Posted on 09/20/2008 7:00:49 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Q. Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree.
A. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.
Q. You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of all college students have the brains and abilities to understand their assigned reading.
A. Eighty percent are not able to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood. Someone can sit down with Paul Samuelson’s textbook and stare at the pages and know what most of the words mean. That does not mean that they walk away from it understanding economics as it is taught in the textbook.
Q. What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics?
A. Oh, the world of work out there!
Q. I’m sure you’re aware that unemployment is very high right now.
A. There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians. I can get a good doctor in a minute and a half. Getting a really good electrician — that’s hard. If you want jobs that are in high demand, go to any kind of skilled labor. And by labor, I mean things that pay $30 or $40 an hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That all high schoolers should be college educated is an argument much like the one for/against global warming:
specious and very expensive!
Paul Samuelson is an over-rated, ignorant Marxist with a limited understanding of real economics. You could memorize every word of one of his text books and still know very little about economics. Not understanding economics as it's taught in one of his text books is a good thing in the long run.
Students come back to visit me, floundering around, knowing they would like to do something useful, but wasting their time on courses that add nothing to who they really are, nor to what they will eventually do for a living. Meanwhile they are losing all that money they could be earning doing something they enjoy.
Increased elitism -- the inevitable unintended consequence of every liberal education notion intended to decrease elitism.
Paul Samuelson is now best remembered as praising the Soviet economy in the 1989 edition of his eternal doorstop.
It was P.J. O’Rourke who memorably reviewed the textbook in one of the chapters of his economics-centered work “Eat the Rich”.
A lot of Americans are confused about the meaning of the words: training and education. If you go to college for training, you and the college made a mistake.
The reason for encouraging people to get a bachelors degree, is the hope they reach high school level work by the end of college.
I graduated from HS in 1965. I then managed to finish college with honors, in business.
In the 70s I worked with an Englishman, graduate of only HS in the UK. He had an education at least equivalent to a four year US college degree.
I googled for Murray’s new book without success, but I did find this WSJ piece by Murray and I thought you might like to read it:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121858688764535107.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Though I like Charles Murray, this proposal is another form of “dumbing down America”. Instead of watered down curricula, his suggestion is to discourage all but “practical” (i.e., vocational) learning for those who do not go to college, and a whole bunch he deems not worthy of college.
Look, if we are to take seriously the concept of an informed and educated citizenry making up our polity, then you encourage continued learning for everyone, no matter how “stupid.” I hear none of this in Murray’s proposal.
He is proposing a very boring life. Moreover, most vocational jobs are dead end jobs that people come to hate.
Instead, while there is a layer of work that stays relatively constant (Construction, repair work, etc.) even that may see significant changes in the near future which will require non-college people to still learn very complex and advanced stuff. Now the Cable Guy needs to know Fiber optic communications?
Or writing, apparently. I recently attended an open house for prospective freshmen at a medium quality State University. Among the selling points was a "Writers' Clinic"--"we won't write your papers for you but we will check your spelling, look for run-on sentences, grammatical errors, and so forth."
I and everyone else my age learned not to construct "run-on" sentences in about the fourth grade. As a freshman in college the idea of someone checking my spelling (what dictionaries are for) would have been unfathomable.
then we would see to it in high school, as we did for our first couple hundred years. College is too late. Recent surveys reported by the National Association of Scholars reveal that (on average) college students actually do worse on American history in their senior year than they do their freshman year. They learn other stuff of course but as for becoming an "educated polity," college doesn't do it.
Thank you for the article.
Did you miss the study that came out this week showing that roughly roughly 1/3 of students entering college need remedial courses?
That is a failure of the K-12 education system. Because that system has failed utterly, students are now required to get a costly four year degree that can be achieved by taking spam classes. That is not an education. It does not achieve a better informed or educated citizenry.
If my kid were an average student or one who struggled in class, I would not insist s/he attend a four year college. I would encourage him or her to obtain good vocational training, perhaps combined with classes at a community college. More parents are beginning to do just that.
A student who graduates with a worthless 4-year college degree is not going to get a great job. S/he will be lucky to get a job at all. And if s/he does, it will be a dead-end office job that ultimately will prove boring. SO why pay all that $$$ to the four year school.
The sad thing is that this country is full of colleges and “universities” that confer degrees that are not worth the paper on which they are written.
Well they could certainly write for the New York Times and do.
I have always disliked Charles Murray and I just can’t put my finger on what it is that makes me wary of him because I agree with most of his contentions. His utopia does seem kind of boring and I get the sense that he wants to make people do what is good for them in some sort of top-down experts-know-best kind of way.
What I love about this country is how uneducated people do all kinds of crazy, nutty things that seem irrational but wind up making lots of sense in due course. Freedom works, even though it can seem like chaos and it makes a lot of people nervous and apprehensive about their wacky neighbors. Murray seems to always be saying that people should just behave themselves and not try to rise too high.
One thing we can agree on - Jimmy Carter is the worst president of the last 50 years. Although I would say Carter is the worst president, period.
Spot on.
College is mainly an expensive and not-so-healthy extended adolescence for many.
Compare B.S vs B.A degrees. A whole lot more meaning on the for the B.S.. I’m biased though(B.S. Chemistry)
Thing is, that was ME. I attended a big state U for four years and didn't learn much at all, because all I wanted to do was play rock music---which I did for several years after I got out. Once I decided I wanted something else, THEN I came back, got straight As, and got a Ph.D.
So there is some truth to the statement that you can do what you set your mind to, although I think it's silly for someone without the brain power to say, "I'm going to become a neurosurgeon," or someone without the physical genes to say, "I'm going to become and NBA star." Sorry, won't happen.
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