I know a bunch of kids in high school so are killing themselves trying to get into the top seletive colleges. Its nuts - the worst thing is if you get in those schools are now filled with the same people who spent their childhood jumping through college admission hoops. Where do smart normal kids go now? My employer used to hire from Ivy League schools exclusively but thanks to zoom we can cast a much wider net.
> Where do smart normal kids go now?
The top public university in their state (i.e. UCB, UW, UT Austin, UMich, GaTech, UWisc-Madison, UNC Chapel)? Or 2nd/3rd tier private schools like NYU and Rice?
I'm guess asking: Why is 4 years of dedication to a sport (in at least the D1 context) not considered an education on its own? List the degrees achievable from a typical college, and rank them in terms of usefulness outside college. Then fit 4 years of a D1 sport into that list. I have a hard time believing the usefulness of 4 years of a D1 sport would be at the bottom of the list.
I think the forms of education here are pretty darn distinct. Didn’t say it wasn’t worth it/wasn’t valuable. Same reason we have conservatories like with ballet.
You can definitely get degrees in ballet/dancing, though. There are plenty of universities specializing in performance arts.
College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…
The top three benefits of college have nothing to do with anything you mentioned.
> One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks. One word. Derrida. ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.
Speaking of blithering, you are only parroting some Internet tropes in an echo chamber (which is probably where you learned them). You know by now that such things are nonsense; they are a waste of time and a poison to knowledge and reason. And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days. What have you read recently?
> What have you read recently?
"Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)
On the other hand, if you reek of obvious potential and ooze ability from every pore, and WGU can get you a degree in six months, why don’t you have that credential? Credentials don’t really prove ability, but there’s a weird staying power that can come from the “minimum bar” it sets.
Easy, I don't want to pay $4000 to someone who provided me no benefit, gave me negative value because I already wasted my time just completing the exams. In what world would you donate 1 - 5 weeks pay just for the honor of it? I'm not sure plumbers are around here to give you a plaque that says "My toilet is working" for your house guests to ogle at. Yes, I understand that the credential is what removes us from candi…
Pre college being a requirement there was still some sort of evaluation the company had to do to decide if you were a good candidate, from their perspective college graduates show more promise and potential. Just as someone applying to college shows more potential of being a good fit to the college if they scored highly on their SAT exam. Is it fair that someone who likely has all the other criteria also has to sit through the embarrassment of an SAT exam when they’re so obviously qualified? Yes. Because that’s a way that universities have found to fairly and easily find good candidates.
I think you are referring to something on one hand very valuable, on the other hand it's very easy to graduate college without learning that, and I think colleges themselves in recent decades are pivoting away from. A hundred+ years ago when "almost nobody" went to college, college was a place for those hungry and willing to sacrifice for intellectual growth. Nowadays college is a baseline consumer good that "almost…
> I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis. It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical…
College seems to have ~3 uses from students' perspectives: 1. A trade school for technical professionals who actually need specialist education (scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc.) 2. A finishing school for the elite 3. A blood sports arena for the brilliant to complete for professorships (almost all of whom will lose and be saddled with 6 figures of debt and 7 figures of opportunity cost) A lot of people…
"The market is correcting itself". It seems Adam Smith's Invisible Hand has left no stone unturned but the paradox is that soon his ideas, along with those of Keynes, Marx, Ricardo, Galbraith and Friedman will only be familiar to the elites who can afford a purely academic education which we, here in the UK, received free for 25 years after 1962. The rest will be chasing their accountancy or AI qualifications, discussing quantitative techniques in the Students Union bar instead of arguing about current affairs and joining campaigns. A sad contrast with the colourful intellectual climate of the 70s in UK universities. I returned to visit my old university recently only to find the campus full of soul-less franchises and real refectories replaced with a single pay-as-you-go food outlet. The post-it-note-plastered walls of the Students Union I knew have gone, replaced with framed commercial advertising. The population has increased four-fold since I was there yet the Philosophy department is threatened with closure. I kinda knew I had it good while I was there but not how good. I watched Thatcher's reforms gradually erode the student grant in the 80s but no-one could have predicted university life would end-up where it is now with students dependent on unscrupulous landlords hiking rents well above what student loans will cover.
American translation: graduating with anything other than a 4.0 or a 1.0 is wasted.
Oh got it now, thanks! Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!
Amusingly along those lines, I once had a prof in my Ph.D. program tell me that if I was getting all A's in my coursework, I was doing it wrong. (I.e., not spending enough time on research.)
Cultures shall be analyzed as a whole, advantages, weakness and not skip infamous parts. Cherry picking is a direct way to indoctrination.
Ah yes, just like things such as slavery, Native American history, colonialism was glossed over in US History so that the great achievements could be celebrated, and we didn't have to actually think about who paid the price.
Coming from the other side of the globe… I’d rather talk about USSR gulags, genocides by various Russian empires, Ottoman eastern-Europe-sourced slaves trade, slave sourcing themes in Africa lead by locals, crusades targeting Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and West selling out Eastern Europe…