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No, I absolutely hold to my assertion. It is one of the worst. Or, it was allowed to devolve into one of the worst.

The results we obtain do not align well with the money we spent per student. Not to mention the ideological crap we shove into their minds, particularly at the university level.

And the problem is that it isn't getting better.

Things need to change, and do so quickly. Like I said in one of my prior comments, these are issues that take a generation or more to yield results. If we don't fix this quickly, we are going to have very serious problems in the coming decades. And, the only way to solve these problems will be through the promotion of immigration of university graduates from other countries. There's nothing wrong with that other than the huge disservice we will do to our students.

The world is a competitive place. Nothing should stand in the way of our system of education reaching for and demanding excellence.

EDIT:

I have to add this.

One of my son's friends decided to go for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Since I was a mentor at our local high school robotics team, she asked me what I thought about one of the schools she was kind of set on attending. I took one look and begged her to not do this. Her Masters was going to cost her THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.

How? Why? This is insane!

Mechanical engineers graduate every day from excellent universities around the world at a cost between zero and, maybe, one tenth of what she was facing. And they are just as capable as anyone else.

Well, the sales people did a good job on her and she took that path. Years later she told me just how sorry she was not to take my advise.

How does an ME degree cost $300K? How is it possibly worth it? How did we allow the system to degenerate to such a level that it is legal to do this to our young?

No my friend. This is a disaster. This is really bad on many fronts. It needs to be fixed or we will pay the consequences in the long run.

Apologies if I implied that it was. I think it's fine to discuss these things in a reasonable and rational way. My point is that was not happened over on X.

I went to a low-ranked university in the midwest for CS (class of 2011) after going through an intense honors/AP circuit in high school. After experiencing difficult courses in English/History in high school, I was flabbergasted at the low quality of some of the courses at this university.

I had two courses that, as part of their curriculum, had a couple lectures to teach me how to write a resume. One of them was a 200-level English Technical Writing course; the other was a 300-level CS course. I had never had an actual job, yet somehow I wrote a better resume than my peers; many of them completely half-assed theirs. In the speech/comms 101 course, apparently I was the only one who had ever synthesized an argument or done any sort of critical thinking prior to that class.

I frequently got told that it was unusual for me, the CS student, to be doing well in various courses. My physics E&M prof asked me how I was able to do so well, better than the engineers and physics students. My math profs asked me why I was taking math courses for fun.

CS courses generally were a joke; a prof told me he had been trying to figure out how/where he was failing in his teaching content, until I showed up and it was clear that the problem was not with the content, but with the quality of students. I am pretty certain the majority of folks who took the C programming course still don't know how to work with pointers.

In-state tuition was still ~$15-20k/yr.

I got quite frustrated by my peers. They just didn't seem to care about the content or technology. I'd internally think "why are you even here then in this degree program"? It was clearly frustrating to the profs, it was frustrating to me, etc. At the time, my peers would especially be loud/demanding that the profs put in more work in education, and to some degree struck me as rather entitled. I would tinker a bit beyond what was required in the curriculum / syllabus, primarily because it was fun and interesting, not motivated by any sort of desire to get ahead, etc.

The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.

> The state of education is not great I agree, but imo somehow we have created generations of students who don't care or are less able to do critical thinking, and certainly that impedes and/or unravels the progress any educator could hope to do.

Thanks for posting this. I agree with everything you said.

Real problems are never about a single magical variable that fixes everything. They always consist of sometimes complex graphs of parameters (issues, control points, rules, laws, politics) that need to be address to a sufficient breath and depth to make things change.

I am intrigued about ideas such as eliminating the Department of Education. I haven't really given it any thought, so I can't speak about this to any depth, for or against it. I do, however, reject big government (that does not mean "no government") and tend to believe that the more you rip out of government claws the better off you might be.

When I get vocal about the state of US education it is easy for many to only think about my criticism only applying to top tier schools. That's not the case at all. The problem is systemic, and it starts with the sad state of the K-12 education.