Mike Rose's What Counts As Intelligence?

There’s a lot that can be said as to why we need college to find good reliable and high paying occupations. As expressed before in the previous paragraphs, the article “What Counts as Intelligence?” by author Mike Rose sees some of the same ideas as Louis Menand had in his article just with a little bit of a different prospective. He gives us a brief story about his uncle ‘Joe Meraglio’ who came back home after the second world war and the struggles he had looking for a job because he didn’t get very far in school saying, “Joe started his career at Fisher Body, a subsidiary of General Motors, on one of the toughest assembly-line jobs, and over a thirty-three-year career he would rise through the ranks, join a solid middle class, buy a nice house, put three kids through college, and retire as a supervisor in 1987—a feat pretty much impossible today for a guy with an eighth-grade education.” (Rose 34). I’m all for what he had to say. For Mike
Rose’s uncle, he was able to get past life merely through little education and experience, but to recall that was almost 30 years ago. Now a days it’s almost impossible to live off of and support your loved ones with a minimum wage job. If I would’ve dropped out of school my 8th grade year, the best I would ever come to a job would’ve been a minimum wage job with the likelihood of a less than 30% chance of ever being hired. Education is the key to pretty much everything. That’s why we come to college, to train, learn, and work for a good paying profession to help ourselves and our loved ones. We learn more to earn more.
In a great source I found author Gary Gutting gives us some critical key points on why my theory and belief is right. In his article “What Is College For” he takes a more in depth look at what form college graduates had to say about college after it was all said and done with and Gutting had this to say, “A Pew Research survey this year found that 74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.” Sixty-nine percent said that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person” and 55 percent claimed that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.” Moreover, 86 percent of these graduates think “college has been a good investment for them personally.” (Gutting 1). College benefits us in so many ways it’s simply a mistake if we don’t take advantage of the opportunity. The statistics and numbers speak for themselves. Looking at these numbers makes you think once or twice before saying no to college, but there’s one line in particular that jumped out to me the most. It’s where these college students said their career preparation their schools gave them was very helpful and significant to them. And that’s flat-out what businesses look for just as mentioned earlier in the paper from the Louis Menand article. It’s a win, win situation if you really take a good look at things. We come knowledgeable and ready to work and companies know that. That’s why people with college degrees get paid so much more because they trust us to do our job correctly.
Getting a job with a high school diploma in today’s day and age isn’t as easy as it was century’s maybe even decades ago.
Things are becoming more complex to work with that’s why business are requesting more workers with college degrees. From the article “3 reasons college still matters” by Andrew Delbanco, Delbanco articulates that, “It’s clear that a college degree long ago supplanted the high school diploma as the minimum qualification for entry into the skilled labor market, and there is abundant evidence that people with a college degree earn more money over the course of their lives than people without one.” (Delbanco 2) They replaced the minimum requirement of a high school diploma to a college degree. Its apparent that employers value a person who has a degree in a certain field versus someone who doesn’t. employers are willing to pay that person more because he/she went to a college or university and received specialized training to complete that task better than the person who has not received that specialized
training.
Later on in the article Delbanco says, “If you are the child of a family making more than $90,000 per year, your odds of getting a BA by age24 are roughly 1 in 2; if your parents make less than $35,000, your odds are 1 in 17.” (Delbanco 3). You might have a question as to what any of this has to do with anything I’ve said thus far, well our success now may have an effect on your future children’s life opportunities and don’t we all want the best for them? We come to college to get good money, a good job to provide for the people we love. By coming to college we’re making these goals possible.
Given these points, the platform of college was made to help us become knowledgeable, prepared, and give us the ability to complete any task our vocation asks of us. We come to college because we’re in search for a career. And not just any kind of career, but one that gives us good pay and that treats us well so well can later down in the road treat our family well. As different as people’s thoughts and beliefs might be, it all really comes down to us wanting to get the training that we need to be successful in our jobs and in our future.