501–510 of 914 posts
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down. No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare. [1] https://educationda…
Higher ed is like employer based health insurance in that they are both weird path dependent historical accidents. People want cheap healthcare, and it got shoehorned into an odd employer fringe benefit system that really is not at all related healthcare in any intrinsic way. People want job training, and it got shoehorned into extra departments at liberal arts universities intended as aristocrat finishing schools. J…
What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.
What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.
There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.
The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!
I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).
Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"World's policeman", that's what you tell little kids America was doing. America didn't invade Iraq or Afghanistan for world peace. There were strong economic and strategic motives behind those invasions. At the same time, soft power is also vanishing.
"strong economic and strategic motive" behind Afghanistan? They did it to get Bin Laden basically. America are like a slightly corrupt and violent world police.
IMO most of the stuffs in colleges can be self taught nowadays so the only two benefits are 1) that piece of paper and 2) networking. And good network only exists for certain colleges so for the majority out there it’s just that piece of paper.
Most of stuffs can, indeed. But how many have actually done so? Like most investments in yourself, you get out of it what you put into it.
Like any business. The only valuable thing is that paper and network (that is if it’s a top 50 school).
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down. No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare. [1] https://educationda…
Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down. No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare. [1] https://educationda…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem Not to mention rank-and-file American conservatives who see universities as bastions of liberal thought/power, and create threadbare, post-hoc arguments as to why universities have to be dismantled or politically reeducated when partisanship has to be disguised.
> when partisanship has to be disguised. The conservatives are right about the partisan bias of universities. See this survey by Mitchell Langbert. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p... Anthropology and communications saw no registered Republicans. English, Sociology, and Art departments had a ratio of around 40:1 Democrat professors Republican professors, whereas in technical fields the rat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that our system relies heavily on uneducated migrants for menial labor. However, uneducated people in the 1950s regularly got jobs in factories that paid enough for a single income to support a family. That opportunity for uneducated Americans won't come back, regardless of our immigration policies.
While it's true that it was possible to support a family on a single unskilled laborer income in the '50s, their standard of living was far below anything most people would accept today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics. Most people don't realize is that war is e…
When would the real death tolls be revealed? When Ukraine does a census?
Americans attend college as a (1) rite of passage and to some extent (2) to have access to an influence network of peers and alumni. For elite universities, it's conceivable that #2 provides some real opportunity. But in general #1 dominates the dollars spent on this experience and it's really too bad.