Many Students Learn Little to Nothing in College. Surprise?
These are people who feel they deserve good-paying jobs. After all, the education establishment told them that having a college degree was worth millions. Well it is, if it is in the right subjects and you did well. A political science degree is not exactly equal to a degree in computer engineering, although the campus feminists are always grousing over how much less they are paid than males of equal rank and seniority. How convenient to forget that the liberal arts, which possess no competitive external marketplace, are dominated by women, and engineering, science, and mathematics are dominated by men.
The next financial bubble is out there. It is comprised of people like your son who are carrying enormous debt without any prospect of paying it off. They are going to default. It’s our fault, you say. Well, you say that now. But if we gave your son the grades he deserved you both would have screamed foul and due processed us to death. If your son is a member of some protected class, we would have had to defend against the accusation that we discriminated against him. Anyhow, he got more than he deserved, and the rest of us subsidized his education directly or indirectly with our tax dollars. Of course, you do know that we are going to have to pick up the defaults, just as we picked up the sub-prime mortgages.
Oh yes, if you think the statistic that half don’t learn anything in the first two years is terrible, how does this one grab you? After four years 36% did not experience significant educational improvement. And that statistic is worse than it appears, because at many institutions nearly half the students drop out after two years. So among the self-selected that continued, more than a third learned almost nothing in four years of college.
And if you controlled by academic major and prior preparation, you would find that these failures cluster. How? It’s easy enough to figure out, even if you never finished college.
But don’t worry. The system won’t change, not even after the defaults. There are too many vested interests that benefit from the system. Colleges are labor-intensive operations. They employ lots of people at all sorts of levels. In economic downturns, they expand their physical plants. And besides, parents want to see degrees, not failures. Students want the campus experience. Everyone needs to believe the myth, and we are as good as Elmer Gantry at selling it.
We continue to drain the intellectual capital of the rest of the world. That enables us to compensate for the abundance of people we produce who are without academic or economic skills. When the defaults come, we will print more money and maybe foreclose on a few for-profit institutions. There will be congressional hearings, a few scapegoats from the for-profit world, and a few horror stories about exploitative student loans. There will be an academic Enron and an academic Countrywide. When the smoke clears, the academic AIG will have bailed out the academic Goldman Sachs for one hundred cents on the dollar. And it will be business as usual.
If you think the debt the slackers incur is something hard to bear, well the debt imposed on the nation is even worse.
Fools and tools of fools is all the people have to deal with upon their graduation. Too many morons are in charge of everything and the people suffer for it.
Yet, what is really needed, like good tradesmen, one has to go on a waiting list to get one to fix the plumbing.
What an ignorant thing to say.
Why exactly would that be an ignorant thing to say?
Griggs vs Duke Power killed the ability of companies to use aptitude tests to screen job applicants, so the college degree is the new requirement. That drives, in large part, the notion that one must have a college degree to succeed in life. That drives, in large part, the enrollment of students who have no interest in learning, but do want to access jobs that can provide a living in the future.
As noted, the skilled trades can provide the living. Many students with average or better intellects and no interest in scholarly pursuits might benefit from that option.
That’s not to disparage education or the skilled trades. A viable society needs both. No individual can excel at everything.
Can I fix my car? Yes, but not nearly as quickly as a skilled, practiced mechanic with the proper tools. My time is better spent at my profession, and I’ll pay him to do his for me.
The other motivator for attending college is finding a mate. As long as a college degree is a status symbol, people will use them to screen for more desireable partners.
I won’t go into my rant about grievance studies degrees, or the stupidity of people who believe that because college graduates, on average, make more money over a lifetime then they will automatically make more money over their lifetime, with a degree in Philosophy.
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962
I’m going to memorize that quote! Thanks!
The role that monasteries played in preserving western learning in the dark ages had been completely eclipsed by the sixteenth century. It was their corruption, laxity and venality that made them prime targets for dissolution.
Today’s universities are their modern equivalents. Sitting on huge reserve funds which could be used to defray all tuition for students, most of these institutions are no more than finishing schools in every sense of the word.
What made the monasteries prime targets for dissolution was their assets, which were seized in order to enrich the state and used to pay off its cronies. Many regions that were habitually prosperous under nearby monastic landlords were reduced to grinding poverty under aristocratic landlords far away at court — all the income off the lands left the region.
Well, the motives and the outcomes vary depending on which account you read. My point was that the monastic orders had strayed very far from their spiritual beginnings and made themselves targets. Today’s universities will find themselves similarly reformed, I suspect.
Not to mention a more down-to-earth asset – all that lovely dressed stone.
Ever wonder why Roman villas don’t dot the English countryside? Same reason that abandoned archways and section-of-cloister make those ancient monasteries such good subjects for moonlight photography.
At least PART of the blame must be put on Colleges of “Education” which turn out cookie-cutter “teachers” for the primary grades and HS who don’t have the least CLUE about how to teach children to think for themselves, including how to use reason to understand how much of their future success depends on actually LEARNING something.
PappaDave, I have two words for you and all other mammas and pappas out there who have school-aged children. And it is easier to say than implement, but DO IT: HOME SCHOOL
It is not always necessary to home school, but it is mandatory to stay involved in your children’s educations. The purpose of public education is to create compliant citizens. The education is secondary. Many teachers are ill equipped to deal with an inquisitive mind.
This is an excellent article, except that the author did not point out when and why the schools began their slide into non-education. Of course there had always been party schools where students were allowed to just float through years of nonsense courses (like psychology and sociology) – until daddy got tired of footing the bill and pulled junior out. But the real disaster began in the late 1960s when all the Leftist professors (that had been planted in our “elite” schools by the Kremlin since the 1950s) began to incite their students to demonstrate (actually riot) against the war in Vietnam. The Kremlin knew the US Military could not be defeated, but the American people could be convinced to force our government to end the war, so this is the tactic that was used – and used successfully. These professors actually encouraged their students to never come to a single class (so they could riot), yet be awarded with passing grades so that they would not be kicked out of school – and then subject to the draft. Thus the trend was set to officially award Liberal Arts degrees for political reasons, that were meaningless, in addition to the degrees the schools had always awarded for “partying”. Of course engineering and science professors continued to demand full effort, and the result was that vast numbers of students abandoned engineering and science, and other legitimate subjects, for BS courses and an easy degree. Obviously you can’t perform experiments in chemistry, or build a bridge, with a fake degree. I saw this first hand because I was an engineering student who graduated in 1967 with my BS (along with an ROTC commission as a 2LT), and watched my school and other schools fall apart over the coming years. I survived my active duty time in Nam and then went on to a rewarding 40-years of technical work in the US space program. Now I am retired, and these problems are someone else’s worry.
You got it absolutely historically correct. Thanks.
Please paragraph and punctuate to make your important message legible.
Pelaut, thanks for the comment. I forgot to mention above that when I did my engineering graduate work in the mid 70s (at a different school and after resigning my Army commission), the student body had already undergone a major change. Student enrollment in science and engineering studies had decreased substantially, and enrollment in worthless “fun studies” had increased substantially.
For example my graduate level class in Advanced Chemical Thermodynamics had 9 students in it – 6 white males and 3 Asian males. Meanwhile the classroon down the hall was actually a huge lecture hall holding some 200 students “studying” psychology. Its population was at least half females, plus a significant number of minorities.
Of course it is only human nature for young people to want to take the easy road in life, but I can’t help but believe Leftist politics deliberately played a role in pushing this useless course of studies onto young Americans. It is the primary aim of Leftist politics to make all citizens totally dependent on the State; and citizens with a serious technical education are far too independent.
That was actually 3 more students than in my undergrad P-Chem class in 1977. I attended a university that had a full time enrollment of over 30,000 at the time and we could muster 6 students to take P-Chem. I wonder if it is any better today.
As someone with a Doctorate in Chemical Engineering from a top-tier university, it saddens me to note that this trend continues. Worse, the number of foreign nationals who are being awarded advanced technical degrees continues to increase while domestically born students shy away from such demanding academic curricula.
I wish Mr. Miller had distinguished between the various educational schools. For example, engineering vs science vs medical school, vs law school, vs music school, vs liberal arts. Mr. Miller uses liberal arts classes, students and teachers as a stand-in for all American colleges and universities. This is obviously false, and not worth our time to read.
The teaching of liberal arts is definitely degrading, and rapidly. This is being caused by both an unconscious and a quite intentional cheapening and dumbing-down of all facets of liberal arts by modern liberals. At its worst, it has become nothing more than profoundly dishonest and cynical liberal indoctrination.
As a friend just commented, remember the guy who kept asking questions in class? He was the one who wanted to learn something. The rest were just there to graduate.
As you say, the Progressive infiltration began in the 60s, when the demonstrators of that era received unearned degrees, and found jobs as the professors of today, bringing with them their strange notions that there is no truth, no reality, and that he who strives is a dupe of the “system”. College tuition cost has risen at several times the rate of inflation, while value received has plummeted.
Professor Miller decries the failure of the students, but we should also ask, “What about the failure of the professoriate?” – of which he is at least a member, even if dissenting from the outcome.
How might it have been prevented, and more important, how might it be reversed?
What I find really amusing is that all of these universities that teach Business Management are in such lousy financial shape. They are always asking for more money and their tuitions skyrocket every year. If they can’t manage their own financial affairs, why should we believe that they know how to teach others how to run their businesses? And I don’t think Bill Gates ever finished college.
College may simply NOT be worth the investment anymore. And although college may be your last opportunity to learn something about subjects you may never come into contact again (like dead 18th century lesbian poets), the costs are so high now that you MUST have a return on your investment unless you want to deal with a mountain of debt for the rest of your life.
Where I live, you have a lot of unemployed college graduates who majored in marketing. But I still can’t find a decent plumber who will charge me less per hour than what my attorney makes. Something is very, very, wrong here.
Since a plumber would be useful in ensuring doodoo is routed away, whilst a lawyer is more likely to be routing doodoo *to* you, it seems to this commenter that a plumber has more utility and thus worth higher pay.
Amen. I’ve been in the HR field for the past 25 years and have had an inside view on the recruiting process, including college recruitment. The cover letters from so many college grads and soon-to-be-grads are virtually incomprehensible; their CV’s read like fantasy romances. Interviews with these same people produce little but a sense of foreboding for the future.
Don’t misread my meaning. There is wheat amongst the chaff, and those stand-outs tower over their peers in comparison. Our colleges and universities are capable of producing very high quality graduates. But they’re few and far between and becoming more so every year. It makes me wonder where the leadership for the future is coming from.
And then I’m jarred by the thought that we’re essentially already at that leadership-deficit future. We’re being led by a man who was supposedly an academic superstar, but whose papers, transcripts and academic records are buried deeper than the floor of the Marianas Trench, so it’s impossible to verify that claim. He acceded to the highest office in the land with little in the way of tangible accomplishments along the way, save an endless stream of self-promoting experiences. He’s assembled a team of people just like him. Supposedly the best and brightest, they can’t figure out for the life of them how to get their fellow Americans back to work, and how to right the economic ship of state.
And what’s waiting in the wings in our colleges and universities to fill his shoes doesn’t look all that much better.
Could you be more specific about what you mean they do not learn anything the first 2 years. Is it the courses are bogus or just pass the kids w/o them learning anything? Take for instance my 2 sons who are at GA Tech -one majoring in computer engineering and the other in computer science. Why would not their first 2 years not be a waste or some of their first 2 years be a waste (just dawn on me that I know they have to take calculus and physics).
JZ, he’s not talking about Ga Tech. The courses are real and you cannot slide by. Your money is well spent.
Amen.
Can I say that on this blog?
Double amen. Yes, you can say that on this site and no he isn’t talking about Ga Tech or really any other hard science curriculum. What they are talking about is the destruction of the liberal arts degree. Over the last forty years the liberal arts degree has gone from a Western Civilization centered core of courses designed to develop in our students a real understanding of our rich history and how we have developed the values of a great nation. The Communist/Progressives have infiltrated this field heavily over the last sixty years and gotten themselves instated as heads of all the faculty and educator associations and then the actual departments in all of the major schoools. These fifth columnists have been actively using the mantra of we are all equal and “truth” is always only relative to destroy not only the liberal arts programs of our nation but in the process undermine the core values of our citizens. At the very top of this list is the nations most prestigious universities and colleges, from Amherst to Harvard and Duke to Stanford. The destruction is ongoing and pervasive and it is only now that the economy is cratering and the costs are now beyond the reach of all but the most affluent that the underlying destruction is becoming obvious. God protect those of us who have to finance our most important concern our children’s education with this as our guidance.
JZ, while this article may be applicable to (an)other large institution in that state, Ga Tech is not the kind of place he’s talking about.
In a hard science major, the first two years are worthwhile although some junior college math and computer science courses are excellent. Also, by the end of the semester, you are one of three or four left in the class as was my experience when I decided to take some refresher courses 50 years after my engineering classes. I didn’t get an engineering degree because I went to medical school instead.
My daughter went to U of Arizona as a non-resident. Her first two years were mostly a waste of time as she had not settled on a major. Her US History class provided a good deal of misinformation with a strong leftist bias. For example, she was taught that the “Silent Majority” of the 1960s were the whites who refused to accept the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Even Wikipedia, which has its problems, would teach her the truth. She is now finishing her second year in a junior college and applying to UC.
From the frying pan into the fire, with respect to the leftward bias, IMHO. Of course, I’m presuming that you’re referencing UC Berkeley, not UC Merced. I had a consulting engagement with a department at UCSD a few years back and for the duration of the project (about 9 months) one of the senior profs in the department scornfully called me “denier” on no more evidence than my having declined free tickets to go to Al Gore’s speech on campus. Yikes.
I noticed what is perhaps just a coincidence and perhaps not: The article says that about half the students learn nothing in the first two years and about half the students who enter college drop out without finishing. It may be that the college system is just taking too long — several years — to flunk out or discourage students who don’t have or want to acquire the skills necessary to graduate. The most relevant statistic is the number of students who graduate without being able to perform at the college level.
One obvious fix to this problem is to have the colleges lose money if their graduates cannot get jobs at high enough salaries to pay back student loans. You could, for example, require colleges to contribute much of their education up front in return for their graduates signing a contract to pay for it as a percentage of the salary they earn after graduation. No high salary, no high payback to the colleges. Not only would the colleges quickly start forcing their students to learn or leave, they would also start discouraging ideologically based academic work that led to anti-capitalist — and hence low salaried — graduates.
How right this article is. My daughter just graduated in December from a very large state University. I saw this exact thing with many of her friends. The laziest, and most unmotivated students dropped out usually after their sophomore year. The slightly less lazy majored in various liberal arts degrees and graduated with crushing debts, and are now unemployed or working at retail jobs that they could have been hired for right after high school. While my daughter flirted with the idea of doing very little work in college like her friends, she finally listened to my advice to major in something useful and graduated with a degree in computer science. She got two good job offers within a matter of weeks, (in today’s very tough job market) and probably could have had more, as a minority (woman in a male dominated field). I always rail about this exact subject to my friends. I feel that many kids, especially if they are the first generation to attend college in their family, are done a grave disservice by the college counselors,(on the college payroll) who advise them that ALL majors have great employment prospects. This is a bold-faced lie. But what do you expect from liberals employed by liberals?
Well said, and, I believe we are already bailing out college. Sallie Mae has been on Federal life support for a couple of years longer than Freddie and Fannie, and with Obamacare, Congress raised the ante on Fed control of higher education funding only exacerbating the problem. There are no market feedback mechanisms in higher education funding, only questionable priorities piled on bad decisions and the students are coming forth with ever decreasing wisdom and discernment.
Yes there are millions of students in college that shouldn’t be but we as a society have pushed the belief for decades now that a college degree, and not hard work, is the path to success. How many sob stories have we seen on TV about parents that can’t afford to send their kids to college and how many politicians promising to make it more affordable so those kids won’t be “stuck in the military” (John Kerry)?
We need to promote the trades and businesses need to be encouraged to hire and train high school grads for jobs that really don’t require a college degree, like most sales jobs.
I’m a mechanical engineer with an MBA that went to college right out of high school. I failed out my first year. I had the sense to not struggle through three more years and instead joined the Navy. After 8 years in the USN I was ready for college and would up graduating Magna Cum Laude. What is often missing from kids today is maturity, focus, and a sense of responsibility for their own futures.
And now anyone with any kind of insurance at all partially pays for insuring these gum-chewing, mouth-breathing, and rapping mollycoddled brats to live at their mommies’ until they’re 26 years old. The law calls them “children”. At 26 I had three kids, lived in a two bedroom apartment and scrimped and saved to get the 20% downpayment required to buy a house, while working two jobs and going after a masters in physics. I say screw them all, let’em starve.
And you, Mr. Miller, remind me of the liberal professor in the 1950′s whom we could not persuade that “grading on the curve” would initiate a race to the bottom. Rather than leave the “profession” of professoring, he chose to take the pay and join in its ruination.
I teach history at a community college. Perhaps it lacks the residential college experience described above to get me quite this upset.
I will say that I have a lot of freshmen who are incompetent at writing sentences–much less writing a proper essay. Even the Politically Correct parts of history seems to have gone over many of their heads: almost none know about the Middle Passage and its horrors.
Way too many kids are going to college who clearly did not get much of an education in high school. I’m doing my best to fix this, but there’s a limit to what we can fix in a culture that does not value education. Ovid’s aphorism, “The workmanship exceeded the quality of the materials,” well describes the problem that colleges are facing today.
I hear you, but you must keep in mind that at a community college, you are getting the bottom third of a high school class (from my high school, it would have been the bottom tenth, (of a proportionately higher sample). You are not coming close to seeing the best kids who are going elsewhere, especially to David Thompson’s favorites…the Ivies!
I daresay that those kids would impress you.
I agree with you that Community College is full of the bottom thirds of High Schoolers but some of them are smart(Not in the bottoms thirds of the HS). I was 125 out of 300 kids in my HS, and got in some nice schools but I didn’t have the $$$ for a 4 Year University.
Sometimes the smartest kids are the ones the system tends to look past and give money to others. But the degree thing is little idealistic. A Political Science degree can get you a government job where it is a good choice if you are pursing a career in public relations. Its just applying at jobs and be in the right area for the job. Yes some degrees though are ridiculous, Philosophy/Classic are an example unless you are well connected in some way or form. See, I’m getting a Major in Poly Sci but also getting two minors(Minors are helpful if you place them right, I believe)in Business and Communications. And I love going to Community College. There are some teachers that are very cool and able to actually help you get into the career you want if you get lucky, like I did.
“Did you forget that the monks preserved the learning of Western civilization?”
If you came out of the Public School system you probably never HAD A CLUE that monks preserved the learning of Western civilization. It just doesn’t fit the “diversity” narrative, so it’s totally unimportant. Those on the left who DO know it are busy rewriting history to make sure no American student ever does.
“If you came out of the Public School system you probably never HAD A CLUE that monks preserved the learning of Western civilization.”
If you knew only what the Public School system taught, likely you have no clue what a monk is.
They would probably know (or have been exposed to) Mendel, Luther, and Friar Tuck. Not many know that monks essentially invented, or at least perfected, the water wheel. But they were the liberal semi-utopian scholars of their day, so I am not sure that they would get the PJM seal of approval.
In short, education as it has historically been known is nearly dead, the victim largely of the Left, but really of nearly every major political group with an axe to grind.
The only subjects that still enforce rigour and yield excellence are generally the ones that a vocational/technical school would be better off handling, rather than a university. And rather than try to reform the humanities back to something that an Aquinas or Doctor Johnson would have recognized and approved, too many on the Right are content to dance upon its ruins because they’re not remunerative enough.
American higher education needs four things:
* The natural attrition of the relics that currently infest the humanities (realistically too late for purges, it appears)
* A widespread reform of the gatekeeper role that such relics currently play in admitting and advancing the next generation of professorAND administrators–some watchdog function to counteract or overrule faculty malfeasance
* An end to the ignorant, lazy insistence of businesses on bachelor’s degrees as an entry-level credential, and postgraduate degrees as prerequisites to promotion
* A Right that widely values traditional humane learning, whose rank and file stays broadly populist but doesn’t let indignation at false intellectuals curdle into anti-intellectualism or educational utilitarianism
A man can dream, can’t he? And oh yeah: shut down all the sports programs, no exceptions. (Long as I’m asking for the Moon…)
I’d say the person who wrote the following sentence:
“It is comprised of people like your son who are carrying enormous debt without any prospect of paying it off.”
obviously cut a few classes himself.
Nothing is “comprised” of anything. Composed, maybe. Sign up for an English class sometime and learn all about transitive verbs. The experience will change your life.
You may just want to go back to school yourself…..
com·prise
/kəmˈpraɪz/ Show Spelled[kuhm-prahyz] Show IPA
–verb (used with object), -prised, -pris·ing.
1.
to include or contain: The Soviet Union comprised several socialist republics.
2.
to consist of; be composed of: The advisory board comprises six members.
3.
to form or constitute: Seminars and lectures comprised the day’s activities.
—Idiom
4.
be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores.
Use comprised in a Sentence
See images of comprised
Search comprised on the Web
Origin:
1400–50; late ME comprisen < MF compris (ptp. of comprendre ) < L comprehēnsus; see comprehension
You beat me to it, Hollymer.
Comprised
–verb (used with object),-prised, -pris·ing.
1.to include or contain: The Soviet Union comprised several socialist republics.
2.to consist of; be composed of: The advisory board comprises six members.
3.to form or constitute: Seminars and lectures comprised the day’s activities.
—Idiom
4.be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores.
Somone now needs to post a good definition for “PWNED”
Yeah, leave the grammar corrections to me!
Come on. You know that that fourth definition allowing “comprised of” was added by permissive (descriptivist) lexicographers to ratify the spread of the incorrect usage. The same thing is happening with the destruction of the useful distinction between “begging the question” and “raising the question”–that was well-understood ten years ago but can no longer be safely used by writers. “Uninterested” versus “disinterested” died out before that. We shouldn’t pretend that these trends reduce the expressive power of the language.
Okay, Gibbs; We know it’s you.
So, hansong; Has your life changed any lately? This comments section is comprised of much education.
In 100 years we’ve gone from teaching Greek and Latin in high school to teaching remedial reading in college. It’s a shame that we’ve allowed a high school degree to be worth no more than a c.v. line item, to use for entry into college. If “college is for everyone”, then it isn’t college. It’s just 13th grade.
What outrages me the most is that ultimately, the students who worked themselves to a nub in hard science and engineering programs will be stuck bailing out the slackers.
It’s obscene.
You are, of course, familiar with Pareto.
Twenty percent of the population will carry the other eighty. It has always been that way.
And now you know why most undergraduates are females. (Abe’s “your son” stuff betrayed an ignorance of the obvious.)
com·prise (km-prz)
tr.v. com·prised, com·pris·ing, com·pris·es
1. To consist of; be composed of: “The French got … French Equatorial Africa, comprising several territories” (Alex Shoumatoff).
2. To include; contain: “The word ‘politics’ … comprises, in itself, a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude” (Charles Dickens). See Synonyms at include.
3. Usage Problem To compose; constitute: “Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards … that comprised the city” (Saul Bellow).
Gotta love pedantic jerks.
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/comprise
com·prise /kəmˈpraɪz/ Show Spelled
[kuhm-prahyz] Show IPA
–verb (used with object), -prised, -pris·ing.
1. to include or contain: The Soviet Union comprised several socialist republics.
2. to consist of; be composed of: The advisory board comprises six members.
3. to form or constitute: Seminars and lectures comprised the day’s activities.
—Idiom
4. be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores.
—Usage note
Comprise has had an interesting history of sense development. In addition to its original senses, dating from the 15th century, “to include” and “to consist of ” ( The United States of America comprises 50 states ), comprise has had since the late 18th century the meaning “to form or constitute” ( Fifty states comprise the United States of America ). Since the late 19th century it has also been used in passive constructions with a sense synonymous with that of one of its original meanings “to consist of, be composed of ”: The United States of America is comprised of 50 states. These later uses are often criticized, but they occur with increasing frequency even in formal speech and writing.
Interesting little sub-thread. I am really glad that I decided a long time ago to avoid using “comprised”; I am not smart enough to use it correctly.
What I find HILARIOUS are the alphabet networks continuing every couple of months, putting on display the sob stories of:
1. A Freshman and/or Sophomore college student accruing a ridiculous amount of college debt and their hard-working family struggling to pay this college debt..
OR..
2. A college graduate ‘unable to pay THEIR exorbitant college loans with high interest rates’ following college.
FYI: If your child has NO major or little interest of setting their mind on one (Honestly, very few kids know ‘what they want to do’ at 18, 19 etc.,), or show an interest in ‘art, humanities, sociology, poly sci or other difficult-to-hire fields, their first few years in school should be at a J C or C C!!!
I’m sick and tired of hearing about these ‘..for profit colleges fleecing the student..’ crapola as well. IF there are, and there always will be, no matter how many programs are strong-armed by the Fed, idiot masses who don’t read the fine lines of said loans.. it’s your bed, bub.
The same goes for the same story of the 19 year old buying a new/next to new car/ credit card approval with ’0% down’ and later having the bank repossess said property(ies).
How about the ‘ARM’ home loans fiasco, as well as the other ‘too good to be true’ home loans leading to the 2008 economic meltdown. Oy!
- ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. Mr. Barnum, I believe that’s more like ‘a thousand suckers’ in this day and age of people being bankrupt so to speal of their very own responsibilities. Sad state..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind#Closing_of_the_American_Mind
Here is a great though of a very practical nature that I think would be an awesome addition to the basic college curriculum. Every general business major at most state college is required to take two semesters of some science related topic. So as a business major we sign up for Geology 101 or Meteorology 101 or something that seems easy and move on.
Why not offer a class called Applied Sciences 101 and 102 or some gimmicy name? But make it science oriented but make it where the students have to do things like strip down and rebuild a combustion engine and the science behind a working engine. Or something similar only computer oriented with an emphasis on electronics. Perhaps giving the students talks of building working circuit boards or household wiring projects. The science would be at least as challenging as anything I learned in Geology about identifying sedimentary or igneous rocks and 1000 times more practical. I would demand my sons take that class if I knew its was offered.
I firmly believe that a couple semesters of introductory computer science classes would do wonders for the ability of students in other disciplines to figure out how to write a coherent essay. If they can’t figure out how to write a mildly complex program in C# or Java, perhaps they should be attending a trade school instead.
Most colleges have a science requirement, but it is not much of one. I think replacing some of the general education PC subjects such as ethnic studies and women’s studies with introductory chemistry, physics, biology, or geology, would be a good start on making a college degree mean something.
Why not write an article about what percentage of people in America are unambitious, dull or lazy? Unless you’re in a highly technical field, the majority of success is done by social networking.
Success is political. There should probably be a class in how to drink coffee with the right people; it would wake college students up to what the real world is all about.
There are wonderful singers, dancers, photographers, politicians, writers, journalists, and on and on who are not particularly successful. There are many who do those things shabbily but live in big houses because they know how to “work it”. If you know the right people and can talk like mad you don’t really have to do anything particularly well except show up and some say showing up is most of success.
You talk as though your observation is true and also some sort of law of nature, like gravity or relativity. It might be true and just be another sign of how decadent we have become. Decadent societies, by the way, have — historically speaking — a very bad track record.
Some adults understand generalizations and what they’re worth. The idea I was positing a science equation lacks merit.
Actually, what I was indirectly suggesting about your additions to the college curriculum is that they “lacked merit”. What you are trying to say in rebuttal is — actually — that I was just plain wrong to say that you were “positing a science equation”. Being wrong is not the same thing as lacking merit. You would be well advised to acquire a sophisticated understanding of the sophisticated-sounding words and phrases you throw around so freely. If you don’t like my comments, you might reflect on this (translated) quote from Aristophanes:
“The wise learn many things from their enemies”
And no, I don’t think you now regard me as your enemy — I’m sure I’ve just irritated you a little.
Since it was obvious I was joking about a coffee drinking class and I never used the word “wrong” but used “lacking merit”, your unsuccessful attempt at straw man pedantry only shows you arguing with yourself and thus producing the source of the irritation you have to be you with yourself. Try parsing that Plato.
Here’s a little ditty I’m going to translate personally for you: “O camerão que dorme a honda leve”.
That means, “You ZZZ you lose”.
Mr. May, I clicked on the link to your essays. While content looked solid and worth a read, sadly, the dark background and white text made my eyes (and me) bug out. Inverted, high contrast designs are really tough to read.
I know; other people have said so too. I originally wrote them to amuse myself and know nothing about typography or web design. Only the Robert Frank essay is non-buggy. I should fix them.
I put it this way to a group of fellow law professors who thought that President Obama’s proposal to increase access to college was a great idea:
Q. What is the purpose of going to college?
A. To delay entry into the labor market.
Q. What is the result of going to college?
A. To extend adolescence.
Q. Can any of you give me an estimate of how many of your law students are educated as opposed to credentialed?
A. (Virtual silence).
Is this a test to illustrate how badly commenters can compose their remarks? Well, it’s working.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for this article. I’m sending the link to every one on my email list. I hope it goes viral.
This phenomenon is illustrated in our government every day. Our elected officials demand more and more money for lower quality and less quantity, and cannot justify their reasoning with tangible explanations.
This educational and governmental trend cannot continue without dire consequences for this society. Our conquerers will not give much respect to our laws of civility and politically correctness.
This discussion reminds me of the recent reaction to the Chinese Tiger Mother story. A large part of the reaction consisted of how it is more important to allow your child to socialize and learn team-building skills than it is to push them academically.
In the end, who is right? As someone who took the “responsible” route, with an advanced scientific degree and a well-paying job, I feel like the “slackers” are smarter. They know that the system is in place to take care of them off the backs of people like me. They can use the social skills learned while slacking off in college to maintain a government that will take care of them (health insurance to age 26, mortgage bailouts, student loan bailouts, etc.).
I skipped college, recreated on my own dime, and became an aerospace engineer. I have a son who graduated with honors from U Chicago (full ride) in the humanities and is now teaching American Culture at a Russian University. I have a son who is studying to be an electronics engineer (on scholarship) and a daughter studying to be a chemical engineer (on scholarship). And who is paying for their scholarships? The kids who don’t study. (or in the case of U Chicago the endowment)
Too funny my friends. Way too funny.
Or as my friend Veeshir likes to say “Funniest End Of Civilization Ever”
It’s another scam, isn’t it?
Other than the engineering and science disciplines, pre-med, some business tracks, and a very few liberal arts tracks, college today is really a 4 or 5 year extension of high school, isn’t it? It delays the responsibilities of adulthood for half a decade.
In some ways, that isn’t all bad. It may actually take that much longer to become a functioning adult in today’s world.
But the problems are huge. At least: a) the 100K or so in debt most accumulate, b) the fact that “college educated” adults contribute 4 or 5 years less to society by not working usefully, and c) the impact on the young adults when they realize that the hype was hype.
But, of course, the liberals who run our colleges make a fortune, don’t they?
I wish I was as optimistic as the author. The rot in higher education has metathesizes into the sciences and engineering. Witness the sting of disasters in our generation. Was there one competent engineer in the Corps of Engineers, in a position of authority, who understood soil mechanics and could deduce that his New Orleans levees could not withstand the flood level of a modest rain storm? Was there one similar person who realized that the I 35 W bridge was built with gusset plates which were 1/2 of the required thickness? (In the hullabaloo, after the slaughter, the head of the highway department admitted that he did not know what a gusset plate was. His department was interested in hike-biker paths.) The 12 ton slab that fell from the new Boston tunnel ceiling and crushed a lady was supported by connections that were lethally inadequate. The engineering firm that designed them had a website which touted their environmental expertise, along with the Corps of Engineers. But my “favorite” is the infamous Challenger slaughter command, “take off your engineering hat and put on your manager’s hat.”… then, unsaid, kill somebody, due to your stupidity. Some engineer was commanded, by a boss, to push the BP well drilling to kamikaze techniques. This was exposed by a commission on which no experienced hydrocarbon engineer sat. It was composed of environmental lawyers or regulators, and (surprise) it concluded we need more laws and regulators, governing engineers. Which is easier, overviewing, or doing? The global warming debate is filled with scientific holding that violate basic science. One example: No one can examine my data and calcs because they belong to me. Try that in the design of a new airplane, or nuclear reactor.
In each of these cases, experienced engineers turned their head, and grimaced, if they knew. In all of these cases, the government employees were never sanctioned. The government organizations were reorganized, renamed, shuffled, but no retirement plans vanished, and no jail time occurred. In private organizations, there has been a long term trend that older engineers, with higher salaries, are laid off.
In my limited contact with the supervisors of new engineers, the judgment that the profession is in decay is almost universal.
As an engineer I always spoke the truth no matter what it cost me. But I’m old school (well I didn’t go to school – I worked my way up). I believe in honor and keeping my own. I don’t live well these days. I do sleep well.
And I must say engineering was going downhill already in the early 80s.
The Range Safety Engineer who refused to sign off
on launching Challenger comes to mind; He was told
“Now it is time to take off your Engineer hat,
and put on your Manager hat. (and do what the
politicians demand: Launch in time for the
State of the Union Address).
metathesizes ??
To continue your critical thinking exercise: Census data shows that those with a higher education vs. high school diploma make more money (when there are jobs, of course).
This is partly because it is hard to get a job beyond asking about “fries with that” without a college degree. As Mr. Miller suggested, very many jobs can be done adequately by high school graduates, implying a waste of the time and cost of a college degree.
There has been whining about the irrelevance of a college education every time the job market stinks.
I graduated in ’74. There were a lot of humanities majors in our graduating class because for the most part my classmates had assumed there would be a job awaiting them upon graduation. That quickly changed during the Carter years. Indeed, by the early 1980s there was talk at many colleges that humanties departments had become an endangered species as no one was majoring in those subjects. The Carter years also saw enrollments in MBA programs skyrocket as all those baby boomers with BAs in soft disciplines sought to catch up in the job market.
The main difference between then and now is that my classmates and their parents mostly had to pony up all the tuition each semester or were on scholarships. Student loans were still relatively rare.
I well recall my son’s junior high history text had 1 1/2 pages on Shirley Chisholm, with a photo, and one paragraph on George Washington.
And what makes you think George Washington, our first president (and a self-admitted slave owner), is more important than an obscure member of Congress? You must be a RACIST!
I attended the University of Delaware 1975-79. Tuiton was less than $500 per semester, room and board approx $2k. My father and I made this deal: I paid the fall semester, he paid for the spring. I mad my money at Dover AFB washing the C5A Galaxy and working at the dining hall during school. The only debt I had upon graduation was $300 in parking tickets which dad took care of. He always used to ask why there was string attached to the car handle?
I graduated in 4 years with A BS Degree in Economics, took Calculus, Chemistry, lots of business, international and foreign policy courses. Pretty much planned my own program. But between the partying, work and being a lousy student to begin with, managed to record several Ds and one F.
But to this day, I understand things better based on this experience.
Oh and by the way, now I’m 50 some and unemployed. So if your looking for any help in the Phoenix area let me know. I’ve been in aviation material and international business since 1980. Thought this could be a novel way to get exposure?
When I started college in 1963, we all were required to have 4 years in high school English; in college, most degrees required 12 hours of English. I have spotty memories of my childhood, but many of them consist of books – in our small, rural high school we were asked to record the books we read for a year. I had the highest (in the sixties as I remember) but it wasn’t out of the ball park. We watched television that used literate allusions and we caught them.
Our junior college has an agreement with a local high school that we teach three classes that they can count toward their high school degrees. None of my children took Enlish as undergraduates except when the classes would also count for their diversity requirements. So what had been 4 hih school year-long classes and what had been 4-semester requirements in college are now taken care of within the 4 high school years – and what had been 4 semester requirements are now for many majors only 1. Our junior college is the best in a large state at preparing students for 4-year schools (they graduate 7 years after starting with us at almost double the rate of the next junior college); our state has state-wide standards that require more of the basics than do most states. Our experience is hardly unusual.
Of course, we can assume that our students are far more prepared than, say, we were. They understand computers, of course. But they’ve read less. 1963 was a watershed year – the end of the strong push after Sputnik for stronger education that became by 1967 the forces describe above had their effect. Their passive vocabularies are pathetic.
I’m not sure why this hasn’t received more attention, but…
The student loan defaults and write-offs are already here. Civil servants have had access to them for a few years, now, and now everyone can do it.
Google “IBR”
People like to bash my generation for being lazy or unambitious, but the simple truth is that our educational institutions suck. Previous generations didn’t do any better job of maintaining that than they did Social Security. If you didn’t want bloated, overpriced, ineffective schools that hand out worthless degrees and inflated grades… then perhaps you shouldn’t have created them. Don’t look at us, this is YOUR doing.
I’m not blaming your generation. I’m blaming my generation, full of selfish parents so focused on themselves that they did not much care whether their kids learned anything or not. And some of it was the insane belief that everyone should go to college. Not everyone is college material.
Famous lost words: Your kid is not College material.
The capacity for abstract thought is found in ~ 1/3
of the population, and those who have it will always
end up in charge when it is time to cope with crisis,
because knowledge will forever rule ignorance.
After the initial shock, humanity responds to crisis
by separating into leaders, followers, and those who
have to be moved out of the way of progress.
I think this has nothing to do with liberal college professors. The study found that college slackers don’t learn much. What’s depressing is how many students are slacking their way to a high-cost, low-value degree.
College failure rates are high: The study misses the weakest students, who drop out in their first year. After two years, 45 percent show little or no improvement in reasoning and writing skills; that drops to 36 percent after four years, suggesting some non-learners have quit.
The study finds many students spend much more time on socializing than on studying or attending classes.
Students who took classes that required significant reading and writing learned more than students who took reading-lite and writing-lite classes.
Education majors were among the group of low-learning majors, along with business, communications and social work.
There are fewer late bloomers than we think. We are sending more B- and C students to college. In most cases, students who didn’t learn much in high school don’t learn much in college either.
Just points that haven’t been mentioned.
The elephant in the room is the notion of an egalitarian education, coming out of the premise of an egalitarian society. I don’t know how else to say this, but people are seemingly improved by challenge, ruined by egalitarian standards.
I would like to see Americans come to an understanding that when other people talk about leveling output, standards, income, and results, they pull out a silver cross, and scream.
A second point is that government, almost by definition, cannot fund or order excellence. Government can either provide least common denomiators; file your taxes, don’t kill, feed your kids. Or, when it does single out, does so on the basis of political preference, crony capitalism if you will. Since government has half our economy, we are drowning in crony capitalism, from food stamps to defense contractors, in each instance an preference that serves a political goal unrealted to excellence.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to end, and, in a sort of political entropy, the tendency is downward. Would like to think the concept of China, 2 generations up from starving peasants, would do a “Sputnik” on us and scare us into action, but probably not. The 1957 challenge spurred us into more consumption in education and engineereing, and so had the wind of government bureaucracies at its back. The 2011 (and on) challenge is to hack back at the government bureaucracy, step by step, and their leaders, and cheerleaders.
I was a professor in a Canadian university before I retired a few years ago and we didn’t seem to have the kinds of students who don’t study and don’t learn that are described in this post. Perhaps this is due to the fact that a large proportion of Canadian students live at home and I suspect that students who live at home are less likely to attend university simply “for the college experience.” I think most parents expect their sons and daughters to be studying when they’re not on campus and the parents are around to reinforce that notion when kids live at home rather than on campus.
Also, because tuition is relatively low here, students can still fund a goodly percentage of their tuition fees by working part-time while they are studying, and so they don’t have the time to merely socialize. (The average yearly tuition for a Canadian university is about $8,000.)
Too, there is no equivalent of the Ivy League elitist university in Canada, so our completely middle-class students don’t have to try to imitate the sons and daughters of millionaires, who may do nothing but party. In addition, while football and other sports are big on many campuses, students are not encouraged to fund their educations through being on sports scholarships; in fact, many campuses don’t award scholarships merely on the basis of athletic prowess. As a result, there really are no “party” campuses.
In comparing Canadian and American campuses, it seems to me that it would cost nothing to “straighten out” American students who don’t study. Get rid of the emphasis on sports by not providing sports scholarships, don’t emphasize the Ivy League colleges as being any better than good public state universities, and use no criteria for admission except high school grade averages in core subjects like English, math, and the sciences.
From the land of the inventors of the Blackberry and Hollywood North (Tom Cruise is up here filming this week).
You may keep Tom Cruise. He jumped the shark on Oprah. Do not and will not attend anymore of his “films”. No thanks.
Many of the identified problems trace to the fact that a college education isn’t made subject to market forces. I’ll provide just two examples:
First, it is remarkable that financial institutions that would hesitate to assign a high credit limit to a student’s credit card, and would never dream of lending some kid with little income $100,000 or more to buy property or start a business would lend that same kid that kind of money to get a degree. They do it because the loan has a government guarantee behind it. (Moral hazard anyone?)
Second, those who achieve college teaching positions, and especially those with tenure, are barely touched by market forces. Ask yourself why someone teaching in the humanities or social sciences who would find it hard to make a living otherwise can earn a comfortable six figures and never fear being fired. At least those with accounting, engineering, or science degrees have some marketable value.
I graduated from university with Honors and a B.A. degree in Anthropology. Two weeks later I landed a well-paying job – because of the typing class I took in my Freshman year in high school. That skill paid off my college debt, kept me fed and clothed and built up one h*ll of a 401-K which is now funding my retirement. As for my university diploma? Well, it’s given me memories of student demonstrations, chugging beer on the weekends and pulling all-nighters to finish a paper on “The Role of Fascism at Kent State”. But it hasn’t earned me a dime. Frankly, I would have learned just as much (probably more) if I’d simply gone to a library and checked out books to read on my own.
With all due respect, Carolyn, if you went to college on the basis that it might “earn you a dime” sometime in the future, then you probably shouldn’t have gone on to college at all in the first place.
I am aware that in present day America (and in the America of your youth), the MAIN reason to go to college is that it will lead to “a better job”.
In other words, the importance of a college DEGREE (not the same as a college EDUCATION) is measured ONLY on the basis of what monetary/professional “return” you might get out of it.
I view this as a bastardization of what a college education is all about, though I’m fully aware I’m in a minority measured in decimal points.
The idea you suggested that you may just as well have gone to the local library and read on your own is really a specious and spurious argument.
You wouldn’t have done it, no matter how much you may now claim that you would have. If you didn’t do this WHILE you were in college (because you WANTED TO rather than because you HAD TO) would you really have done it while working full-time at your typing-based job? I truly doubt it.
Yet, I suggest that your time spent in college benefited you in ways that you may still not be aware of. For one thing, your posting contains excellent expository writing with flawless grammar, skills you probably picked up while you were studying “Anthropology” and writing those “all night” papers.
Chances are very good that even though it was your High School typing skills that got you your first job, it was probably your college experience and command of English that sustained you over the long run, allowed you to advance in your career and made it possible for you to accumulate your awesome 401K which is now funding your retirment.
Had you entered your first job without that degree, chances are very good that you’d still be a member of the typing pool and only dreaming of retirement.
“Ask yourself why someone teaching in the humanities or social sciences who would find it hard to make a living otherwise can earn a comfortable six figures and never fear being fired.”
And this is part of the motivation for why college advisors always lie and tell students that there are plenty of jobs available for greivance studies majors. (Or other useless degrees.) The college has tenured professors that they have to keep on staff. Since the professors are being paid regardless of the demand for that class, the advisors do their best to put students in those empty seats. My daughter never had a problem scheduling classes like philosphy or Japanese culture. But the science and engineering classes filled up quickly.
This is a result of Affirmative Action. Once requirements were made for some, requirements were reduced for all.
Excellent article and comments.
I was a Journalism/English major as an undergrad. It was a tough program, but there was an education to be had, if you wanted to put in the time, get involved in professional-development activities, and do the reading. Most of the professors were old-school newspapermen or classicist English professors — man, was I lucky! I had no idea just how lucky.
Still, as an undergrad, I partied my head off AND worked my ass off — I was under the impression that “work hard/play hard” was how you were supposed to do college. It never occurred to me to give up either one.
I graduated in 1986. After four years of working as a writer, I concluded that I had partied too much earlier and not done enough of the reading, and that I hadn’t remotely mastered my craft. I was employed, but I felt I was ignorant/faking it, and needed to do something about that.
I went to grad school full-time to study English and got a master’s. A few years after that, I went to grad school again to study Secondary English Education. Sadly, in between my undergrad and last grad programs, I figured out a trend. The pre-Baby Boomer professors came from a different school of thought — and I watched as these folks steadily retired. They were replace by leftist idealogues who were teaching anti-education and anti-writing and anti-English literature. There was not an education to be had, particularly at the education school, which was ranked in the Top 30 in the country.
In my time as a teacher, I noticed that the students had little factual knowledge. My students all agreed that the U.S. was 80 percent black and 10 percent white and 10 percent everything else. They had no idea what the Soviet Union was (I was teaching Animal Farm). I spent my days sitting on the desk, explaining this factual background again and again. I taught composition directly at a night GED prep class. My students were shocked that no one had told them anything or taught them anything.
But you see, they were supposed to reinvent the wheel on their own. Anything else would be imposing my white-male point of view on them. (I was a liberal at the time, btw … and eventually watched the political spectrum shift me into the conservative column, simply because I believe that if I had nothing to teach my students (which was told to me by numerous education professors), I had no business in front of the classroom.
Eventually, I went back into writing.
The humanities are a crucial way of passing down the wisdom of the ages and understanding different points of view. Unfortunately, they became so degraded that students learn little besides resentment and rhetorical tricks.
The loss of the humanities has been incalculable to our culture. I know several scientists and dozens of engineers — and they more often than not, don’t possess a well-rounded education. Some do — some do the reading on their own. Fortunately, they have a fundamental grasp of reality, but it seems they were cheated, particularly the younger ones, out of something truly great: the western intellectual heritage.
My point: The humanities and arts are a crucial part of education. They’re just not being taught. And today’s professors, particularly the post-Baby Boomer ones, are even more alienated from their heritage.
My two cents.
This pretty much matches my own experience. I was very fortunate to have gotten a classical liberal arts education at a private school (on a scholarship). The field house leaked, there were pretty strict rules of on campus behavior (that were actually enforced), it was out in the middle of nowhere, and the dorms were very antiquated — but the profs were first rate and everyone was there to learn (as the administration reminded everyone of quite frequently). My parents urged me to go there because the education credentials were rated top notch and you could also take classes at the local engineering school, also considered to be pretty good and where the students were exhorted to academic excellence.
Unfortunately it gave me a rather idealized view of college education, so when I went to go teach, well, was I in for a suprise. Especially in my chosen subject: English. Oh boy, that was not the humanities department I remembered from my own college years.
“I was a liberal at the time, btw” – another proof of an aphorism by one of my favorite writers (anyone can be an author, it takes SKILL to write for a living), Robert Anton Wilson:
“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”
Those truly interested in this problem should visit WhatWillTheyLearn.com to see how individual institutions stack up in requiring students to gain proficiency in classical core subjects:
Composition
Literature
Foreign Language
U.S. History
Economics
Mathematics
Science
It’s free, by the way. And unsparing of schools that’ve lost the bearings toward what a classical liberal education is supposed to provide.
This is a project of my good friends at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni who are dedicated to reversing the travesties discussed above. Trustees and alumni can be a great source of influence on the bloated, flabby insularity of many school establishments and ACTA is finding ways to help focus that influence for real results. Visit them at Goacta.org — you may link from WhatWillTheyLearn.com.
Too bad that this study has nothing at all to do with the bilge pushed by ACTA on WhatWillTheyLearn.com. The Arum and Roksa study gives no support at all to the notion that a specific set of required courses fosters student learning. The important criteria are time spent studying alone, reading requirements, and writing requirements. Students who spend substantial amounts of time studying by themselves, and who take courses that require both more than forty pages per week of reading and at least twenty pages of writing per semester learn.
Even Anne Neal, President of ACTA, doesn’t believe the rankings on WhatWillTheyLearn.com. On this site, East Tennessee State University gets an A, the University of Chicago gets a B, Stanford and Princeton get C’s, Harvard gets a D, and Yale gets an F. Anyone want to bet that Anne would send her kid to East Tennessee State in preference to Yale? So where did Anne send her daughter? East Tennessee State? The University of Chicago? Perish the thought! Darling little Alexandra went to mommy’s school: Harvard.
Of course, ACTA has always been an organization with a political agenda disguised as an educational agenda, from its founding as the National Alumni Forum by Lynne Cheney to its current incarnation with Ed Meese on the board of directors. Anne Neal, better known on the circuit as Dede Petri, is married to a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, worked for Lynne Cheney, and once upon a time showed her commitment to high academic standards by working for the Discovery Institute (that’s right, the “intelligent design” folks).
But wait, maybe there is something to ACTA’s claim that Harvard is a D school. Check out Alexandra’s body of work at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/compost/ and see if you don’t agree that it’s WaPo’s answer to Us magazine!
It will be a happy day when the swamp is drained and useless leftist professors slouch off into retirement homes. (My choice for their nursing home? The Terry Shiavo Memorial Nursing home. Lots of beds opening up daily.)
Actually, this artcle is the brightest spot in my reading for months.
The Petulant Lefties (like some prominent commenters to PJM threads that I could name) will find themselves working seventy hours per week for a $30K salary in middle age. If they are lucky, Daddy will let them live in the basement and Mommy will fix them PBJ sandwiches; if Daddy and Mommy are dead of old age, living in a retirement home, or have spent their inheritance, they’ll be living four to a one-bedroom apartment and eating instant ramen because 65% of their take-home income goes to service their non-chargeable student loans.
The Roe Effect will take hold with a vengeance; the current Petulant Lefties won’t be able to afford themselves, let alone offspring. They may root for the next few generations of Obamas, but they won’t vote for them, because they’ll be threatened with instant dismissal if they’re not in their cubicles at 06:00 or leave before the polls close.
Granted, they won’t be out of the picture until well into the second half of this century. But no one ever said that there was a quick fix in hand.
23 James May wrties:
“Success is political. There should probably be a class in how to drink coffee with the right people; it would wake college students up to what the real world is all about.”
This point can be taken in a cynical way, but it points to a fundamental truth that every person who earned his/her success will endorse. The most important factors in success in business, technology, government, you name it in the US are (1)being born with the blessing of super high metabolism (2) being born with balls of steel and (3) and being born intelligent. If you lack any one of those items, no number of degrees will make you a success. That is the real world. You have to have the ability to step on the accelerator at any time during or after the work day, the ability to remain unruffled in the face of furious opposition from bosses, colleagues, customers, you name it, and you have to have intelligence but not brilliance. If you have these abilities you can study liberal arts and have a great career. If you do not have one or more of these abilities, you might as well study liberal arts and have a fun life as best you can.
As for those recommending technical degrees, the salary outlook for many of those graduates is not rosy. Graduates of good engineering schools usually have to add an MBA and get into management to make the big bucks. Engineers start with great salaries but top out soon. One reason there are many foreign, as in fresh off the boat, students in technical fields is that the technical world is easier to navigate with not very good knowledge of the local culture and language. Also, first generation immigrants are quite happy to accept salaries that Americans consider low.
Surely, every successful person, successful in worldly terms, reading this knows that success requires an enormous effort on a daily basis for your entire life. Isn’t that the way it is supposed to be?
It’s not at all surprising to see liberal (and liberal arts) bashing on pajamas media, but y’all should expose yourselves to some cognitive dissonance and read the damned study. Yes, this study shows that the real sciences correspond to the largest learning gains, but the humanities and the social “sciences” aren’t far behind. The real laggards are business, education, and communications. And you can find rigor in places that isn’t convenient. Most of you would probably regard the program I run (and me personally) as so far to the left that you’d pick up your phone and speed dial David Horowitz. But we figured out Arum and Roksa’s conclusions over a decade ago, and made choices correspondingly. Sixty percent of our students meet or exceed the norm of two hours of study for every hour in class (whereas, as Arum and Roksa show, the average is now less than one to one). Our classes require so much more than the 40 pages of reading per week and twenty pages of writing per semester that Arum and Roksa identify as the threshold for a demanding course that increases student learning that it isn’t even funny. Because, you know, overthrowing capitalism and subjecting all of you to the jackboot of the New Soviet Tyranny [TM] isn’t a job for slackers. Fear us! Our well-trained minions will roll right over your slack-jawed, addle-brained capitalist tools!
I have seen an amusing tag line that reads something like “Fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class.” And when you think about it, when you make it a social requirement that we attempt to send everyone to college, we’re widening the pool of graduates, and thus the colleges of yesteryear, who used to skim the cream of society to educate are now having to deal with the likes of Bart Simpson.
As a society, we have made a terrible mistake: We have confused a formal education with intelligence, experience, and training from apprenticeships. Education is a measurable parameter, the others –not so much.
We expect our professors, people with little experience outside of academia, to train our daughters and sons to do WHAT? What experience do they draw from?
It is all well and good to know mathematics, writing skills, psychology, philosophy, the sciences, and so on. The application of such skills is what we get wrong. Leadership is something learned from study and by apprenticeship. It is a life-long avocation.
Instead, we have the mass of our society looking at Education as some sort of meal ticket. A college education was never intended to be the equivalent of vocational training.
That is why we graduate so many doctors with horrible bed-side manners. That is why we graduate education PhD experts who can not write write a coherent e-mail. That is why we graduate engineers who, without computer software, have not the foggiest idea what they’re doing or what those simulations are based upon. And that is why people have such terrible opinions of a Wonk with an MBA or a JD.
I’m not justifying what we have today. The Deans and professors of our schools should have balked at this back when the GI bill was introduced. But they couldn’t very well bite the hand that fed them, could they?
I suggest that it is time to re-evaluate what we expect from a school, what we expect as a qualification to work, what jobs really require a college education and what jobs can be done with just a high school education.
If we truly had any respect for the educational edifice that we call K-12, a high school education should be enough to do 80% of the work we have today. However, we do not have hard and fast requirements for such education. We allow idiots to tamper with it and dumb it down so that even they could pass it just by attending.
Face it: the value of education has been vastly oversold. Like the housing market, it is way overdue for a correction.
I am my college professor’s favorite pupil. He calls himself a “philosophical progressive” (whatever that means) and he tells wonderful stories about Mao Zedong and how deeply spirtual it is to become a Progressive. He told us not to pay any attention to those horrible rumors that the Conservatives preach to us about Brother Mao’s murder of 60 million. I know it’s a lie, that’s what a girl on Facebook said. After all, President Obama had a Mao ornamate hanging fron the White House Christmas tree, right on cool. After learning all of these new political ideas, I went out and got the latest Che Guevara t-shirt. It is so rad. My professor went to Harvard like Obama did so I know he loves Che too. My professor said Hollywood helped to revive another leftist martyr but my uncle (who was in the Army) said Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean and that I should read to try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer. What ever that means, later dude.
Roy: If you are your professor’s “favorite student” as you state, I wouldn’t advertize it. These days, that means that you totally agree with whatever crap he’s presenting in class and that you do very little independent thinking on your own.
I’m not criticizing you, mind you. I know you wanna get an “A”. I’m just thinking “aloud” (that means “out loud”). There was a time when a professor’s favorite student was the student who challenged him and could present well-formulated counter arguments.
I am aware you were being “ironic” and didn’t really mean what you said. In fact, you probably meant just the opposite of what you wrote.
I used to do the same thing, actually. I too was my professor’s favorite student. Given the different personalities of my professors, I had to constantly “change” my stance to please them all. Fortunately, it was – and continues to be – an easy thing for me to do. I always pitied the ones who couldn’t do it and had to actually work hard to get an A.
You’ll find this to be the case in the world of work, unfortunately. But by the time you graduate from college, you’ll be an expert “chameleon” and your college “education” will have been worth your while.
Best of luck.
Having read the comments here, and given the recent attacks by the Obama admin against for-profit schools (e.g. DeVry or Univ of Phoenix[sp?]) I will repeat a question I have yet to get an answer to: exactly what kind of high paying position can one expect to find with a BA from UC Berkeley in South Pacific Feminist Literature?
The Great Education/Vocation Divide
To: Erisian
I’ll answer your question: There is no high paying position for a UC grad who specialized in South Pacific Feminist Literature. But anyone getting such a degree presumably knew this all along. She specialized in this “field” not for any monetary gain but for its “significance”. Of course, anyone a little smarter than she was would have recognized such a field as no field at all. Rather it’s a caricature, a mockery of a genuine academic specialty.
Most likely, she’ll end up getting a secondary school certification in some state and teach “something” in some high school, poisoning minds she comes in contact with and retire an embittered, ageing, unloved and worthless heap of ugliness. (Funny how beauty and “prettiness” occurs in inverse proportions to the highest degree attainted. Have you ever seen a really pretty female professor?)
I’ve run into several grads with similar off-the-wall degrees. One of my favorites is “Native American Studies”. To a man, none of them has been conversant in a living native American language, an achievement that would have required a real, long term commitment. Their studies, therefore, consisted mainly of smoke, mirrors, crystals, chants and herbs. Oh, and “traditions”. In other words, hot air.
The entire education industry is rife with “professors of English”, for example, without a clue about European literature and its impact and significance on English literature and so on. Or without even a reading knowledge of a European language, never mind the “classical” languages. Again, smoke and mirrors.
At the same time, I’ve always had a hard time viewing courses or majors such as computer science, accounting, even engineering, medicine and economics, let alone “education” courses, as truly coming within the purview of an “education”. But I won’t go into all that here – plenty has been said above on this angle of it.
I’ve always viewed a PhD as a first step in a life of academic “enquiry”, but that degree has long ceased being that.
I totally agree with previous commentators that have basically pointed out that the reason to “go to college” was (originally) to open your mind and encourage you to “explore” on your own as a life-time commitment so that by the time you reached your 40s or 50s, you could truly be called an “educated” person.
What you may have ended up doing as a “profession” to put bread on the table was a distant secondary consideration.
But such an ideal has long since been tossed into the spittoon of history. You can still get “educated” but you mainly have to do it on your own now with very little guidance and despite any college “experience” you may have gotten or expect to get in the future.
Not only do the relativists get morality wrong, they fail to understand culture as well.
Lefties think of culture as a diorama in the natural history museum. Fixed and immobile and interesting as you peer through the glass. They do not understand that culture is dynamic, not static. A given culture changes and adapts over time, or simply dissolves, due to changing conditions such as environment, internal progress, contact with other groups, new ideas, any number of things.
The concept of “preservation” of culture by deliberate isolation is as perverse and unnatural as Hitlers ‘Jewish Museum’.
Progressive liberals are strange animals indeed and so full of contradiction that I cannot really understand them. They are neither progressive nor liberal.
If the wasted college years are being paid for by parents that’s one thing but if the American taxpayers are paying for them because someone thinks everyone should go to college, that’s quite different. This should be clearly understood by college faculties, taxpayers, and students. AND, although this study pertains to college, I think the same thing happens in high schools. How many colleges must teach remedial classes? Students should understand from an early age that their education is being paid for by people who have a right to expect results.
Being a product of the college experience in the 70s, my opinion may not be too relevant about today’s standards. I witnessed the most horrific bastardization of education in the South during the 70s so I can’t imagine how poor it would have to be to be worse today.
I was majoring in the hard sciences in the medical field. There were people who graduated with me that I would not let treat my enemy’s dog much less a human being. Some of the ones I graduated with I had not seen in years but they were listed in many of my classes.
Affirmative action had become the buzz word and professors were actually afraid to fail any minority. I had people in my classes who came to the first class and I never saw them again for the entire quarter until the grades were posted outside the class door. Then if they did not pass with a B or above they would try to intimidate the professor with threats of lawsuits. Some of the ones that did attend class were disruptive and made it difficult for other students to concentrate, but they were never disciplined. Grading on the curve had become the norm and good students were often threatened with harm if they excelled.
It was not the institution that failed the students as many did get a good education, but the government who forced people into college who were not capable of doing the work and then demanded they not be allowed to fail. Many were passed on by professors just to get them out of their classes with no regard for the standards being met.
The same thing is happening today in our public schools. No child is allowed to “fail” they are just moved to a special ed class and moved on through the system when they do not have the education or ability to be a productive member of society. It is all a big lie to pacify the parents and the government. So we have teachers who have degrees but have sub standard educations. How can a teacher who can’t write intelligently be expected to teach students to excel?
<<<<<<off my bandwagon now
Were universities, private and public, commercial companies there would be truckloads of predatory tort lawyers, salavering at the mouth for the chance to become zillionaires in class action suits for failure to deliver the advertised, AND PAID FOR, product, an “education”.
Why are universities immune from this usual response to failure to honour contract, or deliver the advertised AND PAID FOR product, an “education”?
Or are universities merely the favoured children of that other public body that fails to deliver the advertised product: Equality under the Law of ALL CITIZENS in this Country of Law, whatever race, gender, class, ethnicity, age, religion, etc.?
Pied Piper
Ironic, huh?
I went through a very well-respected university and majored in the sciences. I worked hard– very hard– and I did very well. The university I went to was extremely competitive, with many bright and motivated students. That was the case in most of the liberal arts courses I took as electives, not just the science courses (actually political science and philosophy were among the toughest). But that does not mean that my degree led directly to a job or gave me marketable skills– it was still very theoretical in its orientation, even though it was in the sciences.
When I did my undergraduate schooling what I really wanted to study, what I loved, was the liberal arts. But I majored in the sciences because I was good at them too and it seemed a more direct route to stable income. It turns out though that at the end of the day my studies were still not very practical. And, it also turned out that I couldn’t force myself to work in something I disliked forever. So I would tell a young person now– study what you love. You’ll work hard because you love it. And if you do work hard at school you will gain real, marketable ‘soft’ skills like critical thinking, research, and communication. Although the subject specific information is interesting and often useful, it’s the soft skills that a university degree should always build. That’s why education is important. We need new graduates who can think for themselves to be the leaders of tomorrow. Skilled critical thinking and analysis are far more important for the future of our planet than some specific subject-area knowledge, which can often be learned on the job or through personal study.
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