I have a friend who is unemployed and has been for the last few years. She left a clerical position at a magazine and has since scrounged around doing some Web consulting work here and there, picking up a temp job off and on, but never finding anything durable. I pushed and prodded her recently to check out a few for-profit online schools in the area that have short vocational programs of some kind along with a financial aid package (she has credit card bills). We went to Web sites, dug into various programs, and she promised she'd pursue it.

I had a note from her with an answer a few days later. She'd spoken to others who told her to drop the vocational approach and instead to investigate programs in the second largest university in the state. An online degree wouldn't earn her sufficient "respect," they told her, and she listened. It would cost more money and take longer and force more courses upon her, but that only made it appear to her a better long-term decision.

I shot back: "You need a job, not respect, and the employers who will hire you don't care about the school you attended. They just want to know that you can do the job."

No word since. The idea of the standard four-year diploma is too settled and firm. In this case, and, I suspect, thousands of others, a streamlined, job-oriented program can't break the spell--and it's frustrating. Perhaps more studies like this one will dislodge it, and all will benefit. The cover of this week's issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has this front page headline: "Graduation Rates Fall at One-Third of 4-Year Colleges." Obviously, we have many, many young people who don't fit the four-year mold for one reason or another, and when they arrive on campus they soon feel the mismatch and leave. They might have been spared the experience if the "everyone-should-go-to-college-right-out-of-high-school" dogma weren't so universally broadcast.

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