Various perceptive commentators ( I didn’t see Carlson’s Jeremiad but I’ve been reading responses to it) are becoming more vocal about the increasingly obvious fact that sending everybody to colllege,( a four-year winter sleepover camp, hereinafter “FYWSC”as I’ve called it elsewhere), is just stupid. Unproductive. And lately, destructive since “academe” has now decided that our country is the most evil polity ever.
Somebody on Am Greatness said oh no, wait a minute, it is STILL true that you can get a better paying job if you’ve spent 4 years ,lounging on some picturesque green quad and “studying” gender or sump’n. And most recently, one of my fave commentators (see : “Love, Actually”) seems to be suggesting that the FYWSC is still a good thing because how else are the kids gonna meet someone of their own intellectual level, someone “compatible”? And not all young men are suited to hard manual labor, just like not all are bookish.
To the “better job” argument, I say, yeah, that’s only true because a college degree is still a social marker. I think, if we went back to examine “high school” and insisted that children actually LEARN sump’n there, that 18 years olds could go right from high school to professional school. I sat in on my daughter’s third year Harvard Law School classes ( held viaZoom at our dining room table cuz Covid) and, of course, I Vividly remember my own experience in law school. Was it anything she, or I, couldnta undergone at 19? Nah. IF college is necessary to prep for professional school, that’s ONLY cuz we waste the 12 years of compulsory “eduction” which precedes it. That public school teacher who referred to her job as “baby sitting” was spot-on.
And the idea that FYWSC is necessary to find your soul-mate, your intellectual companion? Wow,that is funny, concerning how incensed everybody was a few years ago when someone actually dared suggest that women should go to college primarily to find a husband! It’s true: you will never again be in an environment populated exclusively by a bunch of your peers who have been hand-picked to be just like you! But if THAT’s the point of FYWSC, it is just WAAAAY too expensive! Join a book club fuggod’s sake! Go to church! Those things are FREEEEE.
I HOPE these silly arguments are just the dying spasms of the bloated, pretentious self important FYWSC system. The black gowns are in rags and they’re clutching at shreds to cover their shameful inadequacies.
It’s too late for me, we have had to fork over astronomical amounts of money to the system, just to get our daughter to the point which is supposed to be the baseline of her—our—social class.
But I hope that, maybe, she will not have to do so for her (as yet unborn) children.
I think a lot of what is motivating the higher education racket is ongoing unintended (or, perhaps, intended) consequences of the effective ban on aptitude tests in hiring which was legislated from the bench by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (401 U.S. 424 (1971)).
If companies were prohibited from using IQ tests due to “disparate impact” on racial groups, then, they figured they could get the same result by requiring a high school diploma, since at the time only the relatively intelligent made it through high school. Of course, the high school requirement made high school diplomas a valuable credential, so high schools responded by dumbing down the curriculum so that everybody could graduate.
This, in turn, made high school completion worthless to employers as an idiot filter, so they upped the ante by requiring an associate or four year college degree. Guess what happened? Right in one—the colleges dumbed down their own curricula so there were “studies” degrees that even knuckle-walking pithecanthropoids could graduate from with honours. So employers….
The year is 2036. A Bloomberg study reports that 75% of entry-level rainbow collar jobs in the Remaining States of America now require a Ph.D. degree plus four years as a post-doctoral fellow. Typical student debt owed by those taking such jobs in 2036 was 2.75 million Second Reset Dollars, or about 12 years average starting salary for those jobs. The average age of entrants to the workforce crept up again last year to 29.7 years. The most common Ph.D. earned by job force entrants continued to be in the burgeoning field of Social Equity Studies.
The problem will sort itself out – just takes time.
Good plumbers & electricians can earn well into 6 figures – many law graduates don’t. It is rarely noticed in the clamor about student debt that the majority of the impossibly-indebted students are female, since the majority of students in what passes for college these days are female. Except for soy-boys, males are discriminated against and rejected from the “educational” system.
The female graduate, deeply in debt and stuck in a government cubicle stamping pointless papers, is not likely to want to marry a mere tradesman, even if his income is much higher than hers. On the other side, the self-sufficient tradesman is unlikely to see a heavily-indebted college graduate as an acceptable mate.
The educational travesty throws sand in the gears of the economic engine. In turn, that inhibits adequate production of a suitable next generation. And without that next generation, it is game over.
We human beings are very bad at acknowledging now the predictable long-term consequences of today’s actions.
Ei-yii-yii! What a horrible scenario, JW! But that’s how I felt 2.5 decades ago, when people cooed over my suckling infant and then asked, “oh but how are you going to pay for college?” I used to laugh. I couldn’t believe this insane system would still be in place 17 years into the future!
But as we all know, it became even more powerful, with parents resorting to desperate measures like holding their kids back from starting grade school , Ritalin, the whole “he just doesn’t TEST well” meme ( so give him like,six hours to complete a project every body else has to do in 2…)
Oh and pleeeze do not even get me started about the brutal college admissions melée, where we had to sit with our perfect straight A child and hear mysterious pronouncements about what might be “interesting” to the admissions,officers. Every parent’s hand would shoot up: “define ‘interesting’”. But they never did. The vibe was, well, if you have to ask……
But I also have to say: there was a game board in front of her and us. Yes it is only a stupid GAME that we’d been better off without—but there it was. And yes I m Inordinately proud that she WON!! University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School! AND exceedingly grateful that we could handle it, so she isn’t saddled with debt.
I reckon that makes me part of the problem….
I believe that person who suggested going to college so ladies could find their match was Amy Wax of Penn Law. She is being persecuted as though she was the one who had flipped over the tables of the money changers.
As for the need of a college degree to get a good paying job, I think it is a “yes and no” scenario. For instance, Isaac, currently 6 years old, has a like of marine animals–particularly whales. So let’s say Marine Biology is his thing. Well, if he ever wants to make money with that he needs a degree of some sort because nobody is going to give him lucrative money to just go swimming not knowing anything else about what to do in the ocean. HOwever, one can make just as much money as a technician of some kind, e.g., plummer, electrician, etc. But then the WEF desires those jobs to become “automated” by having AI robots from West World doing them. So what are folks without college degrees to do? Their solution is universal basic income supplied with a central bank digital currency. The point of this? Well I will let them explain it:
Listen carefully here, he says that CBDC’s will provide central banks with total control over transactions because they can track them in real-time and void any transaction not acceptible.
“Get a degree or be a plumber”, is not the choice. Isaac COULD start learning marine biology in, like 8th or ninth grade, is my point. Exactly what are our public schools doing from the time kids are proficient enough in reading to use it as a tool- 4th or 5th grade— and the time they get a high school degree 7 or 8 years later?
They are telling them to hate themselves if they are white or mutilate their bodies.
I love your idea of introducing these subjects to kids in Middle School if not sooner, but we both know that ain’t the agenda. Our children are collectively stupid because that is what the government wants and the government runs the public schools. Isaac goes to a private school here in Delaware, so we are at least sparing him that torture.
You know the answer, Hypatia. They are telling the white upper middle class “Daughters of Privilege” that they have been abused & discriminated against since before they were conceived, worse than any mere great-grand-child of slaves. And probably sexually abused by their fathers too. Also, all Americans are guilty, except that they are not Americans. Does not leave much time for any, you know, education.
All ‘brands’ are prone to inflation unless they’re tightly controlled (and even this only lasts for some time). This applies not just to credentials but to any kind of ‘currency’
I think maybe what you’re getting at eggspurt, is the astronomical increase in the cost of the FYWSC, even though the product they were providing diD not change, didnt get more expensive to generate, and, didn’t improve (rather the reverse.)
No argument.
And yes Robert and Gavin, I DO know what the public schools have been doing instead of education; that was, y’know, kinda a rhetorical question.
I remember when the big debate concerning public schools was about creationism! No, no, not as far back as the Scopes trial, but…idk.mebbe the early ‘90s? Some teacher was quoted s saying, if she couldn’t teach the Big Bang Theory, “basically, what’s left to teach?”
How about reading, writing, arithmetic, you idiot? Cuz we’re graduating kids now who can’t do any of that.
(But still, in retrospect: how quaint! The good ol’days, if we had but known….)
@Hypatia, I agree with everything you wrote. When I earned my bachelor’s degree, my summation of the college experience was: “that was the education I should have received in high school.” I recently entered graduate school and I likewise feel that I ought to have been doing this work 2-4 years ago. So much precious time is wasted in the education system.
Correct! We’re seeing the double whammy: exploding cost and imploding value of the ‘degree currency’. Which is why I left academia very quickly after wrapping up what I enjoyed: research. I had little interest in seeking research grants where institutional overhead was >70% before taxation with various strings that would prevent me from paying market-rate (‘fair’ in left-speech) compensation to my team. I also had little interest in attracting students to an overpriced service (university’s ‘profiteering’ and ‘price-gouging’ in left-speak), where I’d provide 70% of the value earning maybe 5-10% of what the students paid (before taxes). It’s ironic that I left a leftist institution because it violated leftist ideals!
Isn’t that always the way of it though? I mean the State with the largest disparity between “rich” and “poor” is Connecticut, one of the Bluest States in the whole Union. It always works out where the Leftists who hold any real power never have to feel the flame of their own policies.
Just an update: Vincent McCaffrey today on Am Greatness, “About Going to College” . He responds to Greer and to Melonic, whose article “Love Actually” I referenced in my OP.
Okay, we see how awful the system is. McCaffery’s piece is spot-on.
I saw, 25 years ago, how quaint ‘n’ useless it was, although I was kinda nostalgic about my own experience at Bryn Mawr. (Yeah, I was cured of that when they put a picture of a bearded girl on the cover of the alumnae magazine.) But here’s the diffy: back then, college wasn’t so expensive, AND we weren’t promoting the myth that EVERYBODY has to do it, that everybody can benefit from it.
I had hope, back in my child’s infancy, that, since the stranglehold of academe was obviously one of those things that could not go on forever, it wouldn’t.
But now I really have no hope: despite what we all know, the ruinous system looks set to go on far at least a sempiternity—it’s gonna outlive ME, that’s fer shur…….
The funny thing about collapse is that it doesn’t happen, and doesn’t happen, and doesn’t happen, and then it happens all at once. None of the brilliant “Sovietologists” in the CIA, Pentagon, State Department, or academia predicted the implosion of the Soviet Union even a year before it happened. And yet, Emmanuel Todd, based almost entirely upon demographic trends in progress, predicted its collapse in 1976 in his book La Chute Finale (published in English translation in 1999 as The Final Fall). He noted that it was a lot easier to predict inevitable collapse than it was to say when it would happen.
Almost none of the brilliant Wall Street technology analysis saw the advent of streaming music and video wiping out physical record stores and video rental shops in a couple of years. This is probably a better analogy for what is going to happen to the academia racket, as the rise of free courseware combined with independent certification and credentialing institutions will render their business model impotent and obsolete for those who are actually interested in learning something as opposed to a four (or five, or six) year country club/spa experience and networking opportunity.