  But when I look at where I want to be in life I find myself lacking on the scale of progress.  My education helped me get a job.  Since then I have had to move up on my own.  I don't really use any of the "knowledge" I learned in college.

It goes like this for a lot of my friends too.  They have moved beyond the literature, mathematics, and history classes of their core curriculum.  But they hardly apply any of the important principles they learned in their technology and business courses.  No one talks about the Y-algorithm of Randolph's Theorem at work.

I think our educational system has mis-stepped somewhere.  It's become all about generating college degrees but not really about producing graduates who can use their knowledge for a lifetime.  The academic world exists to perpetuate itself.

And yet when I read about successful technology companies it's obvious they are using skills and products that came out of the university system.  So my question is why aren't the rest of us able to capitalize on what we learned in college and use it to start new companies?

We could use entire new industries that change our planet's ecosystem for the better but no one wants to invest in those technologies.  And who would buy the products?  A simple water-filtering system might cost $3-10 to produce, maybe $15 to buy, and it would produce an almost endless supply of water for years but instead we just buy chlorinated, fluoridated water from local systems.

We could also build homes that require less electricity just by digging into the ground, creating more skylights, and using a few simple lighting technologies like LED lights, which use less electricity, and have less of an impact on nature.

We're almost ready to switch over to electric cars.  Maybe we should be buying more of them now.  As we buy more electric cars we'll use less gas and as we use less gas we'll put less carbon back into the atmosphere.

But we don't use our educations to feed, house, and transport ourselves.  We might learn about the perils of global warming in college but we don't graduate with skills to help us make a difference in the world economy or ecology.

Maybe what we need, instead of more college degrees, is more trade school graduates.   But they don't have enough jobs to go around. And everyone wants to sit in an open office and surf the Internet as they work.  Whatever happened to people enjoying physical labor and solving practical problems?  Do we even solve problems any more or do we just hand the questions over to computers?

College education is so expensive that we should be using it more wisely but I don't think we are.  I read about people with masters degrees and doctorates who take restaurant jobs and feel lucky to have them.  And there are people who flee the academic life to take jobs "in the real world".  Is there something wrong with what we are passing on to our college graduates?  Is higher education really teaching the right topics?

Maybe it's time to start developing new degree programs that help us move into the future, preparing us for jobs that cannot be done by computers, and which need to be done.