Posted on 06/16/2017 8:30:52 AM PDT by Lorianne
Students are running out of reasons to pursue higher education. Here are four trends documented in recent articles:
Graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills
The Wall Street Journal reported on the troubling results of the College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+), administered in over 200 colleges across the US.
According to the WSJ, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table”. The outcomes were the worst in large, flagship schools: “At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.”
There is extensive literature on two mechanisms by which college graduates earn higher wages: actually learning new skills or by merely holding a degree for the world to see (signaling). The CLA+ results indicate that many students aren’t really learning valuable skills in college.
As these graduates enter the workforce and reveal that they do not have the required skills to excel in their jobs, employers are beginning to discount the degree signal as well. Google, for example, doesn’t care if potential hires have a college degree. They look past academic credentials for other characteristics that better predict job performance.
Shouting matches have invaded campuses across the country
It seems that developing critical thinking skills has taken a backseat to shouting matches in many US colleges. At Evergreen State College in Washington, student protests have hijacked classrooms and administration. Protesters took over the administration offices last month, and have disrupted classes as well. It has come to the point where enrollment has fallen so dramatically that government funding is now on the line.
The chaos at Evergreen resulted in “anonymous threats of mass murder, resulting in the campus being closed for three days.” One wonders if some of these students are just trying to get out of class work and studying by staging a campus takeover in the name of identity politics and thinly-veiled racism.
The shouting match epidemic hit Auburn University last semester when certain alt-right and Antifa groups (who are more similar than either side would admit) came from out of town to stir up trouble. Neither outside group offered anything of substance for discourse, just empty platitudes and shouting. I was happy to see that the general response from Auburn students was to mock both sides or to ignore the event altogether. Perhaps the Auburn Young Americans for Liberty group chose the best course of action: hosting a concert elsewhere on campus to pull attention and attendance away from both groups of loud but empty-headed out-of-towners. Of the students who chose not to ignore the event, my favorite Auburn student response was a guy dressed as a carrot holding a sign that read, “I Don’t CARROT ALL About Your Outrage.”
SNIP
When everyone has a degree, no one has a degree.
Cogent liberal critical thinking response to every argument:
“Oh yeah? Well you are a racist!”
Yep, what a joke, to think that these liberal college kids develop critical thinking skills. And make some coherent argument??? Also a joke. They learn to criticize others who are not liberal but don’t understand why they have a liberal opinion on an issue. They learn that others are racist sexist homophobic islamophobic but can’t explain why there enemies are such bigots.
The outcomes were the worst in large, flagship schools:
“At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.”
If you graduated from a very good high school college is probably a big waste of time and money. What is worse than a liberal arts degree that requires tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt?
I’m looking at taking some night tech school classes. There is a new program that’s entry level industrial robotics of some kind.
A few years ago, I took a Server 12 class. It was a joke. It was all open book tests.
The last paragraph in that snip shows the author to be nothing more than an idiot cuck.
The same fail mindset that gave the rabid left all the power.
“Anyone confronting evil is just as evil” line of sniveling weak-suck spinelessness. The kind of person you could beat to death with a clue bat and on the last swing and impact he’d be just as stupid as before the beating started.
I then looked at the small group that had formed and asked" "If any of you have ever held a job, how many of you were hired by a poor person." Zero hands. "I turned at looked at the guy and said: "So, what's your plan?" He looked at me and said: "Go f--- yourself!" And I looked at him and said: "That how most idiots with no answer respond to a legitimate question."
Interestingly, the crowd just kind of melted away. It was a good day.
Because colleges themselves are becoming useless?
Liberals have helped transform colleges into what most of the public education systems are: indoctrination camps for leftism, socialism, social-justice-warriorism and feminism (e.g. anti-male)
That is why males have fallen behind in public schools AND college and why males are medicated with Ritalin in public schools. Its not genocide of males, but what it is, I’m not sure there is a word for.
"Sexism" is also an acceptable answer.
Today's liberal arts students are low functioning, poorly educated, politically indoctrinated drones barely able formatting the pithy blanks of “hey,hey, ho,ho -___________ has got to go” , but supremely capable of mindlessly shouting that drivel at the tops of their lungs campus malls to intimate their class mates.
Our universities, most especially our”elite” universities have become nothing more that boot camps for politically indoctrinated social justice warriors.
The Wall Street Journal used to have reporters with better critical thinking skills.
Students who get accepted to prestigious schools already have fairly high critical thinking skills scores so their scores aren't likely to go up much. Students who go to less competitive schools have lower scores, on average, so there is room for improvement.
One would think the reporter would talk with someone who knows about psychometrics. Then again, reporters continue to disappoint.
According to my kid several of them (Antifa) abandoned the protests to maintain their anonymity... protesters are not ALLOWED to wear masks when protesting on the AUBURN CAMPUS according to my kid.
BTW, several of my kids friends on campus were very happy that these goons were UNMASKED by the campus police.
The reason “critical thinking skills” don’t improve at the college level is because the students received little to no basis for those skills while they were in K-12. The basis for critical thinking is called the Trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These are not used in a wholistic fashion within a curriculum that leads to critical thinking. The “teach to the test” method drives schools today so everything is done in specific subject-area silos. This may improve scores within the narrow framework of the tested material but does not give students the skills to fully synthesize the various subjects for an integrated understanding.
17 years ago my home office sent me a new hire. I was running large project construction estimating and contracting for a branch of a large General Contracting firm.
I was somewhat bothered that this fellow was sent to me without my interviewing him but he seemed polite and well spoken. He had a combined Architectural/Engineering Masters degree from a major university.
I took a few weeks of doing light tasks to allow him to participate in the process of construction estimating at our level which was on projects of 5 to 200 million at that time in that office. The process involves vendor solicitation, quantity survey, general conditions analysis, recapitulation organization, default pricing analysis, specific item specification analysis, and collection and evaluation of bids.
After about two months I noticed my Senior Estimator was frustrated dealing with this young fellow. He explained to me he could not utilize his sloppy output and showed me an ill prepared sheet of frame and door counts. The hand writing was poor and unreadable. The simple math did not look all that good.
I gave him an assignment on a different project. Go through the plans and specifications on this six story public building and assemble a quantity survey of the toilet partitions and urinal screens. Assemble it to reflect sizes and locations and keep in mind the similar quantity surveys he had seen by others in the office. I stayed after work for an hour and did a take-off of my own and then at the end of the following day, met with him after he had spent the entire day assembling this item.
Turns out he couldn’t count, organize, analyze, write legibly, do math or present readable output. He had a sheaf of papers about ten pages thick with chicken scratch notations and some totals at the end.
I had a single sheet on one large columnar pad page. His count on every item was wrong, locations were improperly summarized. His output could not be used to do default allowance pricing, review vendors bids or assemble man-hours for installation by locations.
Toilet partitions — urinal screens. Six years masters program, 3.8+ GPA
When one leave most universities the degree they hold is brain washing 101 done by radical professors. It is not real marketable in the real world.
The carrot guy was hilarious.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.