September 5, 2023
"As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students..."
"Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome [according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But the more] pointed critique... is a populist one, and it reflects sentiments that can be found these days on the left as well as the right. Economists have shown that higher education as a whole has become more stratified by income and class over the last 20 years.... Hess says many conservatives have grown skeptical that students are learning much at these selective institutions. Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential.
'It’s a racketeering situation,' Hess said when we spoke last month. 'In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.' For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. 'It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.'"
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True
College tuition and textbooks have inflated more than most things over the last several decades. The ROI is indeed falling, and there are too many colleges out there competing for a smaller number of students.
https://ritholtz.com/2016/08/inflation-look-right-places/
https://uvaro.com/blog/college-costs-vs-inflation-1982-present
One can attend a less expensive college and *perform well* to succeed in life. One can pay to join a clique to succeed in life. Both work for some people and in some situations, disregarding the broader and possibly negative societal effects.
Hasn’t it always been that way? At least for some industries and some employers?
The old boys club, etc.
That’s why some people so desperately wanted to do what ever it took to get their kids into Harvard. And that’s why Harvard bent the knee to the AA crowd and played racial
Games in the name of “diversity” and all.
Not every 18 yr old knows what they want to be when they grow up. College has been the place you park while you wait. It used to be cheaper to waste time on someone else's dime, though.
Hmmm…
Interesting to read this in the NYT, which is a gold plated part of the racket.
One of my high school friends graduated from Harvard College. He wasn't impressed with the professors.
Another friend has a daughter who graduated from Wharton. He had thought she would have these great professors who gave great lectures. He thought the education was going to be rigorous. According to him, its mostly junkets and networking. Not much learning going on.
The thing I object to today is the plain indoctrination going on re: tribalism and CAGW. Conservative views aren't tolerated. That's a serious problem.
Solution? The David D. Begley Chair in Philosophy at Creighton University. The professor will teach Logic, Conservative Thought and Stoicism. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, S.J. will be required reading.
'It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.'
And it's not just financial.
Part of that toll has become sitting through lectures on racism and climate change, and submitting work you know is false in order to pass the courses.
Harvard would do as well to accept the tuition and grant the diploma without the bother of four years residence in Boston. Harvard freshmen know more than seniors.
"It’s a racketeering situation"
Like, a violation of the RICO Act? LIke, worse than Trump in Fulton County?
For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. 'It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.'
Pretty obviously true. In other news, rain will make you wet. Night is dark. Touching an open flame will burn your finger. Too many students on a rickety pier will collapse it into the lake.
This began, so far as I can tell, with giving young male students an automatic deferment from the draft during Vietnam. The effect was to stratify society in a way it hadn't been before.
Then came the legal inability of employers to give applicants IQ tests or other (reasonably) objective measures of suitability to the job, leading to the de facto decision to judge suitability based on the attainment of a degree, any degree, if the work itself wouldn't otherwise require a particular credential.
Add to these the universities abandoning the ideal of producing free thinkers in favor of becoming a petri dish to breed only certain acceptable thoughts.
Next stop: the cliff.
Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome [according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Republicans think this because the colleges have TOLD them they aren’t welcome. The institutions label their ideas as ‘hate’. Jessu
crow get a clue…
These thread the needle stories lead me to believe colleges and universities are taking fire from somewhere, probably alums hitting them right in the endowments…
College used to have a point. It was there to teach the values of "Western Civilization". Now its being used to teach the Values of SJW leftism.
I've alway advocated shortening College from 4 years to 3 years and cutting out the first year liberal arts crap that everyone is forced to take. All this could be taught in HS. But peeps aren't intrested, they just want to make College as expensive as possible.
Of course, Dumbo Conservatives are telling people to don't go to college. Guess where lawyers and Judges come from? If you're going to abandon the legal profession to the hard left, then you'd better change our current system of Judicial Supremacy, where Lawyers/Judges can put Ex-POTUS and leading Presidental candidates in Jail.
Gee, who knew?
Whose fault? Mario Savio.
as i've stated before..
Of All the people i went to college with; the one that is making The Most Money, is one that dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year. He is now a manager at a facebook data center, and just returned to work (this morning) after a 35 day vacation
( every 5 years, he gets a 30 day paid sabbatical, added 5 days of pto.)
his family went boating (on his boat), then Germany, then back to their Large house, with the inground pool (and pool house).. I left out several other legs of the trip, but You get the idea.
My point is.. He's QUITE well off.. And he has a TOTAL of 3 semesters of college Comp Sci.. Which has been NO USE to him either on the job, or on his paychecks. Some of the other Comp Sci people i knew are also doing pretty well.. because they ALSO work at Facebook.
College in the 21st century is for LOSERS.. Do you KNOW what you call a person with a BA? a BArista
The only other people i know, that are doing quite well are 2 welders (that own their own companies) and an oilfield worker for Chippewa Falls, that left Wisco about 15 years ago and drove to Casper and started in the oilfields. THAT guy paid more in taxes last year than i made in my best year of work as a database admin..
One More Time... College is for LOSERS
“As the Democrats have become the party of the college-indoctrinated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning faculty, staff and students..."
Crappy editing, but I fixed it for them.
Help me here. You want me to take four years of my young life (18-21 or so) and maybe a quarter-million dollars --borrowed from others under contracts not dischargeable in bankruptcy, or borrowed from my family, or stripped from my own meager savings in my teenage years-- and hand it over blindly to Diplomas 'R' Us, so that I, too, can stride across the dais and collect that super-valuable credential, which, since my high school left me unprepared for real work, speaks only to my alleged competence in Marxist Grievance Activism?
*ponders this value proposition for one nanosecond*
*decides to use the money and time to qualify as an electrician or start a business*
if you owe a hundred thousand dollars of school debt...
How Long will it take you, working as a Barista, to have more money than a welder?
THAT is the sort of math, that they SHOULD be teaching in school.. As if they teach ANY math
I have been watching a show on Netflix called "How to Get Rich" and it's amazing to me the kind of student loan debts people have, and how they mostly hadn't been paid off. One lady opened a woodworking business, which seemed to be doing OK, but she had tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, for a skill she should have learned in an apprenticeship, and business skills she could have picked up at community college, or would have picked up in high school in the 1960s. Maybe she acquired a degree of artistic taste at the college, IDK.
It's hard for me to understand, I guess, I could pay my tuition mostly by working at a fast food restaurant while at school, and had my loans paid off by the time I was thirty, but what we have done to this generation is unconscionable.
Of course every new regulation imposed on colleges creates the need for a larger administration, which increases costs, and schools are marketing to 17 year olds, whose brains are not fully developed, and trapping them in debts that they don't understand, and think are normal, until gradually they do come to understand what has been done to them. I don't blame them for being angry. But like every major blunder society makes, there is no easy way out.
Public education from kindergarten to college is a three shell mont game with the pea already palmed.
The problem with higher education is the same as with primary/secondary: corruption of purpose while retaining the same facade, sometimes in a way that is purposely deceptive. The unions and supporting progressive organs are highly protective and defensive when it comes to this turf. Charter schools and home schools are answer. The machine has to be defueled before the course cam be corrected.
that first sentence doesn't make sense.
I graduated college in 1988. The degree I got, BS Chemistry/Biology, really was only for the credential needed to get into graduate school where I could get actual research/laboratory experience that I used in my professional career. I basically never went to class (unless attendance was required) except for the exams- I basically took multiple textbooks and worked through them methodically and exhaustively. My real learning at that level that was college dependent were the lab sections, but the truth is that at the undergraduate level, lab sections in chemistry don't really prepare you much for what laboratory skills you actually do need on a real research project, and my college didn't have chemistry researchers to provide real projects.
Now, to be fair, I didn't try an alternate path skipping college and then go to graduate school- perhaps it was possible to skip the undergraduate degree, work for 4 years while doing the same amount of book studying, then taken the two required pre-admission tests- the GRE and Chemistry tests- and gotten in with the exact same scores but with out the BS degrees. Perhaps it is possible to do this today, too. What I do know that isn't easy is to skip college and get into corporate America- corporations really do use college degrees obtained to sort out applicants- at least they did when I was a professional organic chemistry researcher.
the tilt in education is so far left - the education is mostly gone. it's been replaced with indoctrination and victim mongering.
I think allowing sorting for jobs being done with extensive written and verbal tests might be a huge increase in economic productive output because it would save capable young people from having to take on enormous debts to obtain degrees that do the exact same thing.
“Journalist” and “Good Job”
Bwahaha
Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential. 'It’s a racketeering situation,'
Hasn't that been the knock on college since the invention of college?
In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.
Those are the only careers left, aren't they?
My hunch is Althouse's class politics tag is set to get quite the workout over the next 14 months and beyond. Another article I read today by Selena Zito (who reports the old fashioned way by interviewing people relentlessly) quotes more than one black voter (mostly former democrats) who finger class politics as a bigger problem than racism and indicating that it affects their changing voting patterns.
Bad policies, whether Bidenomics or the remaking of higher ed, are hurting Americans and taking away the usual pathways to success and crying "racism!" all the time is seen as the distraction it is. I'm [retty sure political polling is failing to account for several subtle shifts like this in their turnout models, and the lack of actual substantial news sources is hurting that effort (accurate polling) not helping.
Remember the study that showed those who were accepted to Ivy League schools but instead attended state schools did as well in life as those that attended the Ivy's? The Ivy's are all about selection, not actually teaching you anything any better than anywhere else. And no, the contacts made during college didn't matter.
Yes, a sinecures in the great bureaus require one to be "one of us" by those who assign their servants to positions. The great bureaucratic nation, like Germany of the 1920s, the storied British bureaucrats.
Not everybody, of course, is favored by good luck. Very few become millionaires. But everybody knows that strenuous effort and nothing less than strenuous effort pays. All roads are open to the smart youngster. He is optimistic in the awareness of his own strength. He has self-confidence and is full of hope. And as he grows older and realizes that many of his plans have been frustrated, he has no cause for despair. His children will start the race again and he does not see any reason why they should not succeed where he himself failed. Life is worth living because it is full of promise.
All this was literally true of America. In old Europe there still survived many checks inherited from the ancien régime. Even in the prime of liberalism, aristocracy and officialdom were struggling for the maintenance of their privileges. But in America there were no such remnants of the Dark Ages. It was in this sense a young country, and it was a free country. Here were neither industrial codes nor guilds. Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford did not have to overcome any obstacles erected by shortsighted governments and a narrow-minded public opinion.
Under such conditions the rising generation are driven by the spirit of the pioneer. They are born into a progressing society, and they realize that it is their task to contribute something to the improvement of human affairs. They will change the world, shape it according to their own ideas. They have no time to waste, tomorrow is theirs and they must prepare for the great things that are waiting for them. They do not talk about their being young and about the rights of youth; they act as young people must act. They do not boast about their own “dynamism”; they are dynamic and there is no need for them to emphasize this quality. They do not challenge the older generation with arrogant talk. They want to beat it by their deeds.
But it is quite a different thing under the rising tide of bureaucratization. Government jobs offer no opportunity for the display of personal talents and gifts. Regimentation spells the doom of initiative. The young man has no illusions about his future. He knows what is in store for him. He will get a job with one of the innumerable bureaus, he will be but a cog in a huge machine the working of which is more or less mechanical. The routine of a bureaucratic technique will cripple his mind and tie his hands. He will enjoy security. But this security will be rather of the kind that the convict enjoys within the prison walls. He will never be free to make decisions and to shape his own fate. He will forever be a man taken care of by other people. He will never be a real man relying on his own strength. He shudders at the sight of the huge office buildings in which he will bury himself.
--von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
All the more to cause the young to long for the total bureaucratic control of society such as was the socialism of the Soviets or the CCP today.
This "education" in the story is that which Nassim Taleb describes here
I’m not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career–but such effect washes out at the country level. Education stabilizes the income of families across generations. A merchant makes money, then his children go to the Sorbonne, they become doctors and magistrates. The family retains wealth because the diplomas allow members to remain in the middle class long after ancestral wealth is depleted. But these effects don’t count for countries.
–Nassim Taleb, ‘Antifragile’
Nobody would think it wise to give a high school graduate a credit card with a $100,000 limit, but they are allowed to rack up even more than that in student debt. Parents who might otherwise serve as a brake on that behavior have been bamboozled into thinking that their child’s education is so precious that they are in no position to say “no”.
So escalating tuition is essentially subsidized, without (especially for selective schools) price competition. The schools then spend that money on more administrators (while paying adjuncts peanuts), especially in the DEI racket.
Having subsidized ruinously expensive indoctrination into “Woke” ideology, the left wants to “circle back” and close the loop by relieving the students of their debt burden and have taxpayers foot the bill.
Hard to imagine that anyone would think the whole thing is a scam, isn’t it?
And the changes coming to the idealized parts of college do make those majors a bad risk in the coming years. The Xerox copy of the professors model is going to fall to AI. And to learn to solve problems, you need freedom to speak about even disfavored topics. Every speech limitation is a nail in the college coffin.
And observation on college that was and will be:
But, I want to go to the other end of the spectrum, which is intellectual services. It used to be, if you wave your Bachelor's degree, you're going to get a great job. When I graduated from college, it was a sure thing that you'd get a great job. And, in college, you'd basically learned artificial intelligence, meaning, you carried out the instructions that the faculty member gave you. You memorized the lectures, and you were tested on your memory in the exams. That's what a computer does. It basically memorizes what you tell it to do.
But now, with a computer doing all those mundane, repetitive intellectual tasks, if you're expecting to do well in the job market, you have to bring, you have to have real education. Real education means to solve problems that the faculty who teach don't really know how to solve.
And that takes talent as well as education.
So, my view is we've got to change education from a kind of a big Xerox machine where the lectures are memorized and then tested, into one which is more experienced-based to prepare a workforce for the reality of the 20th century. You've got to recognize that just because you had an experience with, say, issues in accounting, doesn't mean that you have the ability to innovate and take care of customers who have problems that cannot be coded.--Econtalk podcast with economist Ed Leamer, April 13, 2020
Americans are losing their jobs, and are being replaced by illegals. All going according to the Democrats plans...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12478977/Staggering-figures-workers-lost-jobs.html
It’s been the case for generations that many jobs that don’t require a college education to do do require a college degree to get. That’s not new. What’s new is the rise of good occupations that require only technical training (whether software development, plumbing, or air conditioner repair) at the same time that colleges are committing slow-motion suicide through outrageous tuition increases coupled with a dumbing down of the curriculum that leaves graduates burdened with crushing debt for a degree that isn’t worth much.
Of course nobody but the wealthy liberals who dominate the cultural institutions really benefit and it was only a matter of time before the rest of us stop playing that game.
Colleges aren't exactly centers of enlightenment. In fact they are looking more and more like the Torqemada. Obey or forever be outcast.
"...higher education has become dominated by left-learning staff and students..."
I don't think I ever saw this acknowledgment in the NYT before. Unless it's being attributed to the conservative guy.
What is this?
As a republican tell me what you think of higher ed...
Call me skeptical.
The agenda is to make people believe the stuff they make up.
It's an expensive toll that the payee of the toll now wants me to pay because the cost of the toll doesn't really pay out in the long run.
"Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome..."
Juice not worth the squeeze, perhaps?
When Bernie Wooster was going to Oxford, he wasn't learning practical skills. He was learning the mannerisms and affectations of the upper classes. For example, a 20th century gentlemen was expected to know some Latin. That's one of the tools they used to recognize each other. Bernie never expected to do a day's work in his life. But he did need to learn to "act like a gentleman" and learn a little poetry and Latin.
It was a different set of mannerisms in the US but it came to the same thing. The great Physicist Richard Feynman talked about his transformation from a kid from Queens at Princeton.
"By now, I had learned what that little 'heh-heh' meant. It meant 'mistake'."
At the time of the GI bill, people had noticed that the top 10% of earners usually had college degrees. It was assumed that if everyone went to college, everyone could be in the top 10%. No. That won't work. But it gave higher education a vast and roaring river of money that they used to establish various pseudo disciplines and bloated administrations.
Now, at Princeton, students seeking a degree in Classics don't even have to learn Latin. What they do have to learn is to recite some lame Marxist slogans and strut and preen about how all the lower classes are 'racist'.
People are catching on. They do eventually.
Welcome to the club, Rick. People have been arguing for decades that college is a 4-year IQ test. It's illegal to use IQ as an employment screen because of "disparate impact": whites do better than blacks. However, no one will bother you if you use college--or even selective college--as a screen, even though there is the same disparate impact.
"As the Democrats have become the party of the affluent..."
Fixed it for them.
When 3% of college-aged males attended college, quite a few of them received significant and useful training that greatly increased their productivity and earning potential. But when half of the people of college age go to college, college has to find something to teach them that they are capable of learning. Their go the productivity gains.
Someone observed that it would be revealing to ask students if they would rather have the Princeton education without the Princeton degree or the Princeton degree without the Princeton education.
"left-leaning". What a hoot!
It is the NYT, but they are quoting AEI. Still, if obtaining a degree is just the toll for jumping queues, then the problem are the gatekeepers for the jobs. They should demand better. I think they are, because more and more skills test are being implemented as part of the hiring process, because the diploma can’t be trusted. The next step is getting the gatekeepers to expand their search for qualified candidates.
The students and those funding the students should also demand more for shelling out the cost of admission. Is it too much to get an education rather than just a paper claiming you got one? Interesting that this is not considered a fraud.
The entire point of a college degree is that it will be worth more to you than the money and time spent to get that degree. For most people, they want an investment of 4+ years and 6 figures in student loans to result in a high paying job that will pay off those loans and make up for the lost income of the missing work years. This has become less and less likely to happen; hence, all these (illegal) efforts to "forgive" student loans. Many of the degrees that colleges are more than willing to charge full and inflated prices have no practical use other than to become a professor, and professorships are hard to come by, especially if you do not check diversity boxes. So, yes, who wouldn't be suspicious of an institution that makes big promises, takes a lot of money, and does not deliver. We generally refer to such things as "scams."
Of course, the alternate argument is that college will expose you to other worldviews and open your mind. Except that colleges and universities have become the basis for cancel culture. Many of these institutions are outright hostile any views that are not approved, and the approved views are always far left wing. If you want to be exposed to far-left wing views, you can get that on social media for free.
So, if you want to spend a massive amount of money for something that is borderline useless while being inducted into a cult, I don't see the problem.
Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes. That way, everyone could have their illnesses treated without being bankrupted and the children of less affluent families could have access to whatever studies interested them. Cut the fucking War Department's obscene and criminally confiscatory budget by at least 50%--preferably 75%, if not even more--and apply our tax dollars to truly helpful programs for all Americans: education and healthcare.
The War Department Slush fund is a criminal enterprise enriching the worst in our nation--arms merchants, high rank military brass, and Congresspersons who grovel for handsome "donations" by the wretched arms merchants.Going to college is not automatically (or even usually) an entry into "leftist brainwashing." College students who are progressive/left were inclined that way before they entered college. I was in college in Florida in the 70s, just after the end of the Vietnam War and the anti-war protestors on college campuses. I never had any professors try to push us toward one outlook or another, and most of my fellow students were earnest young apolitical people wanting to be credentialed so they could get good jobs.
Now, if the problem is of ignorant or uninformed parents being unable to tolerate the notion their children might come home with broader viewpoints of the world, parents wanting their children to abide by the ingrained ideas and opinions they have passed down from generation to generation, they should should admit they do not want informed children if it might cause differences in family viewpoints. They want ignorant children, compliant to family and community ideas and mores. A sad reality. My viewpoints changed in my early-to-mid 20s, mostly after I had graduated college, from family tradition Republican to Democrat (and now repelled by the Dems, too). My change in views grew from the disparity in reality I saw around me close up and in the nation and world at large in contrast to much of what I had been raised to believe. However, despite our disagreements in worldviews, there was no fracture in our family, we all loved and respected each other. We agreed to disagree. My parents (both now dead) were very smart people. Everyone in my family remains Republican--but my (fraternal twin) brother, also still a Republican--sees through the fraud and lies of Donald Trump. He is appalled that so many apparently intelligent people can have been so hypnotized and conned by Donald Trump. My younger brother likes Trump, but we don't speak about him.
I don't know who my parents would vote for if they were alive today, but everything about Trump violates the ethical principles and respect for honesty, truth, and respect for others they raised us to believe. If they were alive and voted for Trump, I would just not engage in any discussions with them about him. Family (and community) comity is worth more than fighting over just one more of the parade of power-hungry creeps who seem to predominate in our state houses, locally and in Washington, DC.
And yet another data point served up today by the NYT no less. Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog summarizes: "the college wealth premium (that is, household wealth accumulation rather than income alone), based on a Federal Reserve study... for blacks with college degrees had fallen close to zero [in the 1990s], and for whites by 75 percent. If this finding holds up, it ought to be a major scandal for higher education. What can be the cause of this?"
Leftism/woke politics in place of education, same thing that's killing ECE and high schools. And entertainment including gaming and movies. And the military. And organized religion. And the "two party system." And has already killed broadcast news through most delivery devices.
Crack might be onto something in lumping all this under New Age spiritism. Woke New Ageism is teaming up with Global warming the way the Roman Empire teamed up with the Catholic church. And Antifa-trannies are their crusaders.
Nothing unusual about this. Many nations use educational systems as sorting mechanisms to identify those most intelligent, most compliant, hardest working, and those with the right social and/or political connections. Injustices abound. What's new is that the normies have figured out that they are, if not excluded, severely disadvantaged by their normiehood.
President Joe Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against former President Donald Trump. On average, Biden leads Trump by just 53% to 28% among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.//snip//Democrats have lost ground among nonwhite voters in almost every election over the last decade, even as racially charged fights over everything from a border wall to kneeling during the national anthem might have been expected to produce the exact opposite result.. - New York Times
Gee, do you think kowtowing to affluent and plain old rich white liberals at every step of the way is causing traditional Democratic constituencies to have second thoughts?
"This is the story of Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For what he never done..."
What is this world coming to when people don't respect the outcome of a good old fashioned show trial?
Purdue was able to freeze tuition for a number of years. How did Mitch Daniels do that?
The Education Degree is the last refuge of many, many students who wanted to get other degrees but would have flunked out had they not changed to Ed. And that simple fact explains so very much about the state of education in the US, today.
Home sales are down 31% in 2023. And the trend is accelerating. Down 45% in the last quarter. Millions of Democrat Party members are now suffering, unable to make a living in the Biden economy.
NO POLITICAL PARTY in power can survive such statistics. Donald Trump is going to be welcomed back with open arms by the very people who impeached him. And maybe even made King For Life.
Joe Biden is going to be booted out of the White House on a stretcher.
Someone observed that it would be revealing to ask students if they would rather have the Princeton education without the Princeton degree or the Princeton degree without the Princeton education.
There's a really curious reality where a short period in the mid-20th century seems to have defined not only how things should be but how things always were, and we assume that we're going through this massive historical shift in moving away from that standard.
College and University life was always primarily about networking and a social/professional pass more than learning. This goes well back to the earliest colleges, and we see the British university system showing this again and again. The fact we have sports in colleges is another huge indicator it was always more social than educational, an indication of a privileged leisure class. This privileged class was primarily a social indication, but every once in a while someone really smart could break into it and join the higher classes. Different fields had different educational assumptions and pathways, but they were often more about networking and fitting into the guild or class than pure education.
Then we had WW2 and the GI Bill. Which radically democratized higher education and in doing that created an assumption this was mostly about education (since veterans already had massive life experience). But that was mostly an illusion, because as colleges of all sizes started to proliferate, the elite institutions kept their elite purposes. Sports expanded from a leisure activity to a pseudo-professional moneymaker and status bringer.
Now we're moving past the mid-20th century assumption that learning is value and class neutral, that the more educated a person is, the more fair and objective they are, the illusion given to the Baby Boomers is now dissipating. It's always been like this, we're just realizing it again and the institutions are becoming more openly arrogant as they enforce social positioning in not just class but also in public politics and debate.
so, which came 1st?
schools Not teaching ANYTHING useful?
or
employers not caring if you had a degree?
Way back, at the turn of the century you Could NOT get a entry level IT job in Des Moines without at least a 4 year degree.
Earlier than that, in the '80's, you could get entry level DP job with a 2 year degree.
But NOW, in Des Moines*, it's 4 year degree 'preferred'.. if that
in Des Moines* i checked the web site of my former employer.. that's What THEY were asking.
And HOLY COW! if a Mutual Insurance company in Des Moines is no longer demanding a 4 year degree..
4 year degrees are TOAST
Nobody would think it wise to give a high school graduate a credit card with a $100,000 limit, but they are allowed to rack up even more than that in student debt.
This is only allowed because student debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
diversity politics
As for college, the proliferation of nonessential degrees, and federal student loan debt, have reduced the value proposition of institutional education.
What is the average grade at Harvard?
If it is, as has been reported, an "A-", then explain to me how much students are being challenged.
A friend earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford, the preeminent school in the field. (In contrast, I graduated from the lowly U of Illinois).
When I asked him about the experience of having the best Research Psychology Professors in the country, he said that it was a helluva lot harder getting in to Stanford than graduating. At my school, the drop out/push out rate was one in three. (Usually classes of 12).
We both agree that I was much more challenged in my ordinary program than in his prestigious one. That makes me wonder about the value of elite education and education in general.
My father was a metals guy as, one after another, manufacturing businesses shut down in the '50s and '60s. Yet I got into an elite school [Middlebury] without any hardship sob-story essays or long lists of socially-acceptable volunteer activities. When I graduated in the hard sciences [1971], without any debt, only 9 percent of the population had a college degree of any sort. Today it's 39 percent ... bur for the majority of them life is "Would you like fries with that?"
I went on to three more science degrees, but chose a career field -- agriculture -- not noted for either high income or elitist positions. It's winding down slowly, with lots of pro bono agronomy, and looking back I am joy-fully content with having chosen, enthusiastically, a lower-income path with incalculable fringe benefits.
In contrast, my oldest son flunked out of college three times -- too busy helping profs and other kids with all their computer problems. He followed his passion and, currently in his 50s, he is Senior Technical Consultant for a major American Airline. He reports at the VP/CTO/CEO level, and pays far more in taxes than I ever earned, even in my best years.
If you know yourself, and provide something people need or want, you'll do just fine without waving a diploma, kissing butt, and brown-nosing.
"schools are marketing to 17 year olds, whose brains are not fully developed, and trapping them in debts that they don't understand, and think are normal, until gradually they do come to understand what has been done to them. I don't blame them for being angry."
At which point, those angry college students agitate to have their debts paid for by other people, who didn't go to college. I do blame them for that arrogance and sense of entitlement.
What I do know that isn't easy is to skip college and get into corporate America- corporations really do use college degrees obtained to sort out applicants- at least they did when I was a professional organic chemistry researcher.
The Griggs vs Duke Power decision required corporations to end IQ type tests and college degrees became the substitute. "Disparate Impact" again.
Someday that may be reversed.
"Americans are losing their jobs, and are being replaced by illegals. All going according to the Democrats plans...."
The only jobs Americans are losing to illegals are farmwork, essentially the grueling shitwork the slaves were required to do in the American south before and after the Civil War. Americans are not seeking such work. Americans losing jobs are losing them in other employment sectors that are not open to illegals.
And, Robert, more and more farmwork has become automated. Unskilled farmwork is still seasonal and for many uneducated hispanics not worth the uncertainty. Druge like repetative factory work is being done by hispanic workers. They generaly make higher than minimum wage. They don't have to speak english. They get healthcare and overtime.
"Who's fault is that?"
Ummm... the people actually running the institutions?
Did these chuckleheads thank that was a tricky question?
Then again, the Left has always been a socio-economic horde of locusts that destroys everything it touches.
Clearly, Cookie doesn't know any a actual construction workers.
My youngest daughter is a 1L at the University of Minnesota. Today is the first day of class. The class is 60% female.
Going to college is not automatically (or even usually) an entry into "leftist brainwashing."
Do you have any kids in college or recently graduated, Robert Cook? I have two currently attending and one recent graduate, three different state university main campi (two red states, one blue), and I can assure you that all three have been subjected to at least attempts at "leftist brainwashing" in the form of required general education classes and required university training seminars, as well as constant exposure to very leftist university policies.
But there is some truth to your assertion that the already-left-leaning kids are the ones who will come out of college more leftist... which doesn't actually help the "we're not doing critical theory" case very much. It only suggests that high schools are turning out at least "soft" left-leaning kids, by accident or by design, since most high school kids are not particularly political and yet college students are the shock troops of every leftist protest.
Kevin @ 2:22: “…not dischargeable in bankruptcy…”
Bingo. These millions of graduates, dragging their impossible burdens from one workplace to the next. Whose intervention will they vote for? That’s right: not those heartless Republicans who argue for the sanctity of a contract, but for that kindly old fellow in the WH (and his benevolent counterparts in the D caucus of Congress) who can set aside those cruel constraints and (literally) emancipate a generation! (We will say nothing of the moral hazard of blanket forgiveness of an honest obligation.)
And then, in a few more years, the next generation rises, needing the same relief. Because what’s fair for one group of hopeless debtors is no less fair for their younger counterparts.
And so on.
The cultivation of the student vote is analogous to the cultivation of the Black vote. Reliable plantations, never to be given a change in the fundamental conditions that beset them.
Robert Cook
Many many jobs are done in India at a fraction of the cost in the US. Everything from coders to tax preparers to the laborious task of reading company filings on behalf of ISS which recommends votes or withholds at corporate elections. You are quite right about inshore illegals, however you fail to mention they are largely illiterate and lack even a vague understanding of their own cultures. In short they add nothing but muscle and certain construction skills that are additive to our vanishing culture.
The only jobs Americans are losing to illegals are farmwork
This certainly doesn't seem to be true in my area.
I'm going to weasel-word some of this because I am not native to this area and I live in what seems to me a pretty enlightened place, though it doesn't seem unusually so. Nevertheless I don't believe I can properly generalize without doing research.
Teenagers here are not getting what used to be normal entry-level jobs like fast food in nearly the numbers they used to; and the drive-through runners, the employees who don't need to speak English but only to learn the menu and the store layout, uniformly appear to be adult lower-status immigrants (by which I mean, in my area they are below-US-average height, darker skinned than Latinos of European ancestry around here, and have Indio features).
This is anecdote. I don't do a lot of fast food, and when I do, I don't have the opportunity to talk to the runners except to ask for a condiment or something, which is part of learning the menu as far as customer service goes. So I'm working from limited exposure, and from appearance and the fact that people with that appearance virtually never have the "talk on the speaker/take the money" jobs.
It is also the case in my area that bussers and, to the extent that I can see them, cooks in regular restaurants are almost all people of the same appearance.
Lawn and landscape service employees here, ditto. (Some but not all owners of these business too.) Construction workers of the rank of standing on the ground (or doing the basic work of roofing) rather than operating equipment, ditto. (Some but not all equipment operators too.)
I don't go around asking people for their papers, of course. All these people could be citizens or legal permanent residents. But I'd be awfully surprised, just based on the numbers and on the fact that this is Texas, where Tejanos have been running businesses, working at professions, and involved in politics for a very long time (that is, prejudice against Latino-looking people in employment seems to be uncommon).
Michael K @ 2:37: "...Someday [Griggs] may be reversed.
Wouldn't that be interesting?!? But let's be serious: why should we allow people to engage in free association --an employer engaging employees based on its testing for their potential to do the work? Why shouldn't the Government sweep that aside and tell employers to hire "blind," struggle to guess at who might do what they're being paid to do?
Americans are not seeking such work
you're So Cute Robert! you really make me smile!
So..
Lawncare, daycare, construction, waitresses, house cleaners, meat packs..
NONE of those, EVER have Any illegals.. EVER??
So, tell me again WHY the CEO of Agriprocessors, went to jail?
Try getting a job hanging sheet rock, for example Cookie. A lot of jobs that once served as entry into the trades are now lifelong careers done by migrants. Try hiring a construction contractor in Florida, for example, who brings in an English speaking crew. Not everyone is cut out for college, and these guys are getting hammered.
Seems like The Only Purpose of a school like Harvard or Stanford, is if you plan on starting a company, and you want to meet people that know people. There seems LITTLE need to graduate.
Who are the Most famous people from these schools?
Harvard? Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.. Both dropped out of undergrad
Stanford? Sergey Brin? Larry Page? Both dropped out of grad school (but got their Masters, i think)
Or that girl that pretended to know blood testing? Or the crypto kid?
How about Steve Jobs?
My point is the degree seems meaningless.. The networking MAY be valuable.. IF you have a product
The simple fact demonstrated by self-professed friend of labor here is that Democrats have completely lost touch with the problems faced by the working class, or worse, consider the devastation that has been wrought by their policies on labor as acceptable collateral damage with respect to their project to import a new electorate and permanently seize power.
Black Unemployment, St Louis Fed
White Unemployment, St. Louis Fed
This is even with the cooked numbers that the Biden Administration puts out.
Shouldn't we do something about this problem, the two graphs don't even use the same scales, before we import millions of unvetted migrants and give them non-expiring work permits (asylum claims)?
In contrast, I graduated from the lowly U of Illinois.
Had your classes been north of Green Street* your degree would not have been “lowly.”
___________
* For those not fortunate enough to have earned a STEM degree from UIUC, the campus north of Green Street includes the College of Engineering, the Thomas Siebel Center for Computer Science, and the Loomis Laboratories of Physics.
Having unreservedly agreed with Cook on another thread I feel compelled to say I thoroughly disagree with his comments at 12:56. Only the free market can save medical care and education. The heavy hand of government has fucked up both beyond recognition. Obamacare mandating an insurance middleman was a death blow. We don't need subsidies for food either. Welfare where its needed and get the government off our backs elsewhere.
What if the point of education was the person and not the job? What if learning to think was just a good thing in itself?
Radical. Hope it catches on.
Governor DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard. I’m positive he learned critical thinking there. Now he’s weaponized fallacies to dupe the citizens who never went to college.
I never got this concept of liberal indoctrination in higher education. In business school, all of my professors were unabashedly conservative. I did all the required readings of Milton Friedman, et al. I perused Forbes and the Wall Street Journal regularly. I listened carefully as the lecturers extolled the virtues of free enterprise, deregulation, and supply-side tax cuts. If I can come through all that and still be a bed-wetting liberal, surely a conservative can learn that slavery existed without needing to be deprogrammed.
"employment sectors that are not open to illegals..."
Right this minute there is a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against Space-X claiming that Musk must hire anybody with an asylum claim, claims which are handed out like candy at the border by Border Patrol, a non expiring work permit. These de facto work permits draw migrants from across the globe who can get one simply by crossing a border which Joe Biden and the Democrats have deliberately left as porous as they can.
Elon Musk's company said it was only allowed to hire citizens and green card holders because of "export control laws," the DOJ said.
However, the DoJ also said that this was not correct and that these laws do not mandate such restrictions.
The jobs from which refugee and asylee applicants were allegedly excluded from were wide ranging - from rocket engineering to dish-washing and cooking.
The DoJ has asked SpaceX to look at providing backpay for those who were wrongly denied work because of this alleged discrimination. - BBC
Got any more whoppers for us Robert?
We can’t just say, “Oh you silly people who want to make money, can’t you just make money without a college degree.” Some careers require graduate degrees. What are my children supposed to do if college is a badly taught indoctrination program?
They can’t become employed scientists or math professors or lawyers (in the case of my three) without graduate degrees that first require a college degree.
A friend's son is starting at community college this fall. Combination of grants and scholarships is keeping the cost very low, as the kid is paying his own way.
THEN he found out that the (many very expensive) textbooks MUST BE PURCHASED at the school bookstore using his school ID at checkout or he will not get credit. You CANNOT purchase from another kid who took the class last semester or on the used market. THAT is a racket if I ever saw one.
Some pigs are more equal than others. That is what is being cultivated at ivy league schools.
Commentators upthread introduced the related topic of student debt. Several years back I met a young woman newly graduated with a BFA and who owned up to having $80,000 in student loan debts. I asked how much she sold her paintings for. $500 to $1000 was her answer. She’s probably been out of debt for a while now.
My impression is that most other young graduates think they’ll be offered six digit salaries as a college hire, and they forget that they’ll need to pay taxes* and rent and perhaps eat now and again, and other stuff like that. Maybe they’ll see that sort of salary offer if their degree is in certain engineering disciplines, or if their parents have wealthy connections, otherwise they shouldn’t hold their breath.
_________
* Wait until they discover that the big government they’ve been trained to love and admire for four years demands a decent hunk of what they earn.
Commentators upthread introduced the related topic of student debt. Several years back I met a young woman newly graduated with a BFA and who owned up to having $80,000 in student loan debts. I asked how much she sold her paintings for. $500 to $1000 was her answer. She’s probably been out of debt for a while now.
My impression is that most other young graduates think they’ll be offered six digit salaries as a college hire, and they forget that they’ll need to pay taxes* and rent and perhaps eat now and again, and other stuff like that. Maybe they’ll see that sort of salary offer if their degree is in certain engineering disciplines, or if their parents have wealthy connections, otherwise they shouldn’t hold their breath.
_________
* Wait until they discover that the big government they’ve been trained to love and admire for four years demands a decent hunk of what they earn.
Some decades ago I was reading the NY Times Magazine education issue. They were interviewing minority students at elite colleges One Hispanic young women explained that at first she was intimidated but then she realized that no one was actually doing the assigned reading and then it was fine.
I don't remember what year this was (I think Clinton was President), but it contained an essay by Florence King expressing the idea that not everyone needed to go to college. I went on to read all of Florence King's books which I highly recommend as being both amusing and insightful.
As a footnote, I was a college dropout who finished my degree through the Regents External Degree program now Excelsior college. I recommend that to any young person who has a low tolerance for bullshit - at least if they haven't gotten their golden ticket admission to an elite school.
Regarding the comment at 5:17 by tim in vermont referencing SpaceX and its conformance to ITAR citizenship requirements, the regulations permit the State Department to waive US citizenship requirements for specific individuals considered for employment at SpaceX, but there is no role anywhere for the DoJ or USCBP in waiving ITAR considerations.
"And then, in a few more years, the next generation rises, needing the same relief. Because what’s fair for one group of hopeless debtors is no less fair for their younger counterparts."
Reparations, anyone?
“The only jobs Americans are losing to illegals are farmwork, essentially the grueling shitwork the slaves were required to do in the American south before and after the Civil War. Americans are not seeking such work. Americans losing jobs are losing them in other employment sectors that are not open to illegals.”
Tell that to Elon Musk and the DOJ Civil Rights Division. SpaceX has long restricted employment to US Persons (citizens and legally admitted aliens with Green Cards) in order to conform to ITAR regulations. Makes sense - they use military applicable technology to launch satellites, often US military satellites, into orbit (and crews to the ISS). But the DOJ has just informed them of an enforcement action against them for refusing to hire asylum seekers (who are, by definition, not US Persons, and who haven’t yet even been given asylum).
Not only that though but in high tech companies, there has been a scandal for decades on their use of H1B visa holders. When I worked for a major microelectronics maker two decades ago, a significant percentage of the PhDs I worked with were here on those visas. It was great for the companies, since these employees were the equivalent of indentured servants. They couldn’t switch jobs without going back to their home countries and reapplying. While H1B visa holders are supposed to have been paid as much as their domestic peers that very often didn’t work out in reality, when they couldn’t even threaten to switch jobs.
In business school, all of my professors were unabashedly conservative.
And when was that, Rich?
I'll repeat what I said in an earlier comment: high schools are turning out soft-left graduates (conservative high school students get there on their own, despite their teachers and the school administration - talk to them and they'll confirm this), and then colleges harden that up for the fraction of them that does become more political in early adulthood, as many of us did.
You, who started out a bed-wetting liberal (love it! ;) ), had to contend with the other side of the economic spectrum - was anyone calling you racist if you disagreed with your economically conservative profs? Or, more subtly, calling the ideas they disagreed with racist, sexist, or anything-phobic? Marxist, maybe - but was that an insult in your mind, much less a career-disqualifying slur? Or did you hear it as a badge of honor?
Consider the uphill battle an economist of Sowell's and Friedman's bent fights today: how do you, the conservative professor, stand against MMT and socialism, and uphold markets and not just printing more Schrödinger's money as needed, when those views are pilloried as signs of white supremacism, misogyny, and various kinds of phobia? Because you're possibly dealing with statistics and other numbers, and because it's the dismal science, maybe you can manage it. Some do. Some are denied tenure. Some without tenure are fired and run out of town.
Now consider the same question in, say, business. Worse yet, sociology. Don't even try the performing and fine arts. Naturally, grievance studies are right out - not that there is any professor anywhere in those "disciplines" who would dare to be openly conservative, nor probably any closet conservative who would bother entering those fields.
Do you see the difference?
Rich @ 5:12: "...If I can come through all that and still be a bed-wetting liberal, surely a conservative can learn that slavery existed without needing to be deprogrammed."
Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence. You haven't established that anything at all could alter the mind of a bed-wetting liberal. Whereas it is commonplace knowledge that conservatives can learn; and do.
I never got this concept of liberal indoctrination in higher education.
"Rich" humble bragging. If you didn't get this leftist bullshit in college you must be almost as old as I am.
Rich said...
What if the point of education was the person and not the job? What if learning to think was just a good thing in itself?
Perhaps, but we are talking about schooling. And the schools now have a social justice mission and inhibit open and free discourse. So they actively impede the development of both learning to discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions, establishment of principles and the development of human capital.
Learning to think is hard, most people learn by talking to other people, often taking the disfavored side of the debate to develop their ability to debate a topic. The essays assigned are suppose to force this on students. But to survive a class or even the college, students must give the teacher the opinion the teacher approves of or they risk a bad grade or even expulsion.
The first time a school puts a topic out of bounds, that school is no longer a place for a student to become educated.
The only jobs Americans are losing to illegals are farmwork, essentially the grueling shitwork the slaves were required to do in the American south before and after the Civil War. Americans are not seeking such work
Cook is going to explain to us how he hired an English speaking dry wall hanger. Or gardener. The boos spoeaks English. The workers do not.
“Try getting a job hanging sheet rock, for example Cookie. A lot of jobs that once served as entry into the trades are now lifelong careers done by migrants. Try hiring a construction contractor in Florida, for example, who brings in an English speaking crew. Not everyone is cut out for college, and these guys are getting hammered.”
The closer you et to the southern border the worse it is. Had to get the guy whose reps do our lansapig o the phoe so I could communicate with the crew leader on site, at our house in PHX. First son-in-law was a carpenter there, and started out making a decent living. Then, the trade was taken over by Mexicans, often illegal. Over a 5 year period, his wage, per hour, was effectively cut in half. The house that they had bought became unaffordable.
Lest you think though that all is lost, with the trades, you can always move away from the southern border. In NW MT, NID, etc, the price of hiring people in the trades has gone through the roof tees last couple years, and they are often booked a couple years in advance. Another alternative (so far) is to join a Union. Step step son is a Union electrician here in Union heavy Las Vegas. He does great. It’s not that he is a citizen (he is), but rather because he is a active English speaker.
It is completely feasible today to obtain an undergraduate degree through testing. If you score well enough on your GRE it will get you into graduate school where there might be something you want to learn. My husband got undergraduate credit from scoring high enough on GRE subject matter exams and obtained a degree from Excelsior College (formerly Regents External degree). While he did not go on to graduate school, he was quite competitive in the job market for software engineers with the undergraduate degree. There are other institutions that offer credit through testing and a number of colleges that will assemble your credits and life experience to get an undergraduate degree.
tim in vermont @ 5:17: This interesting Catch-22 for SpaceX --where it cannot hire noncitizens but is penalized for failing to hire noncitizens-- is somewhere between stunningly wrong and simply delicious. I say the latter because it usefully exposes the vicious idiocy of our betters who are pledged to protect and defend us.
What makes it tolerable, for me, is the thought that Musk can afford lawyers. Lots of them. Without breathing hard. And I have to believe that the employment practices at SpaceX were, and are, and will be, thoroughly lawyered. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the SpaceX HR files have letters from the government confirming the legality of pretty much whatever is at issue here.
Just sayin'.
NYT: 30 years late to the party about regular colleges, 50 years late at elite colleges.
Employment, education, and other civil rights alloted under diversity mandates to illegal aliens, immigration reform, and other particular classes.
"Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes. That way, … the children of less affluent families could have access to whatever studies interested them. "
Hard earned tax dollars paying for "whatever studies interested them."? Hell, no.
Money for disciplines our society needs to students who have demonstrated they have the aptitude to succeed? That, we could talk about, though I suspect we already provide such. At least we did back when we tested student's abilities.
Up until very recently (like 2020 recently) it was possible to get a truly excellent education at most American universities and many American colleges. To do so, the student has to deliberately seek out the best professors and take the toughest courses, and then push themselves to really excel, not just get a nerfed A. That is really hard for most 18-year-olds to figure out, particularly when "get the greatest possible reward for the least possible effort" is so ubiquitous that few people even think to question it as an approach to life.
But in terms of quality standards and difficulty of syllabus, the American higher education system peaked in 1965 and has been slowly but steadily sliding downhill since then (transitioning to free-fall in 2020).
Maybe the collapse started with the Vietnam draft deferment, since most professors weren't going to give a grade that sent someone off to war, so F's and D's for anything except flat-out not showing up / doing any work disappeared. That was before my time. But in the '80s someone had the great idea to make a lot of financial aid--the kind that >50% of the students needed--dependent upon maintaining a B average, and, shockingly, the median grade across the system became a B. When I started teaching a quarter-century ago, a C was considered a "punitive grade." Post-pandemic, I have discovered, students think a B is a punishment. Even those of us who try to maintain high standards (relatively; not in comparison to 1965) are stuck with the problem of hurting our own students (with a B, for God's sake!) because the average GPA at Stanford is >3.5, so you make your own students unable to compete because not only do those who won the admission lottery have the school name-brand, but they also have A's handed out to them like cookies.
For both ideological and financial reasons, colleges have gutted General Education and Liberal Arts core requirements that at least made sure that graduates could read, write, do some basic reasoning, and have some general familiarity with their own culture. My estimate is that now the average graduate of the average university is about as well educated as the average college student was at the start of his/her sophomore year in 1965. And people have noticed.
What carried colleges for a long time was the fact that colleges was an absolutely great way to spend years 18-22. A life of ease, a chance to make your strongest friendships, sex, booze, music, parties--unbelievable amounts of fun. But starting in the early '90s, administrations started restricting student freedom a little bit at a time and adding in more and more indoctrination. Then from 2020-2022 college became much closer to a minimum security prison than to the joyous free-for-all it had been 30 years before. And people have noticed.
I keep warning colleagues and administrators that we are really at risk of a repeat of 1536-39, but none of them know what happened then, which both proves my point and makes it more likely that there will be a dissolution. Unfortunately, much that is good will be swept away with what is corrupt and useless.
"However, despite our disagreements in worldviews, there was no fracture in our family, we all loved and respected each other. We agreed to disagree. My parents (both now dead) were very smart people. Everyone in my family remains Republican--but my (fraternal twin) brother, also still a Republican--sees through the fraud and lies of Donald Trump. He is appalled that so many apparently intelligent people can have been so hypnotized and conned by Donald Trump. My younger brother likes Trump, but we don't speak about him."
Hahahaha! The tolerance and love is just overwhelming!
Blogger Robert Cook said...
"Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes. That way, everyone could have their illnesses treated without being bankrupted and the children of less affluent families could have access to whatever studies interested them. Cut the fucking War Department's obscene and criminally confiscatory budget by at least 50%--preferably 75%, if not even more--and apply our tax dollars to truly helpful programs for all Americans: education and healthcare. "
"President Joe Biden’s proposed $773 billion budget for the Defense Department …"
https://about.bgov.com/defense-budget-breakdown/
"According to the Federal Reserve, borrowers collectively held more than $1.5 trillion in student debt in the second quarter of 2022.". NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/student-loan-debt-america-charts-rcna44439
Sorry to burst your bubble, comrade, but there doesn't seem to be enough defense dollars to even cover student loan debt, let alone healthcare.
You have a greatly inflated idea about how much money goes to our defense.
Owen: “What makes it tolerable, for me, is the thought that Musk can afford lawyers. Lots of them. Without breathing hard.”
The problem with this is that the government is paying for their lawyers using taxpayer dollars. Whether those lawyers are right or wrong on the issue, they’ll get paid. Some of them will even just consult on how to defeat Musk’s lawyers, not on merit but on strategy. They’ll walk away with a hefty payday regardless of outcome. Some of that money will go back into electing Democrats to keep the gravy train going. While technically, the US has already run out of money for this nonsense, they’ll run up the debt troubling people like Musk and Trump, because it is a transfer of wealth to Democrats win or lose. They may not make Musk poor, but we are still poorer for it. They are richer.
"Obamacare mandating an insurance middleman was a death blow."
Yes, stupid. There shouldn't be any insurance middleman. Every citizen should be able to simply make appointments with the doctors of their choice, comfortable in knowing it will be paid out of tax funding. Citizens shouldn't have to deal with "insurance companies" or middlemen at all.
Several people have mentioned that it used to be much easier to work one's way through college. My cousin got BS in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins in the late 60s paid via working his ass off every summer for a large tree trimming service as well as various part time jobs during the school year. He later got an MBA from U Chicago that I think he paid for himself and in the 90s got a law degree that I know he paid for and became an criminal attorney. (He's fidgety like me)
His Hopkins experience is probably very difficult to replicate these days.
What nobody has mentioned, I don't think, is employer subsidized tuition. This has long been a very common benefit in the US available to about 50% of all full time hourly and salaried employees in the US. I had occasion to look it up the other day and it is still in the range of 50%. It was thus when I was in grad school in the 70s and still when I was teaching compensation management in the 80s,90s, and 00s.
It is widely available at all levels. I was in a McDonalds in Limerick PA last year which was plastered with "JOIN OUR TEAM!" posters. ISTR they were offering about $10-11M
My nephew is an packaging/industrial mechanic. He went back to school, while working full time, and last year got a BS in Engineering Technology. I know the company paid tuition, I think they paid books as well.
My oldest granddaughter is working her way through Chemical Engineering school as a volleyball player. Yeah it is called an athletic scholarship but it is not much different from being an employee. (Doing well, 2nd year, 4.0 average)
Her employer at the time paid the full whack for my daughter's MS in Engineering Management (I paid the BSCHe)
I started working on an degree in SCUBA diving while in the Navy mainly because it seemed an easy way to get the Navy to pay for SCUBA lessons. By the time I got out, I had an AS in Oceanography. As an employee benefit.
I got my BA and MBA paid for by my employer as well, via the VA. (A benefit of Naval service) VA was so generous that I could not afford not to go to school. They paid about twice what it actually cost me because they, theoretically, gave me enough to live on.
I did an MSBE graduating in 2003. Since I was self employed, I paid that out of pocket, about $15m. Though it was tax deductible so not quite as bad as it seemed.
I worked at least 50 hours a week the entire time I was studying. Probably more like 60 while getting MBA and MSBE. Was it hard? Sure. I didn't quite have to walk uphill in snow to school but close.
Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
It seems to me that a cheap, maybe free, way to get an education would be to get a job with education benefits and go on the employer's dime. It is hard work but seems a lot easier than going through life with a $50-100m student loan monkey on your back. That kind of debt, expecially if for an education that doesn't result in a good job, really screws up a person's life. Can't buy a house, can't get financing to buy a decent car, spoils your marital chances (who wants to marry someone with that kind of debt?) and a whole bunch of other impacts.
Working ones ass off, 80 hours a week for 3-4 years, seems a far easier option overall.
John Henry
Rich, 5:12:
"surely a conservative can learn that slavery existed without needing to be deprogrammed."
In all your exposure to conservative thought, did you ever learn that many conservatives are not only aware of slavery's existence but detest the historical fact of it? The difference between me and the "America = white supremacy" folks is that I believe it was about the greatest betrayal of our ideals I can imagine. More and more of the left seems to think that was our key ideal.
It goes a little like this:
1619 Project – The arrival of black slaves on these shores represents the true founding of America.
Schools, downstream – Let's teach a curriculum based on the 1619 project.
Conservatives – I object to my kids being taught that slavery is what America is all about.
The online left – Conservatives don't want their kids taught about slavery!
"So..
"Lawncare, daycare, construction, waitresses, house cleaners, meat packs..
NONE of those, EVER have Any illegals.. EVER??"
If they do, the employers who hire illegals should be prosecuted and shut down. It is the unwillingness of employers to pay living wages to Americans (or legal immigrants) for hard manual work--turning to illegals and paying on the cheap, they hurt Americans. American employers are at fault for such situations.
FYI, my lawn man is a white southern boy who is self-employed, (in addition to working a full time job of work Monday-Friday).* My younger brother quit being a high school teacher many years ago. After he discovered he made more income doing lawns in the summers off between school years than he made as a teacher, he made the choice to set up his own full-time service. He put out flyers advertising his services. He's been a lawn man full time for about 30 years, and he makes more money doing lawns than he did as a teacher. He's considering phasing into retirement in the next few months, at the age of 67, but he plans to keep a handful of favored customers who he will continue to service.
*(I mow our lawns and we have our lawn man just to do edging and trimming and other specialized jobs now and then.)
When I say my education was worth it, I mean there was a financial payback. Directly for the MBA as it allowed me teach as an adjunct 1 night a week for 30 years. So that made up for all the extra hours getting the degree. And the way the VA paid, I made a profit on tuition.
Other than teaching, and some financial analysis techniques that are handy in sales, I've used very little of what I learned in my MBA.
I do a lot of industrial training. The MSBE (Master of Science Business Education) seems to impress many of my clients. So it probably allows me to charge a bit more and it makes it easier to sell my services. So I think I have made back the cost but it intangible and hard to reconcile dollar for dollar.
John Henry
Re the degree from princeton without education or the education without degree that a couple mentioned. That happened to me.
I always thought a doctorate would be nice. "Doctor Henry" has a cool ring to it. I thought about it in the 80s when I still had some unused VA benefits but there was no loacl program that appealed to me.
Around 2010 the state Council on Higher Education said I could not continue teaching grad students without a doctorate. I could teach undergrads but had tried that before and they are no fun at all. We tried some workarounds but it was more trouble than it was worth.
So I looked around and found an accredited (key qualification) that offered online doctoral degrees in Engineering Management. My school said that it would meet all local qualifications so I signed up.
My daughter thought she would also like to be "Doctor Henry" so she signed up and it made a nice father-daughter bonding experience. (I paid out of pocket, her company paid her fees)
I had thought we were signing up for a diploma mill that had somehow slipped through accreditation. Imagine my surprise when we started and I found out that they actually expected me to WORK! for my degree. And do a real, as opposed to Dr Jill style, dissertation.
My daughter had gotten transferred to France for a year which caused the college some aggravation. So we both dropped out.
So yeah, the ONLY reason I was going was for the degree. I didn't give half a shit for the education, interesting and perhaps even useful, it might have been.
I am still open to paying a diploma mill for a doctorate if anyone knows of any. Doesn't even have to be accredited since I only need it for the title.
I am going to insist on an actual PhD though. The DD professional doctorate used to be OK until "Doctor" Jill brought disrepute on it. I don't want people laughing at me for having a "Biden degree"
John Henry
"So..Lawncare, daycare, construction, waitresses, house cleaners, meat packs..
NONE of those, EVER have Any illegals.. EVER??"
Robert Cook: "If they do, the employers who hire illegals should be prosecuted and shut down."
"If"?!
"If"?!
You mean, you are unclear on how illegals are used in industries across the board other than just farming?
LOL
Of course you are.
Western commies are always so much dumber than their eastern bloc and Asian commie pals.
It seems to me that a cheap, maybe free, way to get an education would be to get a job with education benefits and go on the employer's dime.
a less cheap, but still affordable, way to get an education is to get a job (hopefully sorta like the field you want to be in), and work full time, and take school part time .. Paying as you go
The Stupid expensive way, is to take a hundred thousand dollars worth of loans, and go to school fulltime, living on your loan money.
The EVEN Stupider Even MORE expensive way, is to take a hundred thousand dollars worth of loans, go to school for 3 years.. FLUNK OUT, and have NO DEGREE, AND all that debt..
Which is what MANY kids do. WHY? because their schools TOLD THEM TO
I did three masters programs (not at one time) while working full time--tuition waived for one class per semester.
I enjoyed the two history programs and most of the LIS, but the LIS was strictly a union card for employment's sake.
The many and diverse people from all over the world who turned to me for guidance in their searches for information got a lot of benefit from my slow march too, not to mention the extremely favorable impression of our library faculty I made on the world.
Win-win-win.
Robert Cook AMUSINGLY said...
the employers who hire illegals should be prosecuted and shut down.
check it out! Robert is SURPRISED TO HEAR, that there is illegal activity involved with illegals!
Yep Robert, the KEY word is: ILLEGAL.. MUCH about ILLEGAL immigration and ILLEGAL employment is ILLEGAL!
This AMAZES Robert! He can't BELIEVE that such things happen! He is shocked! SHOCKED to find out about illegal activity
I suspect that many here have heard of the "Royal Society" Founded in 1660 by Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and continuing today with the like of Stephen Hawking. It is invitation only for the worlds tippiest-toppiest scientists. Very prestigious.
There is another Royal Society, "The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce" more commonly known as "Royal Society for the Arts and Manufactures". Founded under Queen Victoria in the 1860s. It does not have members, it has "Fellows" The main qualification seems to be an ability to pay $150 in annual dues.
I British professor I used to correspond with was a fellow and offered to get me in. So I filled out a form, including credit card info, and sent it in.
A couple weeks later I was a "Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts and Manufacturers" and entitled under british law to append FRSA to my name.
I quickly added it to my business card.
I assumed that people would ask me what FRSA meant, I would reply in my most serious voice "Ahem, it means I am a (pause) fellow (pause) of the Royal Society" I assumed that they would mistake it for the real Royal Society and be suitably impressed that I was not just a member but a Fellow of such an esteemed organization.
Alas, in our land of Philistines not only had nobody ever heard of "the Royal Society for the Arts and Manufactures" They had never even heard of THE Royal Society. I think Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy needs to be mandatory reading in all US schools.
I gave my card to a Brit once. He looked at it and asked me "You're in with that bunch of wankers? Whatever for?" It is apparently not highly thought of in England. It seems to be mainly a socialist drinking club. I'm not a socialist and don't drink.
I let my membership lapse. An impressive looking title is valueless if nobody has ever heard of it.
John Henry
It is widely available at all levels. I was in a McDonalds in Limerick PA last year which was plastered with "JOIN OUR TEAM!" posters. ISTR they were offering about $10-11M
That should have included a sentence that one of the benefits listed on the poster is tuition payment.
Without that I kind of miss the whole point.
If a counter clerk at a McD's can get company paid tuition, it should be easy for anyone to find a job at a company that offers it.
John Henry
Robert Cook said...
"Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes."
Robert Cook then immediately said in the next paragraph...
"The War Department Slush fund is a criminal enterprise enriching the worst in our nation--arms merchants, high rank military brass, and Congresspersons who grovel for handsome 'donations' by the wretched arms merchants."
Cause meet Effect.
Once government completely (as opposed to partially like we have now) takes over college education, we will need a poster here decrying "The College Degree Slush fund is a criminal enterprise enriching the worst in our nation-- useless degree mills, high rank university administrators, and Congresspersons who grovel for handsome 'donations' by the wretched degree mill merchants."
If they do, the employers who hire illegals should be prosecuted and shut down.
So. You're a small business owner, let's say selling... apples, in... let's say California. The only apples you're legally authorized to sell are Washington State apples. The US government imports tons of apples from - let's say Oregon, into California for some reason, stores them there in California with vague promises that they're going to be distributed elsewhere, but makes no provisions for them to be transported out of the area. You are not supposed to buy those Oregon apples for sale in your business. But they're cheaper than Washington apples.
Don't you dare buy those apples.
I'm not saying that employing those who are not legally allowed to work in the US is fine. I'm saying that you are putting all the onus on the business owner and none on the government that created the attractive nuisance, so to speak.
And none of my rather tortured analogy addresses what has been asserted up-thread - that illegally-crossing immigrants are readily granted asylum-seeker visas that allow them to work legally - and cheaply, because of other benefits - in the US, indefinitely. I haven't done my research on that.
Cookie,
Your "lawn man" folk gonna get ubdercut by Pedo Pete's surge of "migrants".
Robert Cook said...
"The only jobs Americans are losing to illegals are farmwork, essentially the grueling shitwork the slaves were required to do in the American south before and after the Civil War."
There were many more whites than blacks in the South who did the farmwork that you disparage as "grueling shitwork". And the Northern/Midwestern farmers had much higher productivity - both in volume and rate - than their Southern couterparts, with German-American and Scandinavian-American farmers leading the way.
Robert Cook said...
Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes.
One of the reasons why the current situation is so bad is because the government tried to fix the system and made it worse. When it became desirable to allow more people to go to college, the government decided to subsidize it. Higher education responded to this in the typical way: they raised prices to absorb the entire subsidy. Hey, it is free money. We have gone through many iterations of this such that many of our elite institutions exist , in roughly this order, to pay generous compensation to an army of administrators who have little to do with the expressed purpose of the institution to educate young minds and are the last to be laid off, to run hedge funds that nominally are supposed to improve the school but in reality exist for the benefit of the hedge fund, to provide a jobs program for leftists, communists, etc. who would otherwise be unemployable, to indoctrinate the next generation of graduates to vote for things that benefit the above, and to produce television content via their sports programs. Actually providing an education to their wards is so far down the list of priorities.
We also have the matter that we are well aware of what happens when the government runs the schools. You really want to turn higher education into the public school system, huh? How's that been working out for you? At this point, a high school dropout in the 1950s is probably better educated than a large portion of college graduates that didn't take STEM. But I suppose when you accomplish that level of failure, you really should aspire to fail even harder. It could be funny.
I grew up in the 70's and joined the military after a few years working in the oil exploration industry. I never attended a four year University/College. However, while I was serving in the US Navy, I took two years of core courses (Math English, Stats, Biology etc.) at a really good community college (Miami-Dade) which the Navy at the time subsidized. It was the best thing I ever did.
Through my military training/skills/discipline and after my six years of service I went on to have a very successful professional career and retired three years ago at the age of 56 with a net worth of seven figures and no debt except for my mortgage which will be paid off in less than five years.
In my humble opinion, probably 90 percent of college degrees outside of STEM/Medicine and maybe Law (there's an argument there pun intended) are completely useless. Our university system is wrecked and a scam that has impoverished the last couple of generations with crushing debt and few meaningful employment prospects. I and so many others like me are living proof you don't need a "degree" to be successful.
Further, what no one is talking about is the trades. When I was in junior high and high school, we had shop classes where you could learn carpentry, welding, mechanics and how to be an electrician etc. of which I took those courses every year and which are all skilled and math based professions that are mostly highly lucrative blue collar jobs.
I live in Maryland now and do you have any idea what a plumber makes? It's hard work, but they are in the six figures, ditto for skilled electricians etc. Most people don't need a worthless Bachelor's degree to be successful.
As usual, the democrat saying that illegals and immigrants ONLY take the jobsamerica s do not want is a privileged gated community type. Clueless about people who do work.
"Yet another reason why college education, as with health care, should be entirely subsidized by the government, through taxes collected for those purposes."
Stupid is as stupid does.
The exact opposite is the cure for College education, and healthcare.
Bar the Federal govt from any influence. Any money.
The College infrastructure can more that support every nickle of college tuition. They can fund their own loans or syndicate together to create a lending body, funded by the participating colleges endowments.
Student debt will by law, be dis-chargeable by bankruptcy. The degree has a value or not. The college itself is the best judge of the value they are selling customer.
'Doing the jobs Americans won't'
That's a lie. In retail agriculture here in the midwest, we cant hire people to run application equipment, with climate control cabs,Air suspension, and auto steer technology. While the salary is not six figures, but you can buy a starter house for $50k. cost of living is a fraction.
Jamie is correct. All chain stores hire illegals through subcontractors. The are the ones who clean at night, load trucks, etc. Out of the public eye.
Higher education is a joke now. Close the border, arrest every business owner, roofing company, construction company, etc., county official and city contractor who uses illegals through subcontractors, and require them to hire only citizens. Cut H1-B bleeding in medicine and computer tech.
We won't need nearly as many colleges then, except for specialized fields.
But first, burn the teacher's colleges and salt the earth below them. Start new ones on the ashes, run by non-communists.
Florida is off to a good start.
I, for one, blame Mike Rowe and his foundation.
Blogger Robert Cook said...
"If they do, the employers who hire illegals should be prosecuted and shut down."
Precisely so Robert. The fact that no one in either party has shown any interest in this very simple solution should tell you everything you need to know about what they really desire. They all WANT to drive down wages. The rest of it is window dressing. There is zero need for a wall. Simply enforce employment laws with real penalties, and the problem of illegal immigration vanishes. No one (including Trump) ever seriously proposes this.
Be smarter Cook. The government “middlemen” also add zero value to the equation. Even more strings attached than private highly regulated insurance. The only people with a direct interest are the doctor and the patient. Like I said before the truly needy should be taken care of but pretending we can afford everyone on the dole is insane and stupid and called socialism, which is always dependent on the whims of the ruling party. See today’s Medicare thread for the obvious evidence of how dumb your argument is.
"I haven't done my research on that."
Clearly, neither has Robert.
Big Mike,
Price is only half the equation; what about quantity?
Let's suppose young BFA sells two such thousand-dollar paintings every single month, month after month. As a side gig, that would be pretty sweet, but if it's her only source of income then no, I wouldn't have expected her to have made much headway against her student loans.
When a thing is subsidized it loses value. College degrees are almost useless now. Imagine what they would be when they are, "free". As we can see from the debt incurred over essentially useless degrees imagine the waste of meny when they are free.
Let the market decide.
As I have advised young people that I know. Learn a trade. If you can't afford trade school get a job in the industry that interests you. You're not going to make a lot of money right away, but you're not going into to debt either.
Tina @ 6:36am,
You left out "overturn Griggs v. Duke Power". Other than that, it's pretty good list.
...neither...nor... Missing that made the paragraph almost unreadable.
Perfect example of what's wrong (well, one of the things) with Robert's 'the government should pay for everything':
"Plus: “In Montana, laying fiber-optic cable to some remote locations could cost more than $300,000 per connection, said Misty Ann Giles, director of Montana’s Department of Administration. Building to those places would empty the state’s coffers, she said: ‘That’s when we might not reach everyone.'”
Private Enterprise: Rural users in most places in the US can get Starlink up and running for $599 in hardware, do-it-yourself installation in most cases, and $120 a month for high-speed service."
Government spending is incredibly wasteful because there's no common sense involved. I don't know why that is, but the track record is clear.
Simply enforce employment laws with real penalties, and the problem of illegal immigration vanishes.
This is only true, ISTM, if the primary impetus behind illegal immigration is availability of work in the US and unavailability at home. Is it? I don't know.
I understand the present system allows "undocumented" "migrants" (which I take it means "people in the country illegally who may or may not have any intention of joining the citizenry") access to significant benefits. If true, how is this not an incentive too?
And then there's the question of standard of living, which for even America's poorest exceeds that of the poor of many developing nations. Isn't having electricity, for instance, an incentive if you don't have it at home?
All you have to do is find one friend or relative already in the US who will let you live with them and sell bottles of water at freeway overpasses, or one employer willing to try to skirt the law, and you have the chance at a much better life than in your home country. I think it'll take more than demand-side regulation enforcement to curtail illegal entries.
Mike MJB nails it again.
Cookie is stunning ignorant about the effect of illegals on the job market and economy. I do agree with punishing employers -- instead of rewarding them as we do now.
Contractors today have two choices: break the law by hiring illegals or be unable to compete, especially for large government projects, where a shell game of subcontracting and stolen IDs drives down wages by enforcing the need for illegal laborers to win work. A handful of trades regulate licenses -- plumbing, electric, septic -- but that just requires one citizen to do the paperwork. And no, illegal immigrants overall do not work harder, and definitely not better than citizens. I've been on scores of work sites with them, and despite some efforts as individuals, their presence enforces a lawless that extends to all aspects of working life and drives down long-term investment and building a business, also trust, cooperation, responsibility, quality, and accountability. I wouldn't ever go into a work site with heavy machinery and illegal immigrants, or buy a new-build built by them. All our trade and entry-level manual labor are suffering.
There are more illegals than citizens on my block. If it were not for our sheriff, lawlessness, third world refuse, dangerous driving, and other maladaptions would overwhelm the neighborhood too. At least they know that in this county, they won't be cut loose for serious traffic offenses and violent crimes, including child rape.
They have to go a few blocks away to get to Hall County, where they get away with anything thanks to the Poultry Mafia, and the place has gone to hell and is blighted by gang conflicts. I like and even love some illegals who are longtime friends, but I urge them to go home and put their skills to use helping their own countries.
If you see a dump truck on the road, give it wide berth. There's a good chance the driver lacks citizenship, a license, or the ability to drive large trucks safely.
I'd guess the same is true of many current college graduates, based on exposure to them. We should start calling some college degrees illegal credentials. Conservatives hardly shun higher education. They refuse to settle for what passes for most education. Happily, there are more quality alternatives for them now.
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