College Crunch

The title of this post isn’t an invitation, but just a notice of what one college graduate has done.

The extraordinary CNN article reports that a student who graduated from New York’s Monroe College three months ago is now suing her former university because she hasn’t had the fortune of securing a job in her relevant field of study. Initially, when I read the headline I thought that this was going to be another example highlighting the craziness of our current day, litigious society, and by the time I completed the article, I realized I wasn’t wrong.

Most colleges nowadays have job websites and student councilors on board to help enable the facilitation for students to get jobs. Trina Thompson has written in her claim to the court that the only thing the college did was in fact have the job notice board facility and to provide nothing really else. She said in the article that she went on to ‘pepper’ those companies listed and only received two responses from possible employers which didn’t lead to anything anyway. She also makes mention that colleges should do more to help secure employment on the part of their students.

It is not practical for a college to do much more than present a website and offer some counseling services. What are they supposed to do, pay for students to get jobs? Hold their hand and take them to the doors of companies pleading for them to take them?

I certainly understand her sentiment. She has paid an enormous amount of money to achieve her degree and attend university, but surely she can’t be serious when she thinks that the university should pay back the college tuition amount plus two thousand dollars for stress and suffering when it’s only been three months. With the job market being as it is, you can expect a downtime of around six or more months currently, even in fields that have had huge periods of available jobs.

You can’t really blame the college for the current economic climate. Can you imagine the number of students who would go on to sue their former university because of their lack of ability in securing jobs if the precedent was in fact set and she was successful in her claim?

I think some legislation needs to be put in place that requires students to undertake a class in civil discourse and normality in order to complete their degrees and graduate.

You can read the full article on CNN.