Posted on 12/28/2008 5:57:02 AM PST by reaganaut1
...
As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”
The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.
I am not discounting the merits of a liberal education. Students at every level should be encouraged to explore subjects that will not be part of their vocation. It would be even better if more colleges required a rigorous core curriculum for students who seek a traditional bachelor’s degree. My beef is not with liberal education, but with the use of the degree as a job qualification.
For most of the nation’s youths, making the bachelor’s degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The article states:I am not discounting the merits of a liberal education.
At least they admit that liberals are running the colleges.
No, Murray meant "liberal education" as in "liberal arts", not as in "liberal politics".
To get a degree in engineering takes 5 years instead of 4 because of this. This is exactly the wrong solution. The man is an idiot.
This is just liberal 0bama infatuation. Both the writer(and every other reporter at the New York Times) and 0bama used their “elite” education with the associated Bachelor’s Degree from the “right” school to get where they are today. Eliminating the college degree as a job qualification would mean that they would face competition from far more qualified applicants with more common sense and real world experience than the establishment with their Ivy League pedigree will ever have. 0bama won’t change this, and the writer is delusional for thinking he will even consider it. After all, 0bama scammed the current system for all it was worth. Besides, that would also mean that college degree-less Rush Limbaugh would be on equal footing with the reporters from the NYT.
I think the evidence suggests blacks are not as smart as whites ON AVERAGE, but the distributions of intelligence in each race overlap, so that there ARE many blacks who are smarter than the average white. Besides, Obama's mother was white, and some research suggests intelligence is inherited more from the mother. I'd bet Obama, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law and the author of two books has a high IQ. Unfortunately, he thinks he is smart enough to micromanage the U.S. economy, which no one is capable of doing.
“...I am not discounting the merits of a liberal education....”
That, NYT, is part of the problem. Concatenating those two words (liberal and education) has become a modern day oxymoron, thanks to you lib’s propensity to remove all things difficult and of historical importance from that curriculum.
It sounds like you don’t actually disagree with what Murray is suggesting, you just don’t think it will happen any time soon. The same criticism could be made of the entire conservative agenda over at least the next four years.
I suggest that the economy itself will reign in the hopelessly bloated, overextended, and expensive higher education system. Since many large corporations already have to subcontract re-education for their new hires and continuing employees, there are strong advantages to getting four more “front end” years of work out of them—when they are at their most productive.
A group of large corporations could get together and create their own school, that would function like DeVry, where faculty run the place, and a small handful of administrators facilitate what the faculty want. The corporate school could help to support itself by subcontracting educational services to businesses outside of the group.
In turn, only the faculty of the school need to continue their education at a university. As soon as they learn a subject, they turn around and teach it at the corporate school, at a much lower per student cost.
As far the the group of corporations are concerned, they win in several ways. First, they know that their employees know how to do their jobs. Second, their employees are getting the education they need to improve in their jobs. Third, that they are saving a lot of money in their training budgets. Fourth, that they are getting four more of the most productive years of their employees careers.
Fifth, that their employees get their education when convenient to the business cycle. Sixth, that they are being taught with an up to date or even forward looking curriculum. Seventh, that employee morale is much higher when they are not saddled with huge debts. Eight, that new hires are being evaluated in a far more objective way than by some HR guy with little understanding of the business.
Ninth, the school might even charge tuition, refundable after an employee works for their chosen corporation for a few years.
Murray is a scholar at American enterprise Institute, NOT a reporter
Uhh, Charles Murray is a conservative. Or did you not read the whole “American Enterprise Institute” part down there at the bottom?
Charles Murray is not an idiot. In fact, I’d put him up against you any given day in an intellectual contest, even if you are in engineering.
His point about traditional bachelor’s degrees was about other fields (as he makes the point that most honors in other majors could not succeed in physics) and that the core curriculum should be more RIGOROUS not that they should “add” more courses to the curriculum. Surely you understand the distinction?
I’d throw in that online education needs to be more varied. Right now, an online class is actually more difficult to keep up with (they tend to stack more work on students because you aren’t in class, forgetting that much of the in-class time is spent listening and taking notes.) Also, the major universities often have non-traditional Bachelor’s Degrees available but they require a significant proportion of advanced-level classes(40-45 semester credits) which take EVEN MORE time and if you’re working will take you forever to complete.
What should be happening is that the same requirements that one faces for a traditional degree program should be available ONLINE exclusively, or perhaps with monitored exams or the like.
And there is no discount for these classes, either, which also makes little sense.
There definitely needs to be a ‘revolution’ in education and our expectations regarding university-level education.
Yes: I knew what he meant, I also mean what I said.
The problem with online education today is that it is run by the same incompetents who run the brick & mortar educational institutions.
The professors are the same as those who teach in front of live classes, so they structure the programs in much the same way they structure their normal classes.
A significant break will take place in a few years where online education gets designed for those online by those online. That is when the university system will start to break down.
The high costs of a bachelors degree versus the low costs of an online bachelors degree will destroy a liberal bastion forever.
It is coming.
Agreed!
There are some who are not “made” for college. There are some vocations that need to be preserved and college doesn’t always provide that. There is also a misconception that a college educated person is better suited for a position based strictly on that piece of paper. I ran circles around the bozo’s coming out of college and yet they were hired in a higher pay than me.
That's correct, but college has been dumbed down by relaxing admission requirements and by grade inflation. Having a degree these days is not the indication of some higher level of educational accomplishment it once was.
Still, we have politicians going around saying everyone should be able to go to college, and even that it should be free. Murray is right about this and most things he says. There are many jobs, particularly in marketing and sales, that now require college degrees, but did not twenty or thirty years ago.
You are right about that.
And I hope that change comes real soon, though it will be too late for me lol.
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