Posted on 03/21/2018 9:07:52 PM PDT by Kaslin
“Higher education” is terrible.
Please note the quotation marks, you doofy liberals who will no doubt fill the comments with high-pitched typing about how “Conservatives hate knowing stuff.” What passes for “education” today is nothing of the sort, and what calls itself “academia” is really just a venal trade guild packed with mediocrities desperately trying to keep fooling people into forking over $60,000 a year – usually obtained via ruinous borrowing that ties a financial anchor around the defrauded grads’ necks for the rest of their lives.
Today, academia’s product is largely garbage – gender studies, twisted history, and pointless sociology spin-offs like communications and political science. Yeah, we need more students studying politics when they don’t even know that the Constitution says they can’t shut people up because their feelz has got the hurtz.
Sure, the STEM fields produce a few grads who are going to be more than mere cogs in the corporate machine like their marketing major pals, and some STEM research is useful, but don’t think STEM is immune from academia’s endemic idiocy. Why, the latest thing is how science is racist because…well, probably because these hacks say everything is racist and the weak-willed gutless wonders of America’s faculty are too scared to stand up and say, “Uh no, that’s stupid and it’s not a thing and stop it.”
What’s worse is that most professors are not so dumb as to actually believe the nonsense we hear coming off our college campuses – well, some of them are, but most aren’t. They know it’s poisonous baloney. They’re just too scared to stand up to the sophomore bully boys, bully girls, and bully non-binaries who scour the countryside for witches to burn. Academics are the Ivy League version of that Broward County sheriff’s deputy, knowing they should put themselves in harm’s way to protect their students from this ideological assault, but being too cowardly to do it.
Pathetic.
Contemporary college is a scam, and if you fork over your money blindly you’re the mark. A quarter million and what do you get? A piece of paper that memorializes your indoctrination plus cirrhosis of the liver.
Hillsdale College excepted, of course. And I wish I could except the service academies too, but when West Point is knowingly commissioning open commies it’s clear that it’s chosen not to meaningfully differentiate itself from the civilian four year resorts. Well, that’s not quite right. At least after you graduate from one of the academies you will get a job – hell, it doesn’t seem the Army can even summon up the cojones to can Comrade Lieutenant yet. But you can’t say that for the rest of academia. Here’s your Feminist Theater Theory degree; welcome to funemployment! I guess being a barista with a $150K student loan debt is a kind of a career.
“But Kurt, what if I want to nurture my mind and explore my options in an environment of scholastic dedication and intellectual curiosity?”
Then you should run away from most colleges. Open environments? If you want a sneak peek at the kind of nanny state regime the liberals dream of for all of America, check out your local college campus. An unaccountable ruling class of overpaid administrators controls every aspect of the proles’ lives – yeah, you students are the masses, and if you think they’re going to let you lose your chains you’ve been taking too many bong hits back in your dorm room. Justice? That comes pre-determined based on whatever ideological label they pin on you. Remember, evidence is a bourgeois conceit, while due process is racist and misogynist. Free speech? You’re free to say whatever the grim gargoyles of the Social Justice Stasi approve of, but remember – you can never be woke enough. You’ll always be wrong somehow, because it’s by declaring you a wrongthinker that they gain their power.
“But Kurt, I have a practical concern – I want to go to law school.”
Don’t go to law school. In fifteen years, robots will probably be doing most of what lawyers do today, and most of them will probably wear better suits. Getting a law degree in 2018 is like getting a phrenology degree in 1918.
So what do you do after high school? How about live? How about do something besides march into another soul-crushing conformity factory for four years? Get a job. Do something, anything besides rush to sit behind a desk for another half-decade. Join the Army – realistically, you have a pretty good chance that your platoon leader won’t be an America-hating Marxist or some virtue-signaling, girlfriendless geebo with a #VetsForGunReform bumpersticker on his Prius. Just do something real.
Then, once you’ve lived a little, and once you’ve learned enough about the world to resist the blithering nonsense you’ll be bombarded with on campus, maybe you can consider college. Maybe you’ve earned some dough, or earned the GI Bill, and you don’t have to wreck your financial future. Maybe you’ll have a little maturity, so your college days won’t just be a drunken haze, and you’ll be able to cut through the guff and use the opportunities that college offers to meet your needs instead of just stumbling through it. I came back from the Gulf War and went straight into law school, back when it wasn’t financial and intellectual hara kiri. I was ready, and I made it work for me. UC San Diego undergrad, not so much. Oh, I had some adventures, but I was four years older than most of my law school classmates and every single day I was prepared for class because that’s what I had learned to do leading soldiers. I was ready.
Luckily the college as booze cruise model is collapsing under the weight of its infinite expense and finite returns, as well as under pressure from technology that allows people who really want to learn to use the same machine you are reading this on to find pretty much any knowledge they seek. The academic monopoly is slowly breaking apart, and that’s good. So let’s hope this is the last generation that has to spend the rest of its life paying off a grift.
College degrees are like sex. It’s only important when you don’t have it.
Great
“If the u.s. university system were a single stock, I would short it”
Peter Theil
a few students can always take liberal arts and humanities subjects for ‘self enrichment’...which can be very nice indeed...........
. these should be folks who do not need job training, of course, since these degrees usually lead to life on the welfare line
many students used to take engineering STEM type degrees but so many of our major America corporations are importing and hiring cheap workers from communist china and india, etc...
that the young American students have wised up... a MSEE or MSCE has a very good chance of leading to a life on the welfare line, too. ALAS! it is not supposed to be this way but there it is, and all the people running around trying to encourage American students to return to STEM engineering type studies... are largely wasting their time... for many of the students, all these efforts do is mislead them .. a lot of harm is being done .... and will continue to be done until the federal government ends the H1B visa program and deports the tens or hundreds of thousands of illegals taking jobs, too
the best thing in many instances ...for young folks seeking marketable employment skills...is to carefully select a trade that they like.. and which cannot easily be replaced by automation....and cannot be easily exported to slave labor camps in communist china or other parts of the world
building trades...some of them cannot be easily replaced, altho factory built houses are coming fast (from Communist china, mostly)
nursing is almost always in demand, as are some other health-related trades.... pick sectors that can’t be easily replaced by internet-mediated service delivery
there’s more. there’s always a lot of demand for good auto mechanics, for instance.
a whole lot better... tons and tons more demand for any of the above.. than, say, BA or MA in most humanities or liberal arts subjects
just saying... we are talking about at least two different groups of young people...rich ones that don’t need job skills... let them, if they wish, take humanities...
and “regular” young folks who need job skills, let’s try to advise them to consider learning things that are in demand in the real world of employment. ANd let’s stop having the taxpayers guarantee or subsidize wasteful long study programs that lead to nowhere
“College degrees are like sex. It’s only important when you don’t have it.”
So you agree they are important!
“College degrees are like sex. It’s only important when you don’t have it.”
Or when you are rolled into the ER for emergency heart surgery and discover that neither the anesthesiologist nor the cardiac surgeon went to med school or even college.
Sex teaches you to be human. College teaches you to be a politically correct snowflake.
At least with sex you don’t have to have a student loan anchor boat to carry around for the rest of your life.
One word. Engineering
Second word. Masters in engineering
No
Politics
Get a real education and get a job
“College teaches you to be a politically correct snowflake.”
College gave me the skills to earn a good living and retire very comfortably. And yes, my wife thinks I am very human.
I saw a documentary a few years ago about hip replacements. Doctors weren’t installing them, the company salesman was. He had no formal medical education but knew how to do it better than the doctors.
So, maybe trade school for surgeons? (just kidding about that)
Mine is MS (in Engineering)
” Doctors weren’t installing them, the company salesman was.”
I don’t think so ...
“So, maybe trade school for surgeons? “
What about heart surgeon trade schools that run commercials at 3:00 a.m. on you local low power UHF station?
MSEE starting salary: $72k.
Seems like parents are getting a pass for allowing their children to abuse and misuse their time in college.
Australia has virtually none, just trades schools.
I think colleges are vastly overpriced and over rated.
I would not shed a tear if most dissolved in the future.
You may not be familiar with the OPT Program (Optional Practical Training) that is open to almost all foreign students attending or graduating from an American university.
Hard data is scarce on OPT, but there are at least 180,000 OPT “students.”
OPT allows a foreign student, with just a student visa, to work in the USA for a minimum of 12 months. Foreign STEM grads can renew for 36 total months. They, and their employers, are exempt from SocSec and Medicare taxes, and there are no requirements for a minimum salary.
Many foreign students seek OPT employment as a gateway to a H-1B visa, and the H-1B visa is a gateway to a Green Card (Legal Permanent Resident).
It is important to remember that very few OPT and H-1B workers have elite skills.
Instead, they are completely “average” STEM graduates who directly compete against completely “average” American STEM grads for exactly the same jobs.
If mere can get a job. True to mouth. Many do. Many others wind up with what are essentially clerical
Or even retail jobs.is it hopeless? Of course not. But the odds are far from ideal and a significant number have to watch from outside as available positions are sometimes filled wholesale by bringing in foreigners. There has been a serious anti- American bias ( along with a few additional serious biases) in the hiring departments of some of the largest and most famous “American” corporations.
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