As the old saying in China goes, "There is Yan Ruyu in the book, and there is a golden house hidden in the book". As far as the influence is concerned, some people go to college for money and sex, and these people will eventually be disappointed. Because the income after graduating from college is not necessarily higher than that of the average person, and the girls in the university are far less attractive than the waiters in the hotel. However, these people are too low-level and not worth our efforts.
Another common idea is that college can enable us to learn real skills for making a living and skills useful to society. This is not wrong, but strictly speaking, what he said is still a misunderstanding. Universities can teach us a lot of knowledge and skills, but this is not the whole goal of university education, or even its main goal.
Many graduates know in their hearts that most of the skills they have learned in school have been shelved in society, and strictly speaking, less than half of them are professional counterparts and have learned useful things.
Many people attribute this phenomenon to the irrationality of China's education system, and the disconnection between specialty setting and production practice. Is this actually China's problem? According to statistics, most American college students end up learning things they can't use. So some people simply call American university education "educational waste". By contrast, the situation in China seems to be much better.
This does not mean that others have more serious problems. What we want to emphasize is that the essence of modern society determines the emergence of a large number of phenomena that are not used in learning. Borrowing margaret mead's theory, we are in the era of "post-figurative culture". The special evidence is that due to the rapid development of society, the experience of predecessors is rapidly outdated and ineffective, and elders can rely on their own experience to educate their younger generations. But now, because the younger generation can't repeat their lives, they may even face a completely different living environment from their elders, and their experience is unreliable.
The same is true of education. When we entered school, the society needed 100 boiler experts, so 100 students went to learn boilers, mainly to learn how to make the coal in boilers burn fully. But when they graduated four or five years later, the development of science and technology made it unnecessary for society to use so many boilers, or boilers burned oil or a new generation of fuel instead of coal, so 100 people had to abandon what they had learned and go their separate ways.
In this process, the government, schools and factories have no responsibility, because no one can accurately predict the future now.
Of course, there are some lucky ones who not only study well, but also learn something useful, but they will feel extremely bored, feel that nothing is interesting, and everything is "so", which is especially common among senior students of science and engineering and even graduate students.
They learned knowledge, but they couldn't find the meaning of life. The university met their initial expectations of themselves, but once they reached this expectation, they felt that they had lost something in their lives.
In my opinion, all these mysterious but real problems mainly come from people's misunderstanding of universities.