Posted on 06/24/2012 7:18:04 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
High schools around here have technical programs/classes. My son has taken a whole bunch of vocational classes and taken certification tests for some things. He will take more this year. I wish he could take more, but he has to take English and communist propaganda history, too. I have lost track of how many college credits he has through the vocational training, but he has quite a few. My older daughter was able to take a lot of classes that satisfied university liberal arts core classes while she was in high school. My son is NOT university material. He will probably make more money than his sister will ever dream about making. He has skills! (She has skills, too. I don’t think she has ambition, however.)
As a nation we need to get off this idiotic idea that everyone is college material. We also need to get rid of this elitist idea that somehow the trades are bad or lesser. There are employers in this country that are having a hard time filling jobs they desperately need filled even in this bad economy (a skilled tool and die maker that makes $57,000-62,000 a year on average- usually with good benefits). While you can't find people in certain trades, US colleges pump out thousands with degrees in art history, womyns studies, cultural anthropology, degrees in languages that are dead (not spoken), music therapy, English literature, political science, American studies, recreation, poetry, puppetry (no kidding- a college degree in how to play with puppets)...
In a word, YES.
Why are there liberal arts schools? They are a danger to society. The graduates often become lawyers. Take out the incubators and take out the spawn.
My sis has a degeree in some kind of humanities or english lit or something like that. I think she went back and got a degree in computer science and physiology and an MBA to make a living.
“and where the operational costs really sits.”
You have to pay the salary of the Dean of Diversity, and her/his/its’ staff, and those SEIU boys are built like tanks and they don’t come cheap either, and a LOT more.../s;)
Yes, a better trades education is needed. The shame of trades is that they have a glass ceiling. They are subject to being managed by degreed peopel who know less about what to do than they do.
Mechanical engineers who don’t know how to run a lathe are missing something in my book. There needs to be some blending in the professional education.
Yes, we need more trades. In Europe the journeyman system produces people I’d rather work with than a lot of their engineers.
Of course we don’t make much here anymore. Skilled trades went out of favor and now we don’t have the means to recapture that skill set.
“The rise in soft science degrees, i.e. history, sociology, psychology, anthropology... follows from a demand in people seeking degrees but not really willing nor having the aptitude for a course of study that requires math and basic analytical skills.”
History as a ‘science’ only goes back to about Leopold von Ranke.
prior to that you had the Trivium and the Quadrivium:
Logic
Rhetoric
Grammar
Arithematic
Geometry
Astronomy
Music
History is a very young discipline, but I also don’t see any Chemistry there either. ;)
If we are going to toss out History then quite a few other things should go as well.
That’s the problem. Too many people are being allowed in college without the basics in math, science and English. I spoke with a recent sociology graduate, and she couldn’t make a logical conclusion out of two sentences.
When a student takes out a student loan, to whom does the interest go? Is it paid to a bank, or does it go to the government?
Used to be that it went to the bank that loaned the money -- a government guarantee getting the student a lower interest rate.
But now, under the Obama administration, the money is a direct loan from the government and the interest is payable to the government.
not too many going to college imho. If the degrees were doctor/science/engineers then its a good thing, yet we subsidies too many useless degrees like history/law/art/social studies
There really is no reason to toss out any college degree, including those in dubious fields such as grievance studies. Why should anyone care what’s taught so long as people pay for it with their own money? If someone wants to pay good money for bad crap, why should I care? Ah! There’s the rub. They’re using other people’s money!
The problem isn’t what’s being taught so much as the generous government subsidies, grants, and loans the prop up the system. In other words, government is the problem. If the education system didn’t have a bottomless pit of (borrowed) government money to operate on, schools would be forced to offer real value, and students would be far more discriminating regarding their field of study.
Universities are also generally very stingy with their endowment money. Several have multiple billions of dollars in endowment money, but they hardly ever dip into it. They want their endowments to keep growing.
I wish the government would be the same. Could you imagine if the government put aside a bit of money every year for “rainy day”. I think the Colleges although stingy are smarter than the government at least.
I just think it's amazingly hypocritical that Universities and much of their faculty support liberal administrations and taxing the crap out of the rest of us, but very frequently pay no taxes themselves - despite having huge endowments. These are actual quotes from an article published in 2008 when Massachusetts was considering taxing endowments: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/05/08/lawmakers_target_1b_endowments/?page=full
“It's mind boggling that one entity not paying taxes has $34 billion. How do you justify that?” said Kujawski, who serves on the influential House Ways and Means Committee” (He was talking about Harvard)
“You'd be taxing success here,” said Kevin Casey, Harvard's associate vice president for government, community, and public affairs. “Over time, this would put us at a real competitive disadvantage, which would drastically hurt the Commonwealth.”
If a conservative made that same point about taxing industry or individuals, the left - including all those liberals who sit on university faculty - would shoot down the argument by calling it ‘greed’. Funny that it's not greed when it's their money they are protecting.
Too many go to high school, never mind college.
Until we end universal academic education at eighth grade and start progression by exam, we won't get anywhere.
The problem isn’t so much that the students spend money for tuitions, but that the schools themselves are a government run monopoly. We have more competition in our utilities than we have in student instruction.
Get the schools off the dole.
Unfortunately in America even the vocations are now being taught in colleges and universities. Something they are unsuited for but managed to make themselves the gatekeepers of through certification and licensing programs, i.e. law enforcement, nursing, fire... Realistically, your kid isn't getting a better paying job if they study one of those liberal arts or soft sciences. With an athletic training degree you're looking at a whopping $35,000 a year, poor benefits, little job security, no ability to apply that degree somewhere else to get out of the rut. As a social worker you can make a whopping $32,000 a year, religious studies gives a $32,900, recreation and leisure studies is up to $34,500, public health $35,500... Worthless degrees, all of them. Right now, this moment, a young kid who is a tool and die maker or a machinist can get a job making twice what these liberal arts degrees offer. There are employers that can't find people in many of these trades and work is readily available. Yet in this country we look down on the trades, and kids are essentially pushed to go to college even though they are not college material. But the college don't care. Give them $80,000-100,000 and they'll give your kid a degree in interdisciplinary studies.
Ping.
Yes.
The result is that almost every office and semi-skilled job is looking for at least a two year degree when it is total nonsense. It does not matter what skills you have, they are looking for a piece of paper that says you forked over $10,000 to sit in class and be told things that will either have no relevance to your job or that you already knew.
Forget the on the job training you got, forget the fact you not only know all the systems but know why they are the way they are, that means nothing any more.
So let's fire the person who has been with the company 30 years and knows where all the bodies are buried and hire a perky 23 year-old that has no idea how to handle a payroll garnishment. Heck she didn't even know what a garnishment was!
It was a savings on the books. But once the people in the plant knew they could get her to do anything just by coming up with a official sounding reason the fun began.
Took me six months to straighten out the mess she left.
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