The Realities of ‘College Education’
The soaring costs of a college degree are prompting colleges to consider a three-year degree program. Britain has long granted a degree for three years of college.
I would like to suggest a one-year degree program. And I don’t mean an associate’s degree.
Here are some hard facts most colleges will never tell you and most parents could not tolerate hearing. The general requirements of the first two years at most colleges are what high school should have been. That is what junior should have learned had he not been busy getting high, getting drunk, and being socially promoted.
Better high schools frequently use the same textbooks for the mandatory requirements that are used in the first two years of college. If a high school draws from the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, the courses will be more demanding than the first two years of most colleges.
Although it is fashionable to talk of our strength being our diversity, it is simply not true when teaching in a college classroom. Teachers have to teach to some middle ground, and that middle ground is going to be higher in an upper-tier high school. A classroom that draws from a wide swath of socioeconomic groups is going to have people of vastly different preparation and skill levels.
You might ask: What about admissions requirements? Aren’t these students qualified to do college work? Absolutely not! Advertised admissions requirements, save for the best institutions, are meaningless. Even in the best institutions, admissions requirements are highly suspect, given the imperative to produce a diverse student body. Advertised standards are what colleges would like their student body to look like. At many institutions, roughly twenty-five percent of students fail to meet published admissions standards.
Public colleges get reimbursed on a head count basis, so taking in more students for unused space means more revenue. In addition, every out-of-state student provides nearly twice the revenue. If your child has a mediocre academic record, have him apply to an out-of-state public college or university. You can experience the joy of paying out-of-state tuition, while still retaining the bragging rights so vital to sending your kid to college.
The impetus for colleges to achieve affirmative action admissions, by dipping into impoverished high schools, results in a student body that varies enormously in preparation and skill level.
Nearly half of all students will not get beyond the sophomore year, even though it should be repeat education. When the high school counselor tells you how many students go on to college, be sure to ask how many finish.
Good students from good high schools, who have not taken advanced placement, know how to play the repetition game. They cut class and recycle their high school term papers.
Early in my teaching career, I had a student from one of the state’s best high schools. She was bright, but hardly exceptional. I found she was taking more than a full class load and holding down a full-time job. I was amazed. She told me that her classes at a suburban high school were more demanding than their repetition at the university. She chose classes where attendance wasn’t mandatory. Was she recycling her high school term papers? Of course; so was everyone else from her class.
A student in the sciences or engineering could not remotely do this, but the liberal arts have become intellectual wastelands, with an emphasis on persuading a captive audience as to the eternal verities of professors’ beliefs about racism, sexism, and homophobia.
A colleague in engineering used to remind me that in his college “PC” stood for personal computer, not political correctness. His dean was reprimanded for not sending his graduate students to diversity training during orientation week. The dean stated that engineering was a serious subject and his students had important assignments during that week. Told that he would have to answer to an administrative hearing, he said that he would be pleased to show up along with several of his alumni, successful businessmen and big contributors to the university. He then said to the diversity apparatchik, “This is a career decision you are about to make.” The hearing never took place. An engineering dean could get away with this. A liberal arts dean could not.
My neighbor’s daughter was valedictorian of her class at an elite, private high school. She enrolled in engineering only to find that there were lots of valedictorians. School was demanding. At the computer center in the middle of the night, she could find her classmates designing programs or doing homework.
In contrast, a hundred yards away on the liberal arts campus, a valedictorian would have been as rare as a student who didn’t download a term paper from the Internet. Here most students were seeking majors that put no premium on analytical skills or cumulative knowledge. The equivalent of writing computer programs as a hobby would have been reading a good newspaper or journal of opinion. But few of these students read anything, including the class assignments.
A college degree is about as prestigious as a highschool diploma these days. And that’s only going to become more true as college becomes more and more accessible.
This is too little, too late for many of us who began their BA, BS programs even 3,4 years ago.
Oh, well. I’m a minority with a MFA in writing. All I need a PC liberal dedicated in cultivating diversity to give me a shot at a teaching job.
If not, I’m going write a letter to supreme court justice Sotomayor to offer her opinion on the hidden bias in the hiring practices at American community college. Maybe I’ll write “I want to be an affirmative action product just like you!”
With the richness of her experience as her Latina, she’ll make wiser decisions than white people.
Failure.
Reminds me of my neighbors after high school who didn’t go to university for the same reason. Instead, they worked for their family owned construction company while I went to my liberal propaganda courses hungover for 4 years.
Now I am a manager in a Japanese owned hotel and drink Starbucks every day. Since my old neighbor’s construction company went under, they sit around blaming Mexicans and vote republican.
Of course the educational establishment is not going to allow impartial examinations. If they allow them before college, they’ll have to admit they’re providing so many people, especially minorities, with appalling educations. If they allow them afterwards, they’d have to admit that (1) they’re providing a terrible education for many people and (2) the most intelligent professors and students are in the departments dominated by conservatives and libertarians.
You forgot to mention parents who call the University to complain if their little darlings get reprimanded or worse yet, punished, for cheating and department chairs who actually listen to them.
Weaver, you brag about drinking your way through college? But then again, you seem to think that drinking Starbucks every day is success. Now that makes me smile.
Several in my family keep urging me to give up truck driving and get a Masters in Education. I look at the curriculum required and back away. I did an introduction to teaching English as a second language at UBC (Vancouver). The texts were theoretical nonsense, useless in the real world. A diversity expert showed up to teach us mature adults about racism. I assumed it would be about how to deal with racism on the part of the mostly wealthy immigrant Asian students. No, we were lectured about the racism of “blackboard,” and the expression “white as the driven snow.” I regret that I was too polite (I’d been in Canada too long) to point out that the word was “pure,” and made sense with no racial content. I had been completing a writing program and was spoiled by good instructors who demanded good writing and had no interest in indoctrination. Anyway, I continue to put off the expensive ordeal of returning to school so I can enter this strange make believe world. Truck driving is just too easy in comparison.
Why, professor, you sound like someone in their right mind.
At long last, sir…
I thought for a bit that this article was satire. Sadly, it’s not. If you haven’t grounded your children well enough in their first 18 years of life to enjoy the experience of college while maintaining their morality, maybe you should just keep them at home. Heaven forbid that they should be exposed to different ideas and cultures.
The odds are that Abraham H. Miller has never heard of the disastrous 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griggs vs. Duke Power. The judges foolishly said that companies could no longer place the primary emphasis on individual testing results. Too many blacks couldn’t pass the tests and therefore they may be biased. Employers were ordered to devise tests requiring no more knowledge than the particular listed job required. Their lawyers quickly realized that this naive court decision would inevitably lead to countless and expensive lawsuits. They recommended that it would be essentially better to abandon the tests—and instead demand credentials. It was best to play it safe. All of a sudden, the job applicant had to normally attend college and obtain a four-year degree. It didn’t matter what one knew. They still had to earn a degree. It’s been all downhill since then. A number of economists estimate that Griggs vs. Duke Power may have cost the American economy three trillion dollars in the last thirty-eight years.
Consider how many billions of dollars, both public & private, are wasted by America’s families paying for this crap, and think about what could be achieved if this money and time were put to something more productive. Also consider how the debt load young people take on warps the rest of their lives if they should marry and start a family. The social costs of this “higher education” scam/power trip are horrendous.
I told my kids when they were young not to waste their money on college unless they planned on getting into a technical field. My daughter, with just a GED, is holding the same position as someone with a BS in Business Administration. Why? She has people skills in a field where that is essential. I did co-sign a student loan for my youngest- so he could go to a tech school to enhance his mechanical skills. My oldest son is in the military doing what I did-serving his country & getting his Uncle to pay for school. When 2 of his friends told me they were going to major in English I taught them a phrase that would make them successful in that career major “Would you like fries with that?”. Neither one caught the gist of what I was saying.
This is all very well. But, what in the hell are we going to do/can we do about it? Rare is the parent who will tell their child they cannot go to the best college they can get into and afford, and rarer still is the parent who can force their child into particular majors.
I’ve known this as certainty over the past six years as my two daughters have gone through college in liberal arts programs at an elite college and a t15 university. One studied English and came out knowing not much more than when she came in. She had a two year ‘great books’ style course in the Western canon, but the upper division English major was as far as I can tell and enjoyable complete waste of her time and my money. She did get a great deal out of college – in terms of personal maturity and a semester plus abroad – but the actual academics associated with her major were an utter waste. At least she decided to get a serious summer internship between her junior and senior years and ended up with a good job for a major company. But, her job in marketing bears no relation to her education. I suppose that’s OK, I always supported a solid traditional liberal arts education, but I expected the liberal arts education to bear some resemblance to what I got studying history and economics in the ’60s and early ’70s.
My younger daughter went to a major university, originally as a music performance major because the university has a reputation #1 for the instrument she played. OK, that made sense. Then, despite a teacher saying she was among the most talented students and likely to be a highly successful professional even in the rough times for musicians, she quits and studies (to my disgust) political science. Pretty much a waste. Added a double major in history and the scales began to fall from her eyes – she noticed that history was significantly more rigorous than political science. I’m an ABD in history and went over her courses and reading lists. Maybe 1/3 was solid, 2/3 was overly pc crap. Nothing gave her any overall perspective or a usable analytic framework. What she has of that she got from me and my making her read R R Palmer’s text when she was in high school. She worked hard and got a lot academically out of her education, but it took real effort. She took the idea of getting the traditional liberal education seriously (other than avoiding math and science because she’s not strong at them and was afraid taking courses she could not do well in — argh!) I guess the good news is that she, too, had a serious summer internship and has ended up with a good job.
I would have strongly preferred more ‘serious’ majors, or at least, double majors that combined a traditional liberal art (like history or classics or english) with something more rigorous like economics, biology, psychology (rigorous at both of their schools) or a hard science. But, I was certainly not strong enough to fight them and the wife to say “I won’t pay unless you study X” — it’s easy to say you will do that, but a lot harder in practice.
So, as long as the colleges and universities can get away with this crap – and we as parents will pay, ’cause the students will mostly take the easy way out if they can – they will. It trickles down from the elite schools, where the kids do well with the credential because of the residual prestige and the alumni networks — not to mention other parental resources and networks — but below that level, all of these non-rigorous majors and political correctness are a horrid bad joke and a cruel swindle on the kids for whom an education means borrowing heavily. They’re not counseled or told (though, in fairness, the internet ought to enable to to figure it out) that while a traditional liberal arts education is a great foundation for someone with otherwise upper middle class prospects, (1) for a lower middle or working class origin student, practical skills are what’s needed if they’re not at a really elite college or university (and maybe even if they are), (2) the ‘liberal arts’ education they’re getting isn’t that traditional liberal arts education, and (3) the level of rigor they’re getting isn’t even close to the rigor even the the faux liberal arts educations at the elite schools.
I think it’s almost criminal the way we let vast numbers average, middle to lower middle class kids go to state colleges and spend four years getting a degree that neither educates them in the traditional sense nor prepares them for any profession or even occupation.
One wonders how the Founders ever accomplished anything without exposure to the curriculum of the modern university.
Plagarism? (Venetian Republic and John Locke.)
I graduated from a reasonably prestigious Eastern Public University in 1981 after working my proverbial tush off… I was ill prepared by High School, and completely flabbergasted by the “inside” and rather difficult nature of collegiate life and education.
I struggled, shifted gears, and kicked my way through school, changing majors because I lacked the base skills to perform my first choice (Engineering). I was then treated to a blow my Junior year when my second choice (Communications – Television and Film) evaporated as the school was torn apart from its performing arts companion. This little move came with a session with my “very sorry” course adviser explaining that maybe I could transfer for a few semesters/quarters to another university where the courses that were no longer available might be made available to me. Though, it would be two or three additional years before I could graduate. So I switched to my minor (History) and took no less than 15 hours of advanced history course work for my Senior year, and one Summer session… I managed to claw my way out of school one quarter late, and with an average grade.
1. We lacked the tools the kids of today have. A 1977 500 word term paper was an exercise in sheer grinding work. If you typed, you were lucky; but there were no word processors. Typing meant perfection or erasures, with erasable bond paper a forbidden item in presentation so money for copies was involved. Grading was vicious. Ten points were taken off for a missed period, misspelled word or typo. The “passive voice” of today’s writing was forbidden. Comma splices were abjectly sinful. “D” grades were plentiful, and complaining about them was met by the usual statement that this is college and you still write like you are in high school.
Of course that essay was easy, compared to the deluge of research papers that required thousands of words, footnotes, bibliographies, and recorded note cards.
Microsoft Word or Open Office for the money challenged makes all of that work a tragic joke.
2. Grading methods are completely off the scale. My son, now a sophomore at the very same and now more Prestigious Eastern Public Institution from which I graduated, presented me with his second Dean’s List Letter for his Freshman Year. I don’t think that there were more than several handfuls of kids who came close to their respective Dean’s lists in my Freshman year. He reported that there was nothing special about it. He slept through his Geology class, stating that he learned it all in high school Earth Science. He was already an academic sophomore at the end of his first Freshman semester because he had more than a semester’s worth of credit from various AP tests, including full credit for a full year of 5 hour Calculus… a talent for which he has no intellectual use. He hates math with 20 passions.
The truth is that most kids who show up in college and who have been “prepped” for college by Cambridge, AP, and IB programs in high school, are bored and unchallenged by their first two years in a university.
Add to that, the proliferation of computers, word processors, spread sheets, the internet, and various free information services, and the traditional university system becomes more of a monetary turnstile and initiation rite than it does a method of education.
What I do know is that my barely average QCA (every course that I took and passed or failed – yes we actually failed things back then) counted for exactly the same part of my grade as every other course) was worth infinitely more than the current B that every kid seems to get for doing nothing more than showing up.
The upshot is, I suppose, that college has become a “required” punch on a “life ticket”, instead of a privilege and a challenging educational experience. Ticket punching will destroy us faster than having no colleges students at all.
Just to report to the good professor… The local Community College is overflowing. It’s several campuses in the area are brimming with students, and schools are actually announcing that their graduates are proudly going to Community College.
Economics are dictating the change. Eventually the market rules.
r/John – TMF
I’ll agree with the heading, it’s a fairly accurate depiction of my experience at the UO.
“…spend four years getting a degree that neither educates them in the traditional sense nor prepares them for any profession or even occupation.”
This is the direct result of Griggs vs. Duke Power. Sadly, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Most people have never heard of this disastrous court decision. Unfortunately, Richard Nixon was president in 1971 and terrified of criticizing anything perceived as redressing past injustices to minorities. And the companies didn’t publicly say that their new policies were due to judicial blackmail. They merely said that a college education would guarantee a higher quality employee.
Caveat Emptor.
I was already employed in a technical field when I finished college, because the company that acquired us wouldn’t promote anyone without a Bachelor’s degree.
Two of my children have technical degrees from good schools. The other could have been the subject of Professor Miller’s diatribe. All are doing well at life.
Public elementary and secondary education are aimed at creating compliant citizenry. Absence of academic rigor is a feature, not a bug. I like to believe I have innoculated my children with sufficient cynicism to keep them from becoming victims.
You can give people pieces of paper. You can tell people things. You can’t make them think, but you can plant the seeds. Do you ask your children questions? Who benefits? What could go wrong? What happens if this doesn’t work? What are the alternatives? What are the benefits and risks of doing it this way?
This is the second article I’ve seen this morning bashing universities. In both, there seems to be a lot of parents whining about how their kids slept through class, drank too much, and didn’t learn anything. I think it would do well for people in the US to remember that kids and parents in others countries would greatly desire the opportunities that are so readily available here. Maybe your kids didn’t learn anything in college because they are lazy. Maybe as a parent you never held them to a higher standard.
I thought most of the articles and posts on this website were from conservatives. It makes me a little sick when I hear people say cut taxes and don’t take away our guns, but blame someone else because when given a chance they or their kids blew it.
Is Miller going to end up on some White House list for this “subversive (?seditious)” writing?
John,
I graduated from a public Engineering Only school in 1971. Our ENGLISH department required 1,000 or so words, in English, in class, for midterm exams. It was a department requirement for the full two years. Finals were 3 hours with a department generated topic list. Oh yeah, we had to say something, correctly, as well. (spelling or grammer errors were a full letter grade off, each)
As a working engineer, I found the writing under pressure skills learned in the “old school” one of the most valuable parts of my education.
My eldest son, class of 94, reported the same requirements.
6. Barbara writes:
“Weaver, you brag about drinking your way through college? But then again, you seem to think that drinking Starbucks every day is success. Now that makes me smile.”
..Barbara, re-read that post carefully. Intended or unintended, it is so very poignant on many levels.
..a year and one half of questionable, liberal indoctrination in his REQUIRED English and Poli Sci courses were enough for my son. He said, “Bullsh*t!” and joined the Marines. He is now staring down the barrel of a 33-week course in maintaining and repairing opto-electronic and night-vision gear. He says he can deal with the educational persiflage down the road after he’s got the tech skills under his belt.
Am I proud of him?
Ooooh-rah!
One must cynically understand that few people attend college to obtain an education. At best, this rates a distant second on their list of priorities. They are there, first, last, and foremost to acquire a credential so that they can get a good paying job. At the back of their mind, these individuals desire to scam the system. Thus, they really don’t give a damn whether their teacher is a postmodernist lunatic or a truly qualified professional. As matter of fact, the easier grading is perceived as a wonderful thing. It makes life so much easier. And their parents are not going to be upset—until their children’s degree is deemed of little value by employers.
I went to a large run-of-the-mill state university forty years ago. All undergrads, regardless of major, were required to take two years each of science, math and a foreign language; and the boys were required to take ROTC.
My kids recently graduated from Ivy League schools. All they were required to take was Wimmins Studies and to attend lectures on why Rape On Campus Is Such A Threat.
Gimme back my money.
Professor Miller’s essay and most of the comments here are right in line with my experience as a college student and college instructor.
However, somebody calling himself “Aisling” wrote:
“I thought for a bit that this article was satire. Sadly, it’s not. If you haven’t grounded your children well enough in their first 18 years of life to enjoy the experience of college while maintaining their morality, maybe you should just keep them at home. Heaven forbid that they should be exposed to different ideas and cultures.”
Most liberal arts programs do nothing even close to exposing your kids to “different ideas and cultures.” They only pretend to. Kids come out of programs with names like “International Studies” knowing plenty of PC and postmodern pieties, but knowing nothing about actual life in foreign lands.
A fine and practical essay, Mr. Miller, there is no bigger scam in America today than the modern university. You can tell millions of parents the truth, but the multi billion dollar education racket will shout you down. And do you think the parents who just dropped 100k on a flimsy investment are going to come forward and say they were duped? The hard and natural sciences sail along imperiously, but the rest of the university, maybe 80%, is a shipwreck of titanic proportions. Better to throw your money off the back of a moving train.
David Thomson @ #22 is right on.
The socialists/communists/whatchamacallits learned that controlling the means of education was their path to power; the means of production could wait.
Michael,
My son is an Architecture Student (though a tad unhappy about it because the first year seemed to revolve around making a box, or generating a cool design. It was a double course of art, and little actual architecture. He has a master’s certificate with Auto Cad from high school, and is excellent at parametric design functions, but hasn’t a clue as to how to translate what he sees into the software.
Someone else from above also noted the disciplinary tact in History versus PolySci. This is true, now, and was true in the past. My 15 hours for three quarters each was brutally difficult. My book bill was astonishing, even for 1980-1981. I sure could have used a word processing program for those papers, though.
After college and a wonderful degree in a field that I absolutely love, I was faced with not having the remotest prospect for employment. I took a six month intensive computer programming and design course that has provided me with a very comfortable lifestyle. This having exactly nothing to do with the manifold reasons why Martin Luther rebelled against the corrupt Papacy of the early 16th century, or why World War I was the worst family spat in the history of the world.
What prepared me for that move, and the continual growth in my very technical career, was that rigorous stint in college. That is something that fewer and fewer students are receiving.
1994 is a world away. There have been many degrading changes in those 15 years. I would have never believed it had I not been closely involved in my son’s education.
It is a very sad thing to see, indeed.
r/John – TMF
The sad decline of the universities will not be reversed until individuals can obtain a job by merely passing the required tests. In other words, these schools must have to compete with those who opt for independent study. The obsession with credentials inevitably means that acquiring knowledge per se is of a secondary importance. Colleges should be compelled to persuade prospective students that their odds are increased by signing up for formal classes.
This article is stupid.
If your kid is smart and motivated, he’ll get a lot out of college.
If he’s stupid, he’ll probably drink his way through and not get much out of it.
So raise your kid to not be a moron, and you shouldn’t have any problems.
Blaming a university for your kid becoming a brainswashed moron is also stupid. If you raised your kid to be an independent, critical thinkier he’ll have the common sense to be critical of what he’s being taught.
And teaching your kid that universities are essentially evil places in brainashing in itself and will only make your kid distrust education in general, which will in the long run make your kid a moron.
thank you very nice. if we pursue the anti education logic then we can start singing “books they were burnin”. people are not that smart and they do not read, so if you go to college for 4 years and spend some time reading this can only help you and society.
Years ago I told my wife that there were too many kids in college who didn’t belong there, which required a large number of professors…who didn’t belong there. We could save a lot of money by cutting the colleges enrolment by half, doing away with a lot of the fluff courses, and expanding the use of apprenticeships and shop courses. We need nerds, we really do not need a plethora of poets.
Free Hat,
What you say has a grain of truth in it, but the point you miss is that instead of being places where critical thinking and serious encounters with ideas are fostered, with rigorous standards, the universities have become places where the faculty is actively working against the kind of education that most of us had 30-40 years ago.
If you read my post carefully, you’ll see that my kids came out OK and able to get good jobs in spite of the large ration of pc crap they had to put up with — one would like to think in large measure because my wife and I did raise our kids to be independent and use their minds, and because they did have solid secondary school preparation.
Nonetheless, the problem is real. And, worse, the problem is worst for those who are least likely to be equipped to resist it and do well in spite of it: the kids who don’t come from top notch suburban high schools or private prep schools, who don’t have parents (and in many cases grandparents and greatgrandparents) who were elite college or university graduates in the traditional liberal arts and sciences, and who don’t have the extended resources and social/business networks that the upper and upper-middle class students have.
If your kid is smart and motivated, he’ll get a lot out of college.
Few kids are smart AND motivated. Usually neither, sometimes one or the other, and rarely both. And yet they are admitted to the universities, even the elite universities, in droves ….
If you raised your kid to be an independent, critical thinkier he’ll have the common sense to be critical of what he’s being taught.
That’s not how it works. If that were really the case, there would be little reason even to provide courses. After all, if smart kids think on their own, independent of course curriculum, what’s the point of teaching a course?
Curriculum matters. It is why the ditzy liberal gals who dominate the modern university use it to steer their students into ‘correct’ modes of thinking.
And it works … because your average student is neither smart nor motivated ….
Like you.
“We could save a lot of money by cutting the colleges enrolment by half…”
This is not going to occur until Griggs vs. Duke Power is no longer the law of the land. Companies must once again be confident that they will no longer be sued by hiring and promoting the most qualified applicant. We have got to cease obsessing over minorities unable to intellectually compete. A black man, for instance, has to compete on the basketball court. He should also have to do so regarding matters of the intellect.
Both my wife and I work for the local school district. We know the teachers and administrators and were able to pick the best educators for our children. K through 12. They never had a teacher with less than four years experience in the classroom or a burnout. They have since gone on to be outstanding college students in the hard sciences. We knew, as a basic truth, that a student with the best teachers will succeed more often than not.
Most parents don’t have the option or inside knowledge to pick teachers in the current system. They take what they get and hope for the best. It’s so socialist like, isn’t it? My family was able to work the system to our favor because of our ties to the system.
Think choice. Think vouchers.
Education, like most things in life, is what you make of it. Just because an individual enrolls in a college or university doesn’t mean he or she is choosing to be educated. The same student who drinks, parties, downloads other people’s term papers, and wastes his parents money for four years is the same adult who will be unable to find his job rewarding, or to think outside of the box, or become world class in his field (or who will plagiarize his colleagues or take credit for their work). There are some exceptions, of course, but I think this is a safe assumption. You can only blame the institution and its “liberal” professors so much without sounding like a whiny, “anti-intellectual.”
A liberal arts education teaches students how to think, analyze, and synthesize in ways that are different than one finds in the sciences and engineering. Take a course in philosophy/ethics, for example. Or a literature or history course that discusses the consequences of cultural or social movements. Most institutions offer a broad choice of courses–you can choose to take that far-out course in postmodern feminism, or you can choose something more mainstream. There is a definite place for the liberal arts for those with the interest.
As another poster writes, is the purpose of college to receive an education? Or to get a job at the end? Perhaps our system of higher education should model that of the Germans: fewer students attend university, while many attend vocational schools that prepare them for jobs in industry.
I’m sorry for those students who waste away their college years. I attended an Ivy League school on a scholarship and felt extremely grateful and priveleged for the opportunity. I was the kid in the library until 2 a.m. every morning working on getting that English paper just right. I did my best to maximize my experience and take as much as I could from the institution.
Perhaps the real problem is arrogant, pushy parents, and spoiled, entitled students who can’t appreciate the experiences waiting for them and don’t have the self-awareness, wisdom, initiative, and humility to get the most out of those experiences.
You get out of college what effort you put in it. Taking easy courses to just get a degree is a mistake and many go that route. Just look at how many liberal courses are taken vice the hard sciences.
Wow,as a current college student, I officially feel like a scum-sucking bug for daring to pursue higher-education at a liberal arts school in a non-science field. I’m actually rather shocked by the level of scorn and dismissal that most poster here express. Not all of us like or do well in sciences/computers and saying that those are the only decent degrees relegates the non-science inclined to a corner that we don’t deserve.
If a student has learned to think for themselves PRIOR to college, they will continue to do so through the indoctrination attempts & laugh up their sleeves or roll their eyes the entire time. My school’s questionable attempts to make me think like them DID change my beliefs–just not they way they would have hoped. They reinforced my pre-existing beliefs & triggered new ones.
I also have little to no sympathy for whining parents attributing their student’s failures to class-quality and school mediocrity alone. There are good schools, but they aren’t state schools and they’re not cheap. If you want good, prepare to pay for it. If your kid drinks his way through school & learns nothing, that’s his problem…and yours. But not the schools. If a class isn’t hard enough, students can make it harder. And don’t insult me by saying all of us are looking for the easiest way of making the grade, so we wouldn’t do this. If your child wants to learn, they will. If they don’t, that’s a character flaw in them and the best school will not change that.
That said, I agree that too many people who don’t need it go through college because “it’s the logical next step.” Tech schools can be good, though too often they are a dumping ground for underachievers and people the school system writes off. Military isn’t for everyone and not everyone can ‘work their way up.’ If we can’t fix higher ed, we should identify good schools so we’re funding places that provide excellent education–in liberal arts or otherwise.
G Alston, the founding fathers read widely and took what was good from a number of sources, just as a good education should encourage. They didn’t cut and past without reading what they copied.
Like it or not our founding fathers were smarter and better educated than the vast majority of people today. The amazing part is that they put into practice their beliefs even though they knew it could cost them dearly. They did it because they knew it was right.
Many people are rightfully impressed by the fact that Bill Gates dropped out of college and still ended up the top guy at Micosoft. He was able to do this, however, only because of his founder status. Somebody else possessing similar credentials couldn’t get into the Microsoft’s front door. The major software corporation would not dare promote the genius Gates over a minority possessing a master’s degree. Griggs vs. Duke Power guarantees an almost immediate lawsuit.
Slveryder,
Actually, there are some good state schools — what are known as the ‘public ivies’ (think University of California, Virginia, William & Mary, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Miami (Ohio) and Vermont) and a few more public liberal arts colleges ranked in the top tier (e.v. VMI, St. Marys of Maryland).
The problem, which you don’t quite see, is that those of us who obtained liberal arts degrees in 30-odd years ago and more, are singularly unimpressed with what we see in recent graduates and undergraduates. Most of us are parents, we have children who are in or have recently finished college, in many cases at elite private colleges and universities. We have a pretty good idea what our kids and their friends knew when the started college, we’ve been talking to them all along as they’ve gone through college, and we see the results of surveys of college graduates knowledge of things most of us take for granted. Many of us think we have a pretty good sense, based on recent experience and contact, with what students are and are not learning. And, while we see the kids in the sciences really having learned a great deal, a lot of us see a whole lot of kids in the liberal arts who don’t know 1/3 of what we were expected to know 30-40 years ago, who can’t write worth a damn, and who are not capable of sustained logical argument.
It’s easy to say if a student wants to learn, they will. What we object to is the university having been transformed from a place conducive to learning, with faculty actively engaged in directing students into learning the Western canon and thinking about it seriously, into a place where English majors don’t take a Shakespeare course and students of history don’t know any.
It’s now called an ‘edumacation’.
Let’s forget about a college exit exam or certification. We wouldn’t need this if high schools (and grade schools) and colleges weren’t failing. But slap one onto our current failing system, and you’ll only get a mirror image of those dubious “admissions requirements.”
Case in point is California’s high school exit exam, imposed over the vociferous anger of the usual villains. Administration of the first test was delayed to give schools plenty of time, and then more time, to prepare for it. The first administration of the test yielded so many flunkies (including one girl who was her class valedictorian) that reform was required . . . so the test was dumbed down. I’ve lost count of how many times it’s been dumbed down since then, and it’s now a meaningless waste of time and money.
#40 Slveryder: an excellent post. As an academic advisor at the university level, I see students like yourself who make the conscious choice to get as much as they can out of college, and I see others who make the choice not to do so.
We are on dangerous ground when conservatives are so paranoid and resentful of the “liberal propaganda” they envision as “brainwashing” undergraduates that they take the anti-intellectual route and condemn higher education entirely. We need more conservatives who have the interest and desire to become academics and scholars. And we need Liberal Arts folks who have an interest in preserving our great traditions of literature, history, music, art, etc. (By the way, “Liberal Arts” means something very different than “liberal” as in ideologially liberal–in case there is anyone reading this blog who doesn’t realize that.).
And don’t think that parochial or “Christian” education is any better. The students who transfer into my “Big Ten” university from so-called Christian colleges are often grossly underprepared for the work. My Christian high school was so dumbed-down that I felt cheated when I graduated. In other words, students wishing to eschew “liberal” educational establishments by enrolling in “conservative, Christian” ones are not necessarily getting a better product.
The key is to find a college with a low student-instructor ratio and with good resources for students. Then the task is the students’–to make the choice to get as much out of the experience as possible.
What is it about universities that filters out megalomaniac lazy socialists with twisted morals from the productive enterprise world and into dead end liberal arts teaching positions? …. Wait a minute, did I just answered my own question?
Send your boy to the military, let him get plenty of experience, then have him apply for a leadership position in one of those soon-to-pop-up militias. They will many of those types.
Now that’s job security.
One of the best things parents can do to help educate their children is to read, then the kids read. Our education system is lousy and will stay so for the forseeable future – we are not even in the top 20 of democratic countries. I told my kids that I would not pay for college unless they chose a curriculum and major that meant something and that they maintained a 3.3 GPA or above. They rebelled, told my ex-wife who threatened to take me to court, then chose real majors and are holding 3.8 averages. Who the hell knows? Teach your kids the value of reading and learning then they should be ok and be able to discern bullshit (like gender studies) from the real stuff.
The liberal establishment has a critique of this criticism. Conservatives are anti-intellectual.
Conservatives aren’t anti-intellectual, they are anti-phony-intellectual.
mariecurie:
This statement,
“The students who transfer into my “Big Ten” university from so-called Christian colleges are often grossly underprepared for the work. My Christian high school was so dumbed-down that I felt cheated when I graduated. In other words, students wishing to eschew “liberal” educational establishments by enrolling in “conservative, Christian” ones are not necessarily getting a better product.”
As an academic advisor at the university level you have proof of this statement? Documentation? Don’t cherry pick.
You also do a bit of lumping and assuming with this don’t you think?
“conservatives are so paranoid and resentful of the “liberal propaganda” they envision as “brainwashing” undergraduates that they take the anti-intellectual route and condemn higher education entirely.”
You do seem to have your world views in order.
“…that they take the anti-intellectual route and condemn higher education entirely.”
Anti-intellectualism is equated with having serious reservations concerning the liberal arts education offered at most universities? That is most peculiar to say the least.
Touche!!!
While PJM typically runs well-written articles, this one is a dud. It’s funny how an article discussing force-fed liberal propaganda reads exactly like the other side of the coin. Oh, the irony.
As a recent graduate from a top 10 public pre-med school, with a BS in molecular biology, I can tell you right now that this claptrap about the sciences being immune from a steady lowering of standards is nonsense. I had more than a few exams which ended up being above 100% after the curve. As has always been the case, the quality of education received is primarily determined by the motivation and work ethic of the individual student. This essay sounds suspiciously like something a leftist would write-let’s blame the school instead of holding the students accountable for their education, or lack thereof.
As for the leftist indoctrination classes, they are certainly present, but not to the extent of taking up a whole year of upper-division work. Hyperbole has its place, but within limits. I was required to take six credit hours of ethnic studies classes, although one of them ended up being taught by a really wonderful professor who spent most of the semester hammering home the importance of critical thinking, perhaps the most important lesson that a university should be teaching. The other ethnic studies class was a leftist indoctrination course that I was admittedly quite pissed about having to spend hundreds of dollars on, although it did end up being rather enjoyable getting to be one to dismantle the standard liberal talking points(not hundreds of dollars worth of enjoyment, but at least it was something).
By the way, we do have examinations to prove that one received a college education, although they are not mandatory unless one wishes to pursue a graduate level education. I suppose we could demand that they be made mandatory to graduate, but as my loan balance tells me, tuition is already pretty high without tacking on another couple hundred for a standardized test like the MCAT or GRE. Being of a libertarian persuasion, I am not in favor of another government mandate, as any halfway competent employer should be able to determine who is qualified and who is not during the interviewing process.
If you are interested in an actual education, check out St. John’s College (non-sectarian), Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.
If I had kids now, I would not offer college as a given. They swould have earn the privilage attendng. That would mean great high school grades, saving for college, having a passion they want to persue and an AA degree.What you worked to obtain, you value. What is given to you has no value. So it is with a college edcuation.
Remember, the primary purpose of any university is the care and feeding of faculty first the blotted staff second. Education is the bait for an elaborate bait and switch scheme.
fingers stiff…typos exist
Oldfrt (33)
I completely agree. Many of the local community colleges started out as exactly what you describe, technical schools where people could learn the basics of a trade and usually get an apprenticeship or ground level job upon completion of their courses. As I recall, there was even a federal frenzy to create just that, a source of technically trained people due to real or imagined scarcity in some fields. Areas without manufacturing or expansion to generate demand for the trades cannot justify running these schools full time. In order to do so, they moved to liberal arts as much to absorb surplus professors, take advantage of surplus state and federal ‘education’ funding, and keep some of the federal grants and aid for students in the community, as to educate anyone.
Personally, I find that this article is a very accurate description of what passes for a college these days. As the author describes, outside of technical fields there are very few students in such places. Most professors don’t want true students, and attendees by and large avoid the few professors who do.
Have a nice day
Most schools in America are staffed with useless people who either failed in the real world or, more likely, were afraid to try the real world. Education in this country is a complete joke, we all know it and the reason is simple. Government is educating our kids K-12 and at most college campuses. And for Rusty and others on this thread, I have not only been through the public education system, but I have put my children through it and through college. When you have done that, please accuse me of not appreciating all that was done for my family. This story was a spot on discussion of higher education in America. So what do we do about it? Get the government the hell out of the business of education.
My liberal arts undergrad degree is worthless. All it got me was admittance to a good MBA program. Business school was a different story – demanding and competitive. The professors were serious and the students unafraid to challenge political nonsense when they heard it.
I’m not going to be pushing my kids into college as a form of late-teen daycare. There is money in the college funds if they really want to go for a reason. Otherwise, buy a car and go to tech school, join the military, or buy that franchise.
10 and 24: David Thompson: Grigg never would have been decided if union hiring halls and others hadn’t discriminated against blacks. The country could not go forward on one foot. Like voting laws asking some voters for the names of Chinese emperors, employment tests that promoted only people who already had jobs was discriminatory. Maybe its time for it to go: but no one can doubt the need for it then.
13 cato:
High schools insist that all students go to college. Who can blame them? The US Steel fabicating plants, auto assembly lines and what not skipped town. The big paying blue collar jobs are gone, and as Bruce Springsteen says “they ain’t coming back.”
The US shifted used to admire skilled blue collar work: now it regards it with semi-disdain: many people of a certain age remember the “plant” in town. Workers were skilled die makers, designers and production men. But those plants were so dirty, smelly and dangerous. After the EPA, Water Quality boards, unions and courts got thru with them, manufacturing now accounts for 11% of our economy versus 24% not that long ago and 50% before that.
As social conservatives fixated on abortion and flouridation, taxes rose on manufacturing while capital gains sank: rewarding quick buck guys and investors and penalizing manufacturers.
Meanwhile, universities enlarged the course offerings beyond what anyone had intended, eased tenure requirements and now we have Ward Churchills in every university teaching “Poetry of the disabled transgendered Snohomish Indians in the 1700′s”.
Still: there is something right about allowing lots of kids to go to college. Even if some drop out or drink themselves into oblivion. We’re not Japan and don’t screen our college applicants at age 14. Kinds take off at different times an there is nothing wrong with english and history classes. If anything, more history and econ classes would be a good thing. Some modern universities are not passing along acquired lessons from the past, and they should be.
What seems overdue is public control over university course offerings, tenure standards and seemingly endless expansion: there is nothing anti-intellectual about recognizing that people who pay for it ought to have some control over what is taught. Taxpayers are not serfs for professorial hiring and course committees. Women’s studies, queer folk theory, the “hook up culture” at Duke…all these and more could be easily trimmed back and that alone would discourage some of the loafers and cut the cost. Similarly, they ought to have a 4 year and out policy–no lngering students in their 6th year absent illness, miitary service etc. Tenure ought to be cut back. And the universities ought to cut back graduate research into Shakespeare’s punctuation and focus more on undergrads. I frankly don’t think a boatload of Nobel prize winning literature professors are worth raising tuition
“we all know it and the reason is simple. Government is educating our kids K-12 and at most college campuses.”
Nope, that is a secondary reason. Griggs vs. Duke Power is the law of the land. Virtually nothing can be done to improve matters until this court ruling is overturned. It alone stops all meaningful reforms dead in their tracks. Are you even familiar with this 1971 U.S. Supreme Court decision? If not, you should immediately start googling and learn as much as you can.
Aureliano: “That’s not how it works. If that were really the case, there would be little reason even to provide courses. After all, if smart kids think on their own, independent of course curriculum, what’s the point of teaching a course?”
You’re just a cynical idiot. Sure, there are plenty of kids who are ambitious enough to study on their own, but why do an independent biology study that has no direction or guidance, when I could take that same biology course with an actual biologist who has a career of research under his belt? Don’t you think I’d have a better learning experience taking a guided biology course rather than just figuring it out on my own? Do you really not understand the value of having curriculum-based, professor-led college courses? Do you even think before you write this crap?
“Curriculum matters. It is why the ditzy liberal gals who dominate the modern university use it to steer their students into ‘correct’ modes of thinking.”
Again, if your kid is stupid enough to believe everything he’s taught, then you obviously raised a stupid kid.
And if you really think “ditzy liberal gals” are the chief obstruction to getting a good education, then you’re deluded and obviously not serious about education.
“Oh no, watch out for those evil liberal ditzy girls! They’re gonna make you believe liberal stuff! You can’t stop them! They’re just so cute and urban, and they wear these cute glasses when they study Marx! There’s no escape! They’ll make you a Socialist!!
Colleges have largely become like everything else in an overly Capitalistic society: businesses. This means that the bottom line is generally more important than the quality of services. If you are going to go to college, then don’t be dumb about it. Find a good school where it is clear that you will be challenged. My Engineering school was NOTHING like what this article describes… it was MUCH more difficult than anything I have done working at a very reputable company for the last 2 years, so just make sure you choose wisely. Also, this blames colleges, but the truth is that there is great demand for easy college degrees… People have to want to learn, and colleges need to go back to teaching instead of acting like businesses who cater to the consumer students and their demand for degrees without having to earn them.
“David Thompson: Grigg never would have been decided if union hiring halls and others hadn’t discriminated against blacks.”
I highly recommend that you read Thomas Sowell’s brilliant, The Quest For Cosmic Justice. Striving for the perfect often gets in the way of achieving realistic goals. The bottom line is this: both white and black applicants had to pass the exact same tests! Life is not always fair. The only real answer was to demand that these blacks study harder so that they could compete with the whites. Eliminating the tests only corrupted the formal education process. It forced people to attend college who didn’t need to do so.
“Don’t you think I’d have a better learning experience taking a guided biology course rather than just figuring it out on my own?”
You are right—in most instances. But so what? What if one can still past the tests even if they opt not to take the course? Do you believe that test results should be the ultimate determiner of excellence? Should someone be sitting in the classroom who doesn’t really have to?
“it was MUCH more difficult than anything I have done working at a very reputable company for the last 2 years”
That’s primarily due to Griggs vs. Duke Power. Employers often higher someone with an unneeded degree merely to protect themselves from lawsuits. Businesses that could merely rely on test results would not have to behave in such a ridiculous manner.
Free Hat,
Settle down, kiddo, you’re showing your age …
… and education ….
Perhaps you should learn how not to conflate everything with everything else. At least TRY to comprehend what you’re reading.
Don’t worry, though — your little missive was mostly grammatical with a proper dose of spittle-flecked grievance.
I gave you an ‘A’ [channeling ditzy female humanities professor].
A bunch of people with useless degrees? Not
really as long as you have an expansion of
government and government spending at all
levels. The diversity students will be
the bureaucrats in charge and the newly
hired public school teachers.
Being a techie may give you a job, but one
of the diversity types will outrank you in
the government or large private company or
regulate you as an entrepreneur. These “new”
Red Guards are attack dogs on incorrect speech
and thought. Their otherwise uselessness
and dependence on government money and
regulation is totally perfect for their
function.
It would really be refreshing if conservatives would somehow find a way to argue a point of view without tacitly blaming minorities as being the cause of whatever problem they are kvetching about.
As for your obsession with a 1970′s SC decision, riddle me this, David. What actually would be the purpose of giving a test for prospective employees that covered topics that weren’t even relevant to the job the person was applying for? In the early 1970′s one didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that such “tests” could be easily designed or manipulated to flunk disfavored groups of people. Remember, at that time, people were more than a little familiar with the “literacy tests” that were designed to deny black people the vote in many Southern States.
As for Bill Gates, he wouldn’t have gotten very far if Steve Jobs had had the sense to properly license and/or copyright his Apple software innovations.
“(1) for a lower middle or working class origin student, practical skills are what’s needed…(2) the ‘liberal arts’ education they’re getting isn’t that traditional liberal arts education, and (3) the level of rigor they’re getting isn’t even close to the rigor even the the faux liberal arts educations at the elite schools.”
Well said #13. Most of the job applicants I have interviewed for administrative positions at our University have degrees in Sociology, Literature, and other Liberal Arts. They spend four or five years and lots of money only to graduate with no marketable skills and no idea how to get those skills. For them, attending four-year college was just a way to prolong adolescence. For the most part, they started college with no particular ambitions or goals, and they left in the same condition.
My advice to parents whose kids are still “finding themselves,” don’t know what they want from life, and are looking for a major that doesn’t make them work too hard (i.e., involve too much math or science) is DO NOT send them to a four-year college. Use your money to send them through a Certificate program at a Junior College or technical school where they will learn a job-related skill. Train them to be web designers, admin assistants, mechanics, veterinary technicians. A college degree is meaningless if you have no skills, no ambition, and are a politically-indoctrinated stooge with no critical thinking skills.
As for the level of rigor issue, I went through a Public Administration Master’s degree program at a state university. You would think that a “Masters” level program would require students to work harder and have a higher level of engagement than undergrad. Wrong. It got to the point that me and several other ambitious but disillusioned grad students would embed bizarre statements and comments into our papers just to see if the professors would catch them. Not one of them did–they weren’t even reading those papers. Everyone got A’s, high GPAs and the University could market it’s program as producing superior grads. And the University got to collect lots of cash from Sallie Mae for all those student loans.
Just finished reading Charles Murray’s “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools back to Reality.” It’s outstanding — highly recommended. Most of the excellent points in the previous posts are addressed. Murray did point out the unfortunate truth that the BA is a virtual requirement to even get an interview these days. I see it where I work. Parents have a dilemma. You know that your kid needs a BA ticket to get a decent job. But you also know the ticket is hidiously expensive — and that’s at a state school. In today’s economy, the BA is not a guaranteed good job. I think this will provoke a rebellion against the current system. Higher Education is the next bubble to burst.
68. Did you ever think that businesses would actually be better served by INTERVIEWING prospective employees in order to get a sense of their credentials and what kind of person they are? A successful business not only needs to have smart employees, but it also needs employees who are able to coexist as part of a unified TEAM. A simple standardized test isn’t really going to give you a window into an employee’s interpersonal skills, ability to think on the fly, ability to handle stressful deadlines or workplace ambiguity, etc.
I think what is ultimately distressing about your obessive, single-minded posting, David, is that you clearly have some pretty major issues with black people. Issues that literally have nothing at all to do with the rather hack article that you are commenting on.
71. Did you ever think that a person with a good liberal arts education has the ability to research, multitask, write, communicate, and absorb new concepts quickly? Seems like that is a pretty good skillset for Administrative positions or office work, no? I suspect that if you didn’t have such ingrained biases against people with certain degrees, that your interviews with them would go better. My guess is that you’ve turned off many good candidates in interviews by acting like a chip-on-the-shoulder dick to them. When the interviewer is a tool, than it hardly inspires the prospective employee to do their absolute best.
“So, my dear parents, if your child has a real talent and is going into a demanding program, don’t worry, she will get a real education.”
Apparently the indoctrination is so insidious that even while decrying it you’ll end up improperly using a female pronoun for the objective case.
66: David Thompson:
Your ideal approach is fine in the abstract and if there is no racism to worry about, and I like Sowell. But the employer in Grigg had a history of segregating employees. Most blacks were in the “labor” department where they were the lowest paid: after the Civil rights Act was passed in 1964, the employer added shiny new requirements for other jobs that had never before existed, like HS diplomas.
This type of fat-bellied foot dragging -along with voter tests imposed only on blacks–infuriated fair minded people and Duke Power was the result. Who could have any faith that employment tests at Duke Power would be fair or fairly administered? The problem was widespead too, and not just in the South. People were determined to end this “cornpone/mint julip/”what did you say boy?” era. Want to target someone for judicial intervention in employment law? Look to the people that couldn’t play fair.
Again, it may be time to call it a day for the case which has been diluted by the courts several times to business justification as opposed to necessity. But it was clearly needed then.
#54 Geoff – I liked a lot of your post, but….
You refute yourself when you say you had required studies in essentially useless courses (ethnic studies). You were very fortunate that you had one with an actual teacher. If both were a waste, perhaps you’d be echoing this article.
As for this curve thing, I’m not sure how it works. When I was in school, I ruined the curve, but one could not ever get more than 100%. My thought is that it doesn’t dumb down the curriculum, but rather, allows the dregs to remain in the class.
Since your name is spelled correctly (Geoff, rather than Jeff), I suspect your parents had much to do with your success.
Finally, you’d have more credibillity, if you actually used PARAGRAPHS! Geez.
“What actually would be the purpose of giving a test for prospective employees that covered topics that weren’t even relevant to the job the person was applying for?”
Who is to decide the relevancy of the questions? The lawyers knew that this would open a can of worms. Inevitably, relevancy would be “determined” in a court of law—and after spending an incredible sum on lawyer fees. Best to dodge this nonsense—and safely require credentials that weren’t needed.
“…people were more than a little familiar with the “literacy tests” that were designed to deny black people the vote in many Southern States.”
There was no such thing as a real literacy test in the Old South. This was just a con job to deny black people the right to vote. There was a test given to black citizens—and a far easier one given to whites. Griggs vs. Duke Power effectively forbade the exact same test given to both white and black applicants!
In concept, a big final exam in lieu of the credit-for-sitting-through-lectures-and-regurgitating-nonsense system is a good idea. The problem that I see with it is that employers, both private and public, aren’t going to accept the results of a test as a substitute for going through the process for a number of reasons.
I’ll guarantee you (based on specific anecdotal evidence) that a “professional” with a degree and no license will be hired preferentially over a professional with a license but no degree 90% of the time, even when the license is legally required to do the work! I’ve seen it happen, again and again.
The employers themselves are largely to blame for this mess; they keep trying to use a degree as a way to dodge due diligence in hiring. They may also be using it as a way to minimize legal risk, but mostly (again based on experience), it’s just laziness.
Free Hat,
Methinks you have not been close to a modern university in some time. Even chemistry and physics have been politicized. Sure, kids who are raised right can come through all right, but it used to be that if kids were NOT raised right the university could help lift them. Nuh uh. Not any more.
“But it was clearly needed then.”
The good must always be weighed against the bad. And Griggs vs. Duke Power has caused much more harm than good. Achieving Utopia is not possible on this side of the vale of tears. The temptation to strive for cosmic justice therefore must be soundly rejected. At the end of the day, the black applicants should have been urged to study hard for the tests. The judges should have also said the GED could be substituted for a high school diploma.
79. Geez..again with Griggs. Yes, the literacy tests were a sham. However, employment “tests” that contained questions that had nothing to do with the actual position were also a sham. If you saw the other post, in 1971, given Duke Power’s history of discrimmination it would have been difficult to say that their employment “tests” were designed in good faith. Title VII is pretty clear about what kind of tests can and can’t be used as a condition for employment. Not to mention that there’s this incredible concept called a “job interview” that should also help employers determine which are the best candidates to hire. Basing a job hire exclusively on a standardized test is pretty moronic, IMHO.
“The employers themselves are largely to blame for this mess; they keep trying to use a degree as a way to dodge due diligence in hiring. They may also be using it as a way to minimize legal risk, but mostly (again based on experience), it’s just laziness.”
It’s Griggs vs. Duke Power. You have to remember that this horrible court decision occurred in 1971! That’s 38 years ago—and we now just take this nonsense for granted. Many reading my words don’t know anything different. That’s “just the way things have always been.” If you were an 18 year old new hire in 1971, you are now minimally 55 years old.
84. Ok. We get it. You want to eliminate HR processes like INTERVIEWING in order to return to a “testing” regiment that was declared unconstitutional in 1971.
The fact that such “tests” guaranteed almost complete whites-only hiring patterns apparently is something you’d like to return to.
Obviously, you have a deep issue with black people. My suggestion is that you do a little soul-searching, pray to whatever god you believe in, and really try to figure out just why you are filled with so much hatred.
#46 Marie Curie: That is all well and good that more “conservatives should go into the humanities” but you are forgetting the fact that the liberal group think that prevades the faculty lounges of most departments will see that they NEVER get hired, and if so, will be marginalized and never get tenure.
Sad truth is you better be: PRO Gay rights, Choice, affirmative action, Labor etc. or you don’t have a snowball’s chance.
“…that their employment “tests” were designed in good faith”
The tests may not have been designed in good faith! I am quite willing to concede your point. But this well meaning court decision caused far more harm than good. At the end of the day, it would have been far better to encourage the black candidates to study harder. The state should only get involved if blacks were given different tests than the whites.
Oh, please. Enough with this “hatred” red herring.
82 and 84: David Thompson:
My you have a read fixation on this case. FYI, the US auto and manufacturing industries were in trouble long before Duke Power, so the impact that case had is up for discussion, but aside from that:
(1) Duke Power meant that we refused to enshrine racism, reward racists or wait any longer for some people to get their constitutional rights.
(2) it stems from the idea that just as one property owner should be able to sell her house and hold up a mall “that would serve the common good,”…just as fair process for the Duke lacrosse team meant just that, even if the entire town of Durham would have been happier to see them incarcerated without all the trouble of a fair pre trial process, the right of people at Duke Power to apply for a job irrespective of race was not going to be subordinated to the vague idea that we’d all be better off if they were screwed over in our name.
“Cosmic” justice is beside the point: it’s fairness: honoring the compact with all citizens. It was Duke Power that was wrong and out of touch. Too bad that we couldn’t trample over the rights of others to be more efficient etc., but that’s the deal we made when we ratified the Constitution. The police would be more efficient too if they didn’t have to worry about pesky warrants and miranda rights.
The dream that inspired Duke power is worth more to the US than any CPA’s idea of efficient shoving aside of the unfairly treated.
David Thomson,
Your opinion on this subject is fine, but if you had ever read any John S Mill, you would also know that the problem of having the government educating our kids was of great concern over 130 years ago. I’m just saying the derision was not needed in your post #63. I was around during the time of the Griggs vs. Duke Power debacle and I agree with you that it was a bad court decision.
87. You haven’t really actually demonstrated why interviewing a job candidate instead of giving a standardized test has “caused more harm than good”. What you don’t seem to grasp is that Duke Power was changing the rules for hiring specifically to exclude black candidates. Saying something flip like “blacks should just study harder” is willfully ignoring that businesses don’t always act in good faith when it comes to hiring.
88. It’s not a canard. David Thomson has devoted nearly thirty comments obsessively whining about a 38 year old SC Civil Rights Decision that literally has absolutely nothing to do with the article posted. One doesn’t have to be Freud to figure out that Mr. Thomson clearly has issues with black people. Or he thinks that by repeating the same off-topic comment dozens of times that he’ll convince people to see things his way? Either he’s a bigot or a worthless debater.
A very good article. But what if your child is male? The article doesn’t seem to address this. Seriously, reading along and encountering that little pretension ad nauseum was incredibly grating.
“Free Hat”:
If you want to talk about “stupid,” look no further than your own statement:
“If you raised your kid to be an independent, critical thinkier he’ll have the common sense to be critical of what he’s being taught.”
Even 30-50 years ago, when 18-year-olds were comparatively well-prepared and mature, college was still considered necessary (for a more reasonable number of them) to achieve the goal of them becoming critical “thinkiers.”
You’re snarkily laying at the feet of other people the job that the university is supposed to do, and still pretends to do, yet doesn’t do.
Hurling insults at people who’ve had several lifetimes of experience with higher education won’t change the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
#81 james:
I think he’s all too close to the campus, and has put a lot of stock in the attitude that the university holds the key to knowledge and its postmodernist denizens are living the intellectual life.
The very opposite is so often the case, but Free Hat has very likely has so much riding on it, both financially and ideologically, that he can’t admit that the university is largely composed of anti-intellectual Jacobins who are trying to replicate their mental DNA on their young, impressionable and very immature students.
All he can do in this situation is reflexively sling insults at those who don’t mouth the same empty dogma he’s been taught to.
I am not denigrating any of the other posters above pro or con
– Just my experience, “Got an extremely “Liberal Arts” degree knowing it was worthless after college but knowing most were also … I got to study what I wanted … Jazz. Batchelor of Music, theory & composition … and at the end of it I could play the piano and sing pretty well, and knew a lot of History, math & science.
Married the Pretties Girl in on the train, (or any train) … true but another story, who was an “A” student in piano at another prestige university.
I went to work for a living, in a management rotation entry program with Actuaries at a big Pension Insurance and life Insurer trained as a wholesaler.
That’s where the real education began,
30 years ago … and am grateful for the opportunity.
She went on to do graduate study with the Principal Pianist of the Chicago Symphony.
She still teaches and plays Classical Music making more than most low level attorneys. But she loves the work.
We had four kids. Located, difficultly, in a high end suburb for the High school.
Two kids graduated in Math/Econ and Bio Science, from “The Havard of Christian Colleges” … i.e. you have to be a Christian kid to even want to go there otherwise you’d be utterly miserable. Both hardworking “A” students, Athletes, and involved in a lot of “service”.
Ones in Med School now, the other a trader at one of the top two Mutual Fund Companies
The other Two … ones in Major University in a Ballet major … she’s got one more year to go. Then the hard facts of worklife begin.
The other quit school as a sophomore, he was making too much money. He’s going back to finish up at CAL next fall as a junior… he’s 28 and the brightest lightbulb of the bunch, jury is still out on what he’ll finally do after.
Incidentally … most business employers would rather hire a graduate of one of the Military Service Academies, then a top tier new MBA.
You don’t have to babysit an Annapolis or West Point Grad for years, waiting for them to grow up. You can put them right to work, difficult work.
I don’t know if it matters now. I’m going to a very nice private university to get my degree in Music Composition/ Performance. I know the piece of paper I will receive is worthless. Yet, where else can you get the intensive training needed to produce true art? College is what you make out of it. At the end of my undergraduate studies, in addition to a degree, I’ll have a large body of work that’s been arranged, performed, recorded, etc. That’s my resume.
Gary Ogletree (7) “this strange make believe world” — Bulls-eye.
Can’t even be creative with the junk they shill. In my case, it was class lectures on the “linear, rigid pattern of quilts made by white women in comparison to the organic, creative, non-linear ‘crazy quilt’ designs of minority seamstresses.”
Reckless insanity.
“(1) Duke Power meant that we refused to enshrine racism, reward racists or wait any longer for some people to get their constitutional rights.”
Griggs vs. duke Power instead inadvertently enshrined credentialism. This is the inevitable result once you say testing must be put aside. It also places the emphasis on results than actual immoral discrimination. And this opens up another can of worms.
“I’m just saying the derision was not needed in your post #63.”
I completely agree you regarding the inherent danger of government being involved in education. But what’s accelerated our current decline has much to do with Griggs vs. Duke Power. Think about it for minute: the judges literally outlawed the same tests given to everyone—just because a number of blacks couldn’t pass them. The precedent that was set has caused considerable damage since 1971. We cannot truly reform higher education until this court decision is reversed.
Better watch out David Thomson, the thought police are on your trail.
The educational system IS a useful tool for the race/sex hustler, grievance mongers, and libertines yelping at the heels of the wretched Enlightened Christians. This was formulated in the Port Huron Statement authored by Hanoi-Jane’s future husband in 1962:
“The University and Social Change. There is perhaps little reason to be optimistic about the above analysis. True, the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military and political power. But the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent, to be counted with enthusiasm. From where else can power and vision be summoned? We believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.”
94. Juvenal: “The very opposite is so often the case, but Free Hat has very likely has so much riding on it, both financially and ideologically, that he can’t admit that the university is largely composed of anti-intellectual Jacobins who are trying to replicate their mental DNA on their young, impressionable and very immature students. “
I fail to see how I am financially and ideologically obligated to lie about some supposed evils taking place at our universities.
My own experience is that of someone who attended a Jesuit university, tailored my education around developing skills, paid very little attention to my professors’ ideologies, got good grades, made good connections, and have had great job opportunities because of it.
It seems to me that a lot of the folks who are railing about some insidious liberal plot to indoctrinate students never actually went to college and have no idea what they’re talking about. The only “anti-intellectualism” going on here is that of the right-wingers on this board who are not intelligent enough to realize the huge value of a college education and are too cynical to acknowledge that university students do have the capacity to separate fact from bull****. Whether they choose to do so is up to them.
But this is a much larger issue of just plain right wing hypocrisy: You’re willing to accept that a professor can have so much influence over a student that he/she can brainwash them into having evil/destructive leftist ideals, but completely unwilling to accept that someone like Bill O’Reilly, who reaches millions of people a day, has enough influence over his audience that he can convince them to adopt evil/destructive rightist ideals.
Free Hat (32)
“Blaming a university for your kid becoming a brainswashed moron is also stupid.”
Why? It obviously worked on you unless your own parents had already reduced you to your current level.
“If you raised your kid to be an independent, critical thinkier he’ll have the common sense to be critical of what he’s being taught.”
Your reactions, arguments, and lines of reasoning are predictable, phrased as mimicry of widely taught, agenda driven, published, viewpoints from predictable sources. Furthermore, you seem unable to pursue any level of disagreement without resorting to precisely the sort of language and assertion that exemplify the point the articles’ author makes. Name calling, cliché ridden, simple, sentences appear to be your idea of intelligent discussion,as is often the case with those who demand that all beliefs and opinions are equally valid, but instantly assail with ridicule any not in agreement with their own.
(as shown by : Free Hat(64) “You’re just a cynical idiot.” and “Do you even think before you write this crap?”)
It’s obvious that you have no confidence in your own education given that your posts make your presence and lack of reasoning ability known, nothing else. That your points are false is richly illustrated by the manner in which you attempt to make them
Have a nice day
Got my degree in economics with a philosophy minor in 1982. I went to a private, Catholic boarding school and got a pretty good education there. I did three years in the Army before going to the University of New Hampshire in 1977, and I remember sitting for the SAT exam at a high school outside of Fort Lee, VA in the spring of 1976 (I ETS’d from the Army in August). So, I was three years removed from high school and I still obtained well above average SAT scores, such that I would not have to take freshman English. My math scores were lower, but I had forgotten quite a bit what I had learned in high school, but evidently was still able to get a 520 in the Math section of the SAT.
I was an older college student and, despite having the GI Bill to help, I still had to work part time during the semesters and full-time during the summer. I did not have time to party and to screw around. While economics is not as technically demanding as engineering and computer science, it is not a cake walk. Philosophy courses were demanding too.
I later obtained a graduate degree in Philosophy (while a Jesuit seminarian)and after leaving the Society I obtained an M.B.A. in Finance. This was during the mid to late Eighties, finishing my M.B.A. in ’91. By the Nineties the drop off in the quality of educational backgrounds of the kids coming out of high school was very noticeable. And while I was at Loyola of Chicago teaching intro. to philosophy, survey courses to freshman I could see some deficiencies in their backgrounds.
The Left is mainly responsible for watering down the educational standards of our kids in grades K-12, as well as at the university level. While I was a college student I never ran across or bumped up against political correctness. However, by the time I got to Loyola of Chicago in ’85 it was showing up. I cannot imagine what things are like today.
There is far more at stake than the unjust rip off of parents’ money today. We are seeing our civilization circling the drain and the consequences of that go far beyond monetary consideration. This is what I am most worried about.
My own approach would be for the Traditionalist/Enlightened Whatever to beat them at their own game. Simply declare yourselves an endangered species. Your rights are being violated, etc., and sue them all, day and night. What civilization did they create? None. Or if they have/had one they sure as hell don’t want to live there. Otherwise, we all die a death by a thousand cuts, i.e., we’re broke but “equal” – except for the taxpayer-anointed ones and their pals who send their kids to Sidwell Friends. Pace Free Hat: its not so much evil, its that we can’t afford it. See USSR; Central Planning.
All the Poli Sci majors I know are in ROTC. Basically, they just need a degree so they can get a commission (most of them are headed into the Marine Corps, although I think there are a few Navy guys as well). I also know a few prior enlisted guys who said the reason they enlisted was because they knew they weren’t mature enough to go to college at age 18. Now they’re attending college on scholarship in commissioning programs.
Four years and out doesn’t make sense for people who don’t have the money to attend college full time. You have to let people be able to enroll part time so that they can work their way through college.
I strongly suspect that if Griggs vs. Duke Power was no longer the law—that roughly 20% of all colleges would close within a few years. It would put a stop to credentialism virtually overnight. Passing tests and not credentials would dominate the hiring and promotion process.
I finally found the interesting essay “Griggs v. Duke Power: Implications for College Credentialing.” The authors are Bryan O’Keefe and Richard Vedder. Here is the link:
http://www.popecenter.org/inquiry_papers/article.html?id=2087
We are on dangerous ground when conservatives are so paranoid and resentful of the “liberal propaganda” they envision as “brainwashing” undergraduates that they take the anti-intellectual route and condemn higher education entirely.
Then get rid of crap like Lesbian Poets, along with the entire Womyns/Black/insert leftwing pet victims group “Studies” departments and “multicultural” BS and guys like me will think its a wise use of our money. If the “academics” were truly interested in intellectual rigour, there’d be no po-mo garbage departments on campus.
Instead I’m in trade school, learning to be a motorcycle mechanic. Why? Because there’s no such thing as “Contributions of Lesbian Carburetors” or other similar El Toro Poo-Poo posing as a serious field of study trying to steal money from me by pretending that such garbage is “education”, rather than leftwing lunacy. Nor would such idiocy ever be allowed in a trade school.
The ACADEMIA in this country is unbelievable:(
It seems to me that a lot of the folks who are railing about some insidious liberal plot to indoctrinate students never actually went to college and have no idea what they’re talking about.
If you say so, kiddo. I have four college degrees and a few certificates to boot.
But what do I know? I have two degrees in the humanities (completed by age 20), a technical degree (completed very recently), and a graduate degree in business (from a ‘Jesuit’ university). My parents are educators, my peer group is professional and includes educators up the wazoo, and I read like the dickens.
The steady drop in knowledge of college graduates is well known, and it is simply not subject to dispute (which you’d know if you had any instinct for finding useful information). Since the university is overrun with liberals, the blame is fully on their shoulders.
Essentially, Free Hat, the problem is that you’re not particularly bright. To somehow equate someone watching Bill O’Reilly to the experience of students at the university is just plain dumb. It’s that conflation thing again. If you really were well educated you’d be way, way beyond such sophomoric nonsense.
Do you even know what ‘strawman’ means, or to what the term ‘jousting at windmills’ refers?
I doubt it.
But hey, your missive was mostly grammatical with a proper dose of spittle-flecked grievance.
I give it another ‘A’.
78 Marc Malone
” You refute yourself when you say you had required studies in essentially useless courses (ethnic studies). You were very fortunate that you had one with an actual teacher. If both were a waste, perhaps you’d be echoing this article.
As for this curve thing, I’m not sure how it works. When I was in school, I ruined the curve, but one could not ever get more than 100%. My thought is that it doesn’t dumb down the curriculum, but rather, allows the dregs to remain in the class.
Since your name is spelled correctly (Geoff, rather than Jeff), I suspect your parents had much to do with your success.
Finally, you’d have more credibillity, if you actually used PARAGRAPHS! Geez.
”
I was not attempting to deny the reality of forcing ______ studies on students whose field of study has nothing to do with _______ studies, rather, I was disagreeing with the author’s suggestion that anyone but a _______ studies major would be forced to take a year’s worth of ______ studies classes. There is exaggeration with the purpose of making a rhetorical statement about something, and there is exaggeration with the purpose of engaging in demagoguery, and I believe the author is guilty of the latter.
In my experience, there were two types of curves: those which took the class average of an exam, and added x amount of points to each exam as would be necessary to reach the average score that the school wanted(typically 70% or 75%). The second type(which I only experienced in organic chemistry) was to write a very difficult exam to challenge the students(he said that he tried to write them so the top score was 80%), and then taking the top score as 100% and normalize the rest of the class to this score. Needless to say, it was a tough course, but for that very reason I found it one of the more rewarding during my studies.
My parents certainly had a lot to do with my success, but to be honest, the primary cause was being genetically gifted. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be a better student, I picked up a lot of bad habits during grade school(ah, the wonderful quality of public schools), and came to rely more on natural talent than hard work, which is not a recipe for long term success. I do take pride in the fact that I was able to do as well as I did in college, as I was struggling with alcoholism that had begun in high school for the first 2.5 years of my studies prior top getting sober, I was lucky in this regard.
Finally, while I’ll admit that math has always been a greater strength than English, my paragraph breaks aren’t that bad, are they? Haha.
I majored in engineering, but even the sciences, particularly meteorology (global warming) and biology (all about our wrecking the environment) have become more about ideology than true research.
“A very good article. But what if your child is male? The article doesn’t seem to address this.”
Glad to see someone else point this out.
But disregarding the general annoyance of the feminization of our language, the fact is that misguided adherence to feminist principles has actually made it so that it’s very unlikely that your male child will go to college. College admissions have been >60% female for over a decade now.
The continued over-glorification of the female gender, along with the continued abasement of the male, exacerbates this problem. Disregarding the bias endemic to our ‘higher learning’ institutions (where classes like ‘Modern Feminism’ and ‘Feminist Religion’ are par for the course), we see it reflected daily in our media. Commercials in which families play together inevitably have mom and daughter playing football together, or mom and daughter building a home project, or mom and daughter working on the car, ad nauseum.
This is how the liberal agenda works: insinuation. They take the least common case and try to argue that it should be the most common, for no reason other than they want it (they insist it’s “fair”). Look at the world around you – almost every problem you see can be attributed to the destruction of male identity. The vast majority of kids going to prison had no father. Boys don’t want to go to college and drop out of school because schools don’t speak to the male gender anymore. If anything college attacks the male gender.
It’s a pathetic state of affairs. And it’s doubly sad when an article decrying the situation falls into the same trap.
Say it loud and say it proud! Amen, brother!
I graduated from HS at 17 and had no financial backing for college and went straight to work. Twelve years later I was able to get an MBA at one of the top ranked institutions in the world. I was admitted based on high GMAT scores, work experience, and recommendations. It turns out that the business school was interested in having a few people with real world experience in the class – I had 10+ while the average student had 3.
For a while I thought that my lack of a BA was an impediment. Now I understand that it did minimize my liberal indoctrination and exposed me to responsibility early. I did go to an excellent high school. There are a few gaps in my education that perhaps – though not with certainty – could have been covered by a good bachelor’s degree, mostly in math and science. My writing is strong enough to anchor a career as a writer/columnist in some technical fields and I was able to test out of my MBA program’s political science courses based upon my general knowledge from reading high quality newspapers for 10+ years.
However, as a result of my experience I also have no doubt that I can learn anything I need to on my own and at my own pace, rather than having to sit in class – although of course I do appreciate the efforts of a good professor to, as I was lucky enough to have some great ones in HS and during my MBA program.
Bottom line, college is a bribe that you pay with 4 years of time and tuition. Like all bribes, it serves little purpose but to enrich the bribe taker. In the end, however, it must be paid. I think this article was right on the money. For those who romanticize the value of a liberal education; keep in mind, it is possible to read a book, associate with people of diverse backgrounds and hone your critical thinking skills without the the help of a university. You just can’t get credit for it and that is the problem.
Professor Miller is right about engineering. I got my mechanical engineering degree and never encountered any political correctness, brainwashing, or indoctrination. And I graduated in 1998.
I recently struck up a conversation with an attractive young lady who very proudly told me that she had just graduated from college with a degree in Liberal Arts. Wow, I said, that’s great. “Yep” she replied, “so would you like to supersize your meal”?.
OK, so should we home school college? It could perhaps work for the arts, but not for the sciences. And, as they always ask about home schooled children, “But what about the socialization?”
On a positive note, College keeps college professors from hanging around playgrounds, casing banks and stalking armored cars.
“Four years of propaganda, partying, and buying a mostly worthless degree.”
—I couldn’t agree more.
Freehat:
Each time you comment, it’s becoming more and more clear to me how right I was about you.
So far, you’ve been able to come up with no argument other than “a college education is obviously the most wonderful thing you can do, and if you can’t see that, and express that truth in the most enthusiastic ways, you’re nothing but an idiot who never went to college.”
You haven’t been able to articulate WHY this is so. Your logic is “A is true, and if you don’t agree, you’re wrong.” That is nothing but narrow-minded, anti-intellectual cant, and is a de rigeur part of the curriculum in the majority of the social sciences and liberal arts on college campuses.
How oblivious does a person have to be to read the testimony of one person after another, many of whom attended prestigious universities, and try to write their opinions off as the class envy (which in any other context you’d probably try to ramp up as much as possible) of people who never went to college?
And it’s not just “right-wingers” who see the dire problems that the university system has, though that is the group of people that all too many academics and wanna-be academics try to blame for their failures.
I would really like to see you make an argument for your position, rather than falling back on pre-packaged insults for people who don’t agree with you.
Willie S. GRIGGS et al., Petitioners, v. DUKE POWER COMPANY. No. 124.:
“Congress has not commanded that the less qualified be preferred over the better qualified simply because of minority origins. Far from disparaging job qualifications as such, Congress has made such qualifications the controlling factor, so that race, religion, nationality, and sex become irrelevant. What Congress has commanded is that any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.”
I am guessing that it is not GRIGGS v. DUKE POWER per se that is the “problem.” Credentials just narrow the pool of potential hires or promotions in a way that has allowed employers to escape Title VII lawsuits generally.
I am not a lawyer. My thinking just reflects my observations and my instructor’s speculation in a labor law course in my MBA program.
This is simply not serious; it is a collection of conservative stereotypes about learning generally, not just the libertine and excessive nature of college today. It borders on attacking the very learning the Founders engaged in – i.e. knowing their way around people like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Montesquieu – in implying strongly that educated people are defined by skills merely. The article asserts the Founders’ own learning can be done on one’s own: I challenge all of you who agree with that to read your way from Plato to Locke, and give yourself the appropriate historical context for each thinker, and be able to elaborate the relevant debates for me. And yes, there are right and wrong answers, and if you think that you can do this and not be held accountable, you’ve got another thing coming: talk about the Founders wrongly and those of us who know better will laugh at you. This is not as easy a task as the author proclaims it is.
Now it is true that there are subjects in the liberal arts where you can get away with doing nothing.
It’s also true that there are people who do classics and modern languages at a high level; friends I’ve known who have done art and music are probably the hardest working people I’ve known in my life. But again, if the cultivation of skill is the hallmark of the educated, then why don’t we let high schoolers – many of whom really are that high achieving – rule the world? Their classwork has immersed them in knowledge, after all, and we know that as we grow older we get divorced from being open to new knowledge and stuck doing specialized jobs.
There’s something about education which is crucial to moral formation. The Left caught on to this and transformed the university; the Right ignored what was happening because of arguments like this article, and now is advocating an even further retreat. Education is far more complicated than the acquisition of skills in order to make money; Aristotle says we are learning animals, and inasmuch our ability to love is contingent on our ability to learn, there’s a lot more at stake than merely each individual’s future in the problems of education.
For more by me on this topic:
Why school vouchers are the Most Important Issue in America
Should affirmative action be extended to conservatives in academia?
“I majored in engineering, but even the sciences, particularly meteorology (global warming) and biology (all about our wrecking the environment) have become more about ideology than true research.”
Sounds like the critical thinking aspect of university is something you didn’t quite master. If you think that medical research isn’t one of the top areas of research right now, both in terms of funding, and production of cutting edge ideas, go back to drinking your koolaid.
To ashok – No one disagrees with the importance of being educated. And, this is not discussion over the importance of teaching skills vs teaching liberal arts. This is about structuring a society where young adults start life $50,000 – $100,000 in debt and labor for thousands of hours to have any access to basic economic opportunity. We allow the educational establishment to engage in outright extortion. Not only do we allow it, we glorify it as something noble.
The answer is simple, training and certification need to be managed independently. There is inherent conflict of interest when the two are married. If certification was divorced from training, there would be tremendous advantages:
1) Competition would force a revolution in teaching procedures and options. You would no longer be locked into a 4 year curriculum, but could pursue whatever learning style is effective for you.
2) You could learn at your own pace.
3) The proper customer/supplier relationship would be established between the student and the school. Today it is distorted. Why should I have to apply and be accepted so that I can purchase a service?
4) Capacity constraints in the labor market would be eliminated since schools could no longer control the rate of graduation. Why are there not more doctors?
Unfortunately, there are powerful vested interests who would never allow this to happen. The special interests who cling to this system are not interested in the high ideals of liberal education. The modern American educational system is structured to optimize the political and economic power of those in charge. It is not about learning and education.
What’s kinda sad is that I wish I could agree with Free Hat.
As an undergrad at UCSD I (as wells as the rest of the freshmen class) had to take the “Dimension of Culture” courses had little to do with my major. Wasted a good year and a half on that. Left leaning professors who were a dime a dozen. I had to buy my books from a small, cramped bookstore that had “Free Mumia Jamal” type of posters strewn all over the place. The bookstore wouldn’t take a credit card, to avoid becoming a corporate loophole. No, seriously.
As I was finishing up my masters, my professors were quick to admit that people with masters are dime a dozen nowadays. If you want to work at even CAL state level, you had to be significantly published (PHD a must), as well as some other qualification outside of your degree. I have a decent shot at some adjunct positions, but I’m not holding my breath.
If you have a doctorate or PHD in the law, medicine or science, maybe your degree is relevant. With fine arts or political science or something, not so much. Unless you have oodles of experience in the relevant field.
I remember long ago reading that young men took time to “read” the law and then took and passed the bar exam. The law schools took umbrage at this and had a law passed stating that only graduates of certified and accredited law schools would be permitted to sit the bar exam and tack an esq after their name.
Cato (#13) is absolutely right…colleges are ripping us off….our children should go to college to learn real skills and knowledge that will lead to real jobs.
Colleges should provide the education and skill that is necessary to fulfill the available jobs and they should know where the jobs are being created, what industry, etc.
There are too many college graduates waiting on tables, doing minial work which does not required the investment in college, and/or there are too many college graduates with no job prospects.
The problem is not that there is not enough money invested in colleges but the money is wasted in courses that lead to nothing. If a degree will lead to nothing the student and parents should be notified and sign a disclosure that their children are learning for the pleasure or leisure of learning something esoteric but not necessarily useful or that it will lead to a real job.
Universities need to be accountable for the job they are doing and not be wasteful of our limited and precious resources.
Colleges should label all courses as either “leisure” or “productive” Productive courses are those that will lead you to a real job and career and Leisure are courses to enjoy but do not lead to real jobs.
Why don’t they begin to teach courses or degrees that will lead to real jobs?
I shudder to think what my life would have become had I not gone to college.
What I learned there, and what amplified my thinking, was not what I learned in class. The academic atmosphere was life-changing. I matured during those years in other ways, despite myself.
I’m struggling with the author’s same disillusions at the moment, because I have a son who recently finished a disastrous first year at a state university. If we decide to send him back for another go, he will be entering his second freshman year on double-secret probation.
Sure, you don’t have to go to college to learn how to roll a joint with one hand, or chug a 16-ounce beer in 5 seconds, but what are the other options today? Enter the workforce at 19 as a pizza delivery boy?
Except for college, where else do you meet like-minded individuals, willing to discuss literature or philosophy until 3 o’clock in the morning — as opposed to how to handle that roofing job on Maple Street? The free-form community of thought and ideas which you pass through in academia does not exist in the real world.
I haven’t made up my mind yet . . . to toss the kid to the curb or give him another one-semester chance. Either could be the right decision.
This is my dilemma, and I have no clear answer.
I have not found the college-educated who have crossed my path to be particularly more successful in their lives, but I have found them to be incredibly more interesting on the whole.
#128 Global Observer: Instead of letting your son return to the state university where he has been unsuccessful (presumably because he did not manage the freedom well enough to combine acceptable academic work with extracurricular interests), give him his opportunity at a local community college at home and make him work as a pizza delivery boy (or whatever) so that he can appreciate his alternatives and make up his deficiencies at a reasonable cost to you (and him). Alternatively, a tour in the military might well be what he needs to gain the maturity to take an education seriously and to benefit from it. Not everyone thrives in the military, but for many young men (especially) who lack motivation and maturity, the effects are positive. I am very grateful I had the opportunity to serve, though it was after college as an officer.
#127 Morena8: It’s ironic, because a traditional liberal arts education, of the older rigorous sort which required tough general education courses in math and science in the first two years (usually calculus, biology, and chemistry and/or physics) as well as a foreign language, philosophy, writing and a survey course in the Western literary canon, and survey courses in Western civilization (essentially Modern Europe with a few weeks spent on the pre-modern period) and American history, and often economics or psychology survey courses) before the major courses taken in the last two years usually did provide solid thinking and work skills for most entry level managerial or administrative work, and a basis on which to build any professional education. Even a practical major built on that kind of a foundation would be substantially better preparation than students now receive at most colleges and universities. General education requirements today can almost always be fulfilled from a smorgasbord of choices that include courses that are not rigorous and teach little — even if they’re not from the politically correct left end of the spectrum. Sure, a student could design that kind of a general education course, but sometimes you can’t get the classes or find it hard to resist the pressure to take easier courses to keep up the GPA. When the general education courses were more closely prescribed, it was relatively straightforward for a college or university to make sure that enough sections of the required courses were available so that students could meet the requirements and finish in four years. I was lucky to get that kind of liberal arts education, and think it has a definite place in the university.
But, as I pointed out, today, at most colleges and universities other than the elite schools (which, stretching things a bit, but for convenience one can consider the top 50 national universities, the top 100 national liberal arts colleges, and maybe 25-30 of the best regional masters universities in the USNews college rankings — that’s something like 10% of the 4 year colleges) — and even at some of them — liberal arts studies are fragmented, lack rigor, and prepare one for nothing beyond flipping burgers, but imbue attitudes that make one unsuited for any work.
So, for the vast majority of students in the 4,000+ colleges and universities, including community colleges and technical and for profit schools, they would be far, far better served studying curricula that would give them practical job skills as well as a reasonable general education. Engineering, sciences and the like for those with the ability and inclination — perhaps even with the encouragement of subsidies — and things like business, economics, accountancy, nursing, as well as the various skilled trades in community colleges.
Here’s a much better idea: Lets turn all of our colleges into seminaries. Then god would bless this country. Can I get an amen?
Global Observer:
In my experience, intellectual friendships and intellectual involvement among undergraduates is extremely rare. I can’t stress enough how rare that is.
Maybe he’s struggling academically because he’s following his actual interests and that’s robbing him of some of his focus. But that is not AT ALL, according to my experience and everything I’ve heard, the dominant culture on campus.
Oh gee, another snarky comment from sheesh; what a surprise!
I have faith that someday in the distant future, you’ll engage with an issue for the very first time. Until then, keep on avoiding them!
I am the parent of three remarkably educated college graduates. Two are HVAC engineers and the other is an SLP.As parents we demanded that our children take meaningful courses that would lead to a job. Parents need to keep their nose stuck deeply in the college experience. Colleges can and will give your child a meaningless degree!
I worked at a state university for 10 years (in a staff position), and now I’m a high school teacher in a suburban public school district with a daughter about to be a high school senior. From my experience, college has been a big con for some time now. Universities are turning out kid after kid with worthless degrees (women’s studies, sociology, political science, psychology, etc.). I have student after student head off to a $50,000/year private college to major in “literature” or “cultural anthropology.” They’ll spend (and borrow) a quarter of a million dollars for an utterly worthless degree. Their college advisers and professors KNOW the kid will never find employment beyond the minimum wage unless they go to graduate school and try the college professor route. BUT, the kids who choose such majors typically don’t have the intellect or motivation for grad school, so they end up working at Starbucks, trying to pay off student loans for that worthless degree, and enrolling at the local community college to learn a “trade” in which they can make money. The vast majority of students in our local community college RN program already have 4-year degrees in worthless programs — and most are hard-pressed to pass their introductory chemistry course at the community college after having earned a 4-year degree. Pitiful.
So, for my kid, I said think of college as trade school. Pick something employable, and aim for the higher income areas (engineering, biotechnology, etc.). I’m all for the liberal arts, and our family lives a life deeply engaged in the great ideas of past and present. We call it “reading books” and “having conversations.” But incomes must be earned, and college must be looked to as a means to income, preferably high income. Period.
I would like to see investigations into the qualifications of everyone involved in building a collapsed bridge or any collapsed structure. I think this should be a federal law and it should be revealed where they received their degrees.
#114 For those who romanticize the value of a liberal education; keep in mind, it is possible to read a book, associate with people of diverse backgrounds and hone your critical thinking skills without the the help of a university. You just can’t get credit for it and that is the problem.
Great point. Even though I received my BA at a Service Academy and later took a Masters in Computer Science, I feel like I didn’t start my education until I began reading National Review magazine two years after I graduated from the Academy. I’ve been reading it for the last 26 years.
Oldguy, that’s why engineers are (supposed to be) licensed. I don’t know if anyone ever did lose his license over that, but the legal licensure structure is more-or-less independent of education (they count a year of college in engineering as a year of experience, and you don’t have to have a degree to take and pass the exam and recieve a license).
The more interesting question is, how did all of those BS engineering graduates who can’t pass the PE exam (and there are a lot of them) get through college?
I quit work in mid-life because I wasn’t getting anywhere and went to a University. Got BS degrees in Microbiology and in Medical Technology. Neither one of those degrees has netted me a job in the 12 years since graduation.
What a waste of time.
And I lived on student loans to do it……
What a fool I was.
Oh, and that was at Montana university system.
Nothing is going to substantially change until the universities must compete with those opting for self-study. Only test results should ultimately matter. A law school, for instance, could offer one a course of study that significantly increases their chance of passing a state board exam. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, you retain the right to study on your own. John Adams attended Harvard Law while Alexander Hamilton relied on self-study. Both earned a law degree. Robert Jackson merely passed the appropriate tests and eventually became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Ok, David. And the whole argument comes full circle. You say that the college degree is a proxy for an IQ test, because real IQ tests are essentially illegal. But what about the draftsman who picks up enough engineering knowledge (with some added self-study) to pass the PE exam? Do you think he’s going to get hired at a corporation that has a policy of only hiring college grads? See the problem? Even when there is an alternative mechanism for demonstrating competence, at this point, the college degree thing has become institutionalized. It’s become a matter of snobbery at this point.
Face it: the days of the janitor rising through the ranks and becoming CEO are gone forever.
And these days, Abraham Lincoln would be flipping burgers.
I agree with many of the points in this article.
However, blaming the situation on universities is avoiding personal responsibility. Certainly, the university system is a bad joke. At the same time, parents need to own up to the fact that if their kids need years of remedial catch up, they were lousy parents and/or their kids have sub-standard minds. And, if your kid really was so smart, the kid would be in the computer lab with the Asian kids at 2am.
I know, I know — YOUR kid is a breathtaking, unique, genius snowflake. It’s all the fault of that damn PC gender studies department! Ah, I know. All the other kids, well, maybe, they could be duds or their parents could be failures. But never, ever YOUR kid. Eh?
I agree with the gist of this article, but it is a bot mre polemical than need be. That cost benefit of non-technical higher education is so bad that one could destroy it without the vitriol and hear say. Online education will eventually slay middling higher education. The elite universities will remain because the branding is worth the fees. The large, cheap unviersities will remain, albeit with greater self-study and remote learning, because they are somewhat cost effective and everyone loves college football. It’s the medium-sized universities and the unprestigious liberal arts colleges that will disappear. I have already made a deal with my kids. Skip college and they get $100K to start a business. We will all be better off for it.
My oldest just started college last year and boy did my eyes get opened. We put away money when she was little, enough to cover what was at that time the projected annual cost for college, and it is now about half of what we need. What really gets me is this: our president wants the government to take over our health care system, the goal being to provide better health care for less cost. The government, for all practical purposes is now attempting to run GM and Chrysler in return for bailing them out. Our universities have depended heavily on government subsidies of varying forms for decades, as well as raising their tuition and “fees” 10-12% per year for years on end, why doesn’t the occupant of the White House want to do anything to get the cost of college down? It would certainly be well within the power and authority of our government to say “if you want to keep getting money from us, get your costs in line with the overall inflation rate.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I had no idea what I wanted to do or be when I was 18. However, the draft and the Vietnam war had a way of making any course of study look attractive. Two years later, I’d had all the political rectitude and stupifying boredom that I could take and I joined the Marines.
That was a real education. I learned a trade, IT, and had the opportunity to live in a foreign country, take college classes, and teach English to foreign students. You couldn’t buy an experience like that, and I got paid to do it.
“…the draftsman who picks up enough engineering knowledge (with some added self-study) to pass the PE exam?”
I am ignorant regarding the PE exam. Does it allow an employer to hire an individual without worrying about a law suit? Don’t ever forget that Griggs vs. Duke Power remains the law of the land. The snobbery is only part of the problem. And yes, it will not disappear overnight. I was foolishly overly optimistic in an earlier post. Still, nothing can be done until the 1971 court decision is reversed. The bottom line is that the companies will inevitably be sued if they promote a white janitor, however brilliant, over a black possessing the “appropriate credentials.” Bill Gates would have never gotten to first base had he been hired by Microsoft.
i wa
“A strong back is a terrible thing to waste.”
The PE exam is a state licensing exam. The same as a medical license exam or a bar exam. It’s as if (as in Lincoln’s day) you could take the bar without a JD.
Umm…Bill Gates never would have been hired by Microsoft, period, except for maybe night watchman.
That’s a wee bit of a problem now, isn’t it?
One of my employees for a summer job was a Fine Arts graduate of Harvard University. She had NEVER HEARD OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH!!!
I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent high school education. It took place in a tiny city up in the boondocks, and my graduating class had 18 students. We wrote ‘provincial exams’, set by British Columbia. These 3 hour exams included history, english, math, chemistry, biology, etc. and were graded far away from our highschool, in Victoria.
I have put up a homage to the best English teacher ever, Miss McMurphy, at:
http://www.rememberingmissmcmurphy.blogspot.com/
And another straw in the hurricane: I went to a florist to arrange to deliver flowers to a Moscow hotel. The clerk (who told me she has graduated from the local community college), could not spell “Moscow.” When I asked her WHERE Moscow is, she thought, well, maybe, Germany.
Her mother is an elementary schoolteacher.
Nice.
I may have a unique perspective on this issue: I’m a secular humanist Democrat married (for 27 years) to a devout Mormon Republican accountant. I got one of those “worthless” BAs (Sociology) from UCLA, ranked #17 in the country; she got a BA in Accounting/Liberal Arts (dual major) from a California state university. I got mine in ’65; she got hers in ’85 (returning to college after a decade in the workplace, where lack of a BA was hampering her. I got little if any political indoctrination; she reports that about half her classes were leftist indoctrinations. She remembers her Environmental Science and Cultural Anthro profs being especially annoying, swapping in their pet ideologies for what was described in the course schedules.
The difference between her experience and mine represents the 20 years that separated our college experiences, and validates much of the author’s complaints. And even though I’m on the left in many areas, I’m just as offended as most of Pajamas Media’s right wing readers are by profs substituting indoctrination for actual instruction–even when I agree with what’s being indoctrinated.
See, if you want to persuade anyone of anything, you must show willingness to criticize your own side as well as the other’s. That makes you an honest broker in the marketplace of ideas, and a promoter of democratic (small d) principles rather than just another whirly-eyed ideologue. It’s the difference between Sean Hannity and David Brooks (I’m not saying Brooks is always right–just that he is at least willing to treat the other side respectfully and thoughtfully).
That said, I have some observations about this thread:
1. Liberal arts BAs can contribute to one’s livelihood–mine sure did, even though I never made a living as a sociologist. I worked in advertising, then became a computer journalist for 22+ years, and found my broad education and training in rigorous thinking highly applicable to my field. Especially since virtually nothing I ever reported on or wrote about existed when I was in college. I knew how to learn quickly and see how new ideas still relate to old frameworks.
2. When these BAs are polluted with indoctrination that teaches the opposite of critical thinking, of course such BAs are worth less than mine. And to repeat a key point, as a secular humanist Democrat I bet I’m even more offended by smug leftist professors who violate–on the process level–the content they claim to adore, every day of their working lives. Hannity/Limbaugh et al make you guys look bad. The Ward Churchills of the world make me look bad. I despise him and his ilk.
3. If 50% of my wife’s classes were leftist indoctrinations, that means half weren’t. Which means a student who checks out teachers beforehand can probably navigate his/her way to a reasonable education. This shouldn’t be necessary, and I object so much to the current state of affairs that I think academic tenure should be abolished–but at least it’s something those with students in school can talk to them about.
4. Like one of the commenters on this thread, we had an offspring who went to college–to Brigham Young University no less–and decided she loved campus life…except for the classes and stuff. So she just quit going to class without telling us, flunked everything, and wound up back at home expecting us to support her indefinitely. We made her go to the local community college, monitored her grades closely, and made her get work to support herself partially–such as working at the local hardware store and movie theater. Her experience in retail gave her a healthy reality check, and she eventually went back to college and got a BA (in a field she’ll never get work in, but oh well).
5. I detect a strain of fundamental anti-intellectualism in this thread, which the right wing is repeatedly accused of. Seems to have some basis in fact. A general education is generally useful, even if it doesn’t come with a meal ticket stapled to it. And often such a meal ticket has an expiration date even when it is attached. In a knowledge economy, being able to learn constantly and apply new knowledge is paramount. In my computer world career I met many successful people with liberal arts BAs who’d wandered into high tech; OTOH I also met a fair number of engineers whose specialties had become outmoded and who were spun out of good work through their inability to adapt constantly.
That is, sometimes the indirect route gets you farther than a frontal assault. If you put flies and bees in a jar, point the base toward a window and unscrew the lid, all those random-flying flies will eventually get out of the jar, while the bees will keep singlemindedly flying toward the light until they drop dead. Look around–you know I’m right.
More pointedly, the naval pilot who was Perot’s VP running mate wrote an autobiography I read. He was a hotshot flier, but the moment he hit the silk over North Vietnam (leading to 7 years in solitary in the Hanoi Hilton) he says his considerable technical education became useless, and the only thing that saved him during his incarceration was his academic training in classical philosophy.
6. When we took our daughter to BYU, we attended a talk by the president to the parents. He suggested that when we talked with out children in school, instead of obsessing with their social lives or talking about ourselves, that we buy the books our kids were reading and discuss their reading with them. Doing this can help the kids a lot–especially when they’re getting indoctrinated. Often the profs are highly articulate and have worked up a compelling narrative over the decades. Your kid may not have the tools needed to dismantle the prof’s cant by him/herself. You can help.
7. One more thing about engineers–as I said, many forget how to think, and despite their non-ideological training in college, they many not have been taught how to think their either. Not really. Someone who agrees with me about this is Jim Adams, former associate dean of Stanford U.’s College of Engineering. His contribution was a marvelous little book titled “Conceptual Blockbusting: a guide to better ideas.” It helps both engineers and others learn to think better. I recommend it highly.
“The PE exam is a state licensing exam.”
This sort of snobbery is inadvertently encouraged by Griggs vs. Duke Power. It’s been 38 years since this horrible judicial decision became law. Most people probably now take it for granted “as the way things are.” God may somehow even be responsible.
Self-hating Boomer (148)
The Supreme Court has several times upheld that you do not need a BAR ticket to be an attorney, as well. In theory can read the law and take the BAR, if you pass, you are an attorney and should be admitted to the BAR. Often (always? I don’t know) the BAR will not accept someone without a degree as a member, and courts regularly do accept ONLY the BAR ticket as proof you are an attorney. So, just like Andrew Jackson, the Court has ruled let the Court enforce it. When do you think you’ll see federal action on that one??
Regards
Ehkzu: the real problem is the disintegration of the “liberal arts.” My problem is that I know what a good liberal arts education looks like, and it isn’t what is presently slopped around at today’s universities. Social science and liberal arts are a waste of intellectual time and money. The trouble is that graduates of these studies THINK they are ‘educated.’ They are not.
Note Obama’s self reference as a ‘student of history,’ after which he made a speech loaded with FACTUAL error.
Number 153: Mr. David Thompson:
You have become officially annoying: Grigg does not matter in legal, financial, aerospace, politial, skilled technical or a host of other areas: usually only in factory jobs which are locked up with union seniority anyway. Your facination with this old case is sad and no one thinks it matters but you.
Since the US manufacturing capacity was bleeding offshore well before that decision, its role in the US industrial decline is marginal at best. No one worries too much about promoting janitors. Skilled people are easy to distinguish based on experience and training.
Bad article. Very bad.
Look, according to the BLS, a typical college grad makes twice that of a typical HS grad. College is your very, very best investment, even better than a franchise.
The problem is that many kids (and parents) view college as an act of self discovery, not as an attempt to improve your labor status. Remember, the only thing we have of value for the rest of our lives is our labor (unless you have a trust fund). Learning “the game” is part of the process. Dealing with BS professors, BS programs, BS classes, BS classmates; this helps kids respond to “the real world” (I hate that term.)
If you found the article well devised, then by all means, hold your kid out and send them to community college for two years. They can live at home with you! Then hit university at age 20 or 21, a junior that is completely unaware of how the game is played.
I don’t know what state you are from, but in Michigan, you cannot take the PE exam without a minimum of an engineering degree from an accredited 4 year university and four years of work experience. In general, here are the qualifications to take the PE exam:
Required experience: EAC Eng degree + 4 yrs exp; MS Eng degree + 3 yrs exp; PhD Eng degree + 2 yrs exp; other degrees accepted at discretion of the board
The hardworking draftsmen CANNOT move into engineering anymore without attending a university and earning an engineering degree. This applies to PE licensing through the state, in addition to the HR policy of most engineering firms.
Bottom Line: Look at what post-modernism and “self-esteem” educational philosophy hath wrought.
#152 Ehkzu: Solid post. The difference in standards between our day in the ’60s and today, or even the ’80s, is huge. And, of course, the difference between the University of California and Cal State anywhere was (and supposedly still is) day and night in terms of general student ability. In the ’60s, UC general education requirements were serious. When my father went to Berkeley in the ’20s, the professors in the freshman survey courses told students to look to the left and right, saying that only one of them would likely still be in school the following year. In the early 1960s, at Berkeley, students in the freshman survey courses were often still told to look left and right, but by then it was suggested that one of the three would not be back the following year. That’s not what your wife got at Cal State in the mid-80s, and that’s sure not what the undergraduates are getting today.
There are some conservatives who are anti-intellectual almost congenitally — there is a strong strain of suspicion in the Anglo-Saxon character of anything that “smells of the lamp” as they used to say, it goes back to John Bull’s practicality and hostility to Rome, canon law, and ‘Jesuitry’ — but I think many conservatives who are intellectuals, or who are at least seriously immersed in and interested in the high culture of the West (of which the humanities or the traditional liberal arts are an integral part) are not so much anti-intellectual as anti-post-modernism and anti-multiculturalism, which we take to be pretty much what’s currently acceptable as “intellectual” or “academic” discourse in the humanities and liberal arts today.
“No one worries too much about promoting janitors.”
You are actually half right. Griggs vs. Duke Power does not impact too many people possessing advanced degrees behind their name. It is mostly the “blue collars” that got the knife in their back. However, there are cases of fairly well credentialed firemen who also got screwed by Griggs vs. Duke Power and other similar court decisions. The recent Frank Ricci situation is a case in point. And never forget that most Americans don’t attend college—and they are the ones really paying the price. But we are still left with one question: do you believe that credentials are more important than actual knowledge? Should the self-educated Alexander Hamilton been compelled to attend law school?
It’s ironic that you unwittingly agree completely with me. We are on the exact same page. I’ve long told people that Griggs vs. Duke Power has been mostly ignored—because it did not harm the highly credentialed individuals populating America’s law schools and economic departments. It was no skin off their teeth. That this court decision has roughly cost the overall American economy three trillion dollars since 1971 is something that still does not impact them directly.
#160 Cato:
Actually I find the ability to dispassionately analyze practically anything pretty much missing from both the right and the left. Mostly I observe the brighter thought leaders of left and right working hard to prevent such discourse by putting their hot-button issues off limits.
Thus, if you bring up illegal immigration, most leftists will say “You’re a racist.” End of debate in their minds. Bring up abortion and most rightists will say “You’re a murderer” to anyone who’s pro-abortion. Again, end of debate.
College should teach people how to discuss their most deeply-held ideas with those they deeply disagree with, seek common ground where possible, and defend their ideas where not–and change them when they’re wrong. And know enough of empiricism to be able to tell when they’re wrong. As far as I can tell it doesn’t today–at least not by design. And this is a far more profound shortcoming than all the “Womyns studies” and deconstructionist multiculturalism put together.
Still, there’s intellectual anti-intellectualism, which you’re discussing, and the hatred of any study but worshipful study, which is practised by right wing high school grads out there in the Red areas (pretty ironic how right wingers are now Reds, isn’t it?). I’m talking about the people who deny evolution and go so far as to believe the Universe was created 6,000 years ago. These are the people who think thinking is innately subversive (and so it is–to their beliefs). These are not a few inbred mouth-breathers living up in remote Appalachian hollers. They represent about half the country, if I read my Pew surveys right.
This group’s signal achievement is preventing high school biology teachers from teaching evolution, which they’ve managed to do in a majority of American high schools.
So if leftist cant pollutes colleges–and I believe it does–then rightist cant pollutes the high schools, in part from what it prevents being taught more than actually getting its own version of reality taught.
A pox on both their houses, I say.
Oh, and to #159. fred: I agree, but I’d like to point out that the most outstanding product of the self-esteem movement was President Bush II–a man whose belief in himself vastly exceeded his actual abilities, and who had moved through his whole life having the way paved for him. He’s the poster child for the self-esteem movement, and the perfect example of what happens when people are taught to just luv themselves regardless of actual achievement.
here’s an idea that will save everyone a lot of money & hassle:
have your kid JOIN THE MILITARY right after high school – that should squeeze a lot of the adolescent BS out of them
they’ll take college a lot more seriously since they had to EARN it
#150 heather mc wrote:
“One of my employees for a summer job was a Fine Arts graduate of Harvard University. She had NEVER HEARD OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH!!!”
And there it is. I assume, having the Harvard name on her resume and Harvard letterhead on her letters of recommendation and transcripts, she will find one of the better jobs available to recent college graduates.
But not only did she not learn a useful skill; she didn’t even learn the liberal arts.
This is what’s wrong. It has not a thing to do with class envy and not a thing to do with anti-intellectualism, and not a thing to do with right vs. left.
From top to bottom, those who “own” and administer higher education are not doing their jobs!
<>
That’s nothin’. One of OUR summer employees was a Princeton graduate, and she asked me one day, “Is West Virginia, like, a separate state from Virginia?”
And no, it wasn’t Sonia Sotomayor. But I’ll bet you’ve seen her on TV.
“but I’d like to point out that the most outstanding product of the self-esteem movement was President Bush II–a man whose belief in himself vastly exceeded his actual abilities, and who had moved through his whole life having the way paved for him.”
Seems to apply equally to the present occupant, Ehkzu. Your apparently unavoidable liberal snark detracts from some otherwise worthwhile comments.
“One of my employees for a summer job was a Fine Arts graduate of Harvard University. She had NEVER HEARD OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH!!!”
“That’s nothin’. One of OUR summer employees was a Princeton graduate, and she asked me one day, “Is West Virginia, like, a separate state from Virginia?”
This is the indirect result of Griggs vs. Duke Power. Employers cannot essentially rely on testing. They must therefore mostly rely on credentials. This greatly empowers the politically correct idiots who run our colleges. In many respects, they know its more difficult than it was before 1971 to find out that schools even like Harvard and Princeton award phony degrees. The affirmative action grading started roughly in the mid 1960s. First it was limited to blacks, then women jumped on the bandwagon and eventually the whole deck of cards fell apart. Around 45 years later—and we now have a disaster on our hands.
re #166 MikeD equating Bush’s baseless self-esteem to Obama’s:
Hey, I said I was a Democrat who’d voted for Obama. Not like I’m hiding where I’m coming from.
But do you seriously think the two prezzes are comparable? Bush II is a grandson of the guy who actually made the family fortune. Obama was mainly raised by a single mother and then his grandparents, all people of modest means.
Obama might have gotten into Harvard through affirmative action (I don’t know whether he did or not), but the honors he gained thereafter he earned on his own hook. And note that when he became editor of the Harvard Law Review, he angered fellow liberals–especially the black ones–by hiring a fair number of people from the Federalist Society. That’s when he first showed his nonpartisanness. Then after graduation, instead of taking any of a variety of corporate law jobs offered him, he chose to go to Chicago and do community organizing. He wrote an autobiography without any ghostwriter’s help, and it received good reviews for its quality long before he ran for president. He was a constitutional law professor. At every step he has demonstrated exceptional ability, and you should recognize that whether you agree with his politics or not.
Bush, on the other hand, has demonstrated mediocrity at every step–in school, in business, and in life, which by his own admission was half-buried by mind-altering substances until he had a midlife crisis and–admirably–pulled through, with the aid of an intelligent and generally admirable wife and children. Note that I’m not dismissing his entire life–just pointing to his mediocrity of accomplishment before running for president (and during his tenure), coupled with his obviously high regard for himself and almost complete lack of interest in anything that might challenge his ideas.
I’m especially underwhelmed by his business career. His ownership of the Rangers only made money by scamming the taxpayers–whose taxes he raised appreciably to the get franchise. None of the money he made came remotely close to reimbursing those taxpayers. This was detailed by Pulitzer-winning financial journalist David Cay Johnston in his book “Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans enrich themselves at government expense (and stick you with the bill).” OTOH Obama’s small family fortune (as such fortunes go) was made by his writing a bestselling book. As I recall he and his wife didn’t even pay off their student loans until they were pushing 40.
And I’m also dismayed by his military “leadership.” He vastly overestimated his side’s strengths and underestimated the enemy even more (not to mention misidentifying who the enemy actually was). From a pure nonpartisan military viewpoint, I put it to you that Bush II will go down in history as America’s worst-ever Commander In Chief.
I’m not saying all this because I rubber-stamp all of Obama’s policies and proposals. In particular I’m against nearly everything he’s said about illegal immigration, though I suspect a portion of that is political pandering (which I prefer to ideology, since ideologues can’t change). And in fact I’m probably a Democrat today only because the Republican Party would consider Dwight D. Eisenhower a RINO today, and I’m pretty much an Eisenhower Republican–which makes me a Senator Webb-style Democrat today.
I am saying that Obama’s abilities are already proven–as is his high self-esteem, which is demonstrated by his willingness to learn from his mistakes and change course when needed. Only people lacking in true self-esteem are rigid (they call it “principled” but it’s really just rigid).
Underestimating Obama’s executive abilities is a sure way to ensure that Republicans won’t regain power during his tenure. So I suppose I should encourage it.
“Got BS degrees in Microbiology and in Medical Technology. Neither one of those degrees has netted me a job in the 12 years since graduation.”
Translation: I’m a liberal who blames others for my failings, since somehow I’m unable to get an MT job, one of the few fields that actually still has a large job market in this recession, and one that is likely to expand if the Democrat Congress continues on its health care reform plans. I’m probably just too stupid to have bothered getting certified, but that doesn’t stop me for blaming the schools instead of myself.
Too bad he didn’t learn to speak Austrian at Harvard. He could be a lot more helpful in negotiating treaties with California.
/And if you don’t get the reference, you’re dumber than I thought.
#160 Ehkzu: I confess to being completely stupid in never having been able to understand the evolution/creation controversy. Science teaches theory, and observable fact. Evolution is a theory which fits some of the ‘facts’. What evolution does not say is how it all happened. One could theorize it’s purely random, but the evidence is not there for that one way or another. Unless one is insistent on the Bishop Usher sort of creationism, at some precise hour of 4004 BC or somesuch, there is no conflict in theorizing there was a creator and accepting (subject to falsification as is all science) that life has evolved. Faugh! I’m all for teaching evolution, but as the theory that best fits the facts as we currently know them, and with the caveat that the theory is absolutely silent on the issue of causation. Why is that so hard?
Your right as far as it goes on the way both sides demonize certain issues like abortion and immigration. My view is that they’re both difficult. I do get tired of charges of racism, though. When I hear them, I tune out. Completely. Racism may well still exist, but it’s time to get over it. Do, not whine. I want to judge people on their abilities, not ethnic or racial characteristics.
Your #168 puzzles me. I can really see nothing positive about Obama, and I think history will be far kinder to GWB than you are. YMMV I think you are right that one should not underestimate Obama, but as a politician, not as an executive (where he seems to be demonstrating complete incompetence).
My sympathies for anyone who voted for Obama are nil. The facts about him were there to see for anyone who bothered to look. He may well destroy the republic – and I don’t think that’s more than slight hyperbole.
Sort of. Kind of.
The master’s degree is the new bachelor’s degree.
The suggestion I’d make in these changing times is as follows: For the BA/BS degree, go to a public college, which should be very affordable.
Then, if qualified, spend the extra money on a master’s — even at a private college, the expense won’t be crazy, as master’s degrees are typically about 33 credits.
That’s another interesting aspect of this. And the bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma, and the high school diploma is the new birth certificate. Perversely, the more the colleges dumb down the curricula, the more people go to college, and the more money they get. They have every financial incentive to water the rigor down.
And this gives the employers even more of an incentive to demand college graduates; if they don’t, they can’t be assured of an employee who can read and write, and add a few numbers.
And even that’s not guaranteed. Some college graduates these days wouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from high school 100 years ago.
This also plays into the elite ivy interests; because the worse the land-grant grads are, the better theirs are by comparison. Even if they can’t speak Austrian or list all 57 states.
Amen! What this country needs is LESS education! That way we won’t even be able to *pretend* to compete with the Japanese and Chinese.
It’s funny to me because often times the people with the loudest voices have the least amount of college and graduate experience.
The myth of the drunken, stoner college kid is not a representative majority. But hey – if reason and logic are working against your political party, I’m not surprised that you’d target the place where we develop critical thinking skills: college.
The last thing this country needs is a lot of ignorant republicans holding onto an idealized dream that never was.
“Amen! What this country needs is LESS education!”
You are presenting a straw man argument. The United States needs well educated citizens. This is beyond debate. But how do we determine the quality of the education? Griggs vs. Duke Power effectively outlawed employer testing. They are now forced to rely on mere credentials—which are often phonier than a three dollar bill.
My sister went to Douglass College, one of the “mini-colleges” at Rutgers University. For some reason, it was restricted to women; this is in the early 90′s when Rutgers’ all-male college (Rutgers College, I think) was deemed discriminatory (“equality” always manages to go one way with the progressives, doesn’t it?). At any rate, at her graduation, the commencement speaker basically did a 45-minute diatribe against white men. I was looking out at all the white fathers in the audience and wondered what they were thinking.
When I was a kid in the 70′s, my mother used to say that colleges were “hotbeds of Marxism”. I pooh-pooh’ed it, but boy was she right, even then. A friend of mine graduated with a double-major of English and “Gender Studies”. She’s going for her PhD in English Lit now. I remember talking to her about her coursework and she mentioned how coursework and discussions approached literature based on Marxist criticism. I asked her why Marxism was the default worldview – what does reading Emily Bronte have to do with Karl Marx?
It’s really scary out there. You really have to prepare your kids, but a lot of kids aren’t prepared and swallow this crap with mouths wide open. Sad.
#171 Cato:
re: evolution. There is no controversy about evolution vs. creationism within scientific circles. None. Evolution is as proven as the laws of thermodynamics. One semantic source of misunderstanding is the fact that “theory” as understood by scientists, is closer to “fact” as understood by lay people, whose understanding of the word is more like what scientists call “hypothesis.” So lay people think when scientists refer to evolution as a theory it means there’s still controversy about whether it’s true.
And of course as you implied, science has nothing to say about supernatural agency. It’s about observable, verifiable facts/processes/principles–though of course scientists can and should hypothesize about things we can’t prove yet (sometimes ever). So it’s no paradox that a majority of American scientists are religious (though the percentage goes down with high achiever in science). So it’s meaningless for a scientist speaking as a scientist to say “There’s no God” or “There is a God.” Because those sentence contains a scientifically undefinable word.
What offends me about the far right’s successful campaign to prevent the teaching of evolution in a majority of American high schools is that it’s basically a campaign of covert intimidation–qualitatively the same as people in Iraq getting notes in the night threatening them for working with the Americans or running a barbershop or, or (it’s a long list). Christianists aren’t called American Taliban for nothing.
Creationism could certainly be discussed in a comparative religion class–or in a propaganda class. Your choice. Or in a history of science class, for that matter, along with other religious accounts of phenomena now satisfactorily explained by science.
But from a religious viewpoint, consider this: the universe operates under a variety of observable and replicable laws/principles/processes. If God made the universe, these laws are God’s laws. So science is no more or less the discipline of discovering God’s laws. Of course science comprises a core of proven stuff–which we call theories–surrounded by unproven stuff–which we call hypotheses. Sometimes proven stuff is disproven, more most of the time the proven core just keeps expanding out into the surrounding field of hypotheses, proving some, disproving others. Which means that anyone denying the proven core of Science (including evolution) denies God. And anyone saying that some scripture they’re waving trumps God’s laws is simply putting himself above God. From a religious perspective that would be the sin of Pride.
b) Accusations of racism. As I said this is a form of bullying usually–an attempt to end a debate through a kind of verbal coup. I’ve been accused of racism frequently in forums discussing illegal immigration. And I’ve found that even when I do respond substantively–i.e., whether I’m a racist or not, how does that change the verifiable facts/reasoning I’m using?–the response is invariably schoolyard taunting–Racistracistracist!
I finally realized I’m dealing with people who don’t actually understand empirical reasoning. They’re using associative reasoning, which is what the human race used for its first ~80,000 years on Earth (and which at least 5 billion of us still use). So you’re probably right to tune out, but sometimes I’ll toy with such folk rhetorically.
re: Obama. I think the latest polls show that around 80% of Republicans actively dislike/disdain the guy, while 80%$ of Democrats adore him. BTW the 20% of Democrats who don’t adore him believe he’s a corporatist–i.e. a closet Republican–who’s failing to enact the leftist agenda they believed he’d enact. That’s pretty amusing when I see Hannity calling him a Bolshevik. If only, those disgruntled Democrats would say.
Among those unenchanted Obamaphobic Republicans are my wife of 27 years and most of the folks we go to church with, I should add. Every few days my wife will email me from work with some tidbit about Obama’s supposed failings. So It’s not like I’m not in touch with those of your sentiments.
Conversely, she demurs when I mention Bush as the worst president in our history–not worst in terms of abilities, of course…we have the likes of Warren G. Harding and others to claim that anti-prize. But the worst in terms of disparity between abilities and ambitions.
Actually, I keep thinking of Bush as I hear Iranians talking about Ahmadenijad–especially his total disinterest in any Iranians who didn’t vote for him, or what they think or want. He and Bush share a pure majoritarian philosophy, which Obama patently does not.
But few Obama supporters are seeking your sympathy, Cato. They’re just glad a grown-up is in the Oval Office, finally, instead of an aging frat boy with delusions of Mission Accomplished grandeur. The irony is that so many Republicans despise Obama when he has the votes to really overthrow all the GOP holds dear, and is instead constantly trying to compromise and build coalitions with them.
Yet Republicans like Powell, Gates, and Jones all see something in the guy. And don’t give me that RINO stuff. That’s as offensive as someone calling you a racist. Seriously, look at the Republicans who work with him. Other Republicans could learn a lot from them.
As for destroying the Republic–that would be the Republican reign that gave us the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The novelist Patrick O’Brien (of the Aubrey/Maturin seafaring books) had his ship captain Aubrey say once “Men must be governed.” Adam Smith himself would agree that this includes human aggregations such as markets. Neither Smith nor I would argue that this justifies socialism. But the Republican era’s ungoverned markets led to people in power decoupling themselves from the consequences of their actions (look at the golden parachutes of CEOs who bankrupted their companies). That never works out, neither on the personal nor on the corporate level.
And to return to the topic of this thread, tenured academics are similarly decoupled, enabling them to teach their pet theories instead of what students actually need. These should be brought to account just as CEOs must be. Acknowledge this and we’ll have found common ground.
Uhh, ‘scuse me? You either don’t know biology, or you don’t know physics, (or both). Thermo is derivable from statistical mechanics. It’s a quantitative theory. Evolution is a consensus coupled with a non-quantitative theory, not a rigorous mathematical result.
Here. Watch this. You may learn something:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsyS0oHLNFA
He was a constitutional law professor.
Which is one of the stories he likes to promote. If anything he was an adjunct professor (if that much) – no way Chicago would have hired him as a professor given his lack of experience.
So what have you all ‘learned’ from this discussion. Perhaps making good use of a univeristy education might have developed critical reflection rather than mere criticism.
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