Volume 6 Issue 5
"Growing with a growing community."
© Metroprea September 21
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(CPS)For most freshmen, registration's long lines, heat, missed course sections and frustrations are cause to wonder why they bothered to come to college. But for freshman accounting major Jackie Pouliot, the events transpiring on her first day of registration at Clarkson College "weighed a lot on my decision to come here." Freshman engineering major Steve Safranek likened the August 25th registration to Christmas morning, when he, Pouliot and 800 other frosh each got eight boxes to cart back to their dorms. · Once there, they hastily unpacked the boxes to find new Zenith z-100 personal computers. They inserted accompanying "demo disks," and stared at the monochrome screens in silent homage. Clarkson thus goes down in ·history as the first college to require all entering freshmen to buy not only paper, pens and textbooks, but microcomputers. A week later, Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey became the second school to impose the new requirement. This winter, Drexel Univer-· sity in Philadelphia will require its freshmen to buy a new wonder Apple computer, which college officials grandly call the Apple-DU. Even more - all of them private colleges - are only months from similar steps: Carnegie-Mellon, Brown, MIT, Pepperdine, Vassar, Dartmouth and the Rochester Institute of Technolo~, to name a few. "What's happening at Stevens and Clarkson merely heralds what is to come," predicts Alfred Bork, a physics and computer science professor at the University of Califomialrvine. "I think we all agree the day is near whan all students will be required to continued on page 3
((P.)) 100 jOO ootkdc fer~ gnds "appears bleak" for the rest of this decade, acrording to a new Stanford Univer&ty study d the big-~ oollege job market. Mmu..u, •an iBml<mg IlUillba- (cl cdlege gnkk) will be £oraid to aro:'pt jcb; inxmm:mJrate with their le.d cl training," says R~ Rumberger, author of the report. "&ml c:n ~cllowenploy ment growth for the eightie'I," he expaim, ·im the inmming Jll.IIDbers cl ~~will lrld OOJege degrees, I see a large number of college gndms ~will be<M!l'-traim:l and not able to get upper-level jobs." AIMdy, RurnberiJ! says, ooe rut cl ~ fwr )QIAg 'MrlB'S in thelalnforce has a college degree. And by 1990, he estimates, one out of every three ~11 be college grads.
"It will be more important than ever to pick a major which is in high demand. A college degree by itself just won't mean much. " There's already a glut of college grid; in manyfiekk, ~pants
ax-, mDl'l fM'.11~ maps
Careers: A guide to the future
Revenge of Last look Pages
special pullout section inside
Nothing to fear but Grinch knocks Bowie's Christmas fear itself Page 16 Page 7
like engineers and computer !rierloe grads will be oompeting for fewEr and fewer openings. "Were simply produdng mJre oolIege gnkk than the labor market can ah!iorb, and it's going to get worse." "It isn't necessarily true that tha;e ~will eamm rooney, but they will have lower-level jobs." College grads currently earn an ~ d 65 percurt more than high mn gnd.iatf's, ~says, and for those lucky enough to find~ in their fieldc; a cdlege degree will still be worth more. 'Tm not ~people from getting a college degree," he adds. Tcr ~who oo ~on tocxilege, they gill have a bttrr ~ d Sfiting ·a better, highez-Ievel jOO. It's jmt that tlee's am a~ dl8IOl they wm't" O:nupntly, "it'll be more imporDri: tbm e.u' to pdca maier~ i> in high <hnairl AOO)ege ~by~ just won't mean much." D