Posted on 01/27/2023 7:38:02 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In June 2021, comedian and political commentator Bill Maher slammed college as a “racket” on his political talk show "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO.
“Now that graduation season has ended and we won’t be spoiling anyone’s big day, let’s talk about what higher education in America really is — a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper middle class,” Maher declared to wide applause and cheers.
The comedian has not been alone in his criticism.
A few months later in December of that year, partially paralyzed former Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who attended a Christian college for one semester before dropping out, urged conservative youth to drop out of college if they aren’t studying medicine, law or engineering because higher education is “a scam.”
“I am proudly a college dropout. If you are not becoming an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer, I highly encourage you to drop out. It’s a scam,” Cawthorn said at AmericaFest 2021.
Like Cawthorn, many men citing the diminishing returns to having a college degree are also now choosing to forgo what many families previously treated as a rite of passage into adulthood.
While some 32% of the U.S. population 25 years of age and older holds at least a bachelor’s degree, according to data from the American Community Survey, new data from a Pew Research Center study show that only a minority of white parents view a college degree as extremely or very important for their children while most minority parents do.
In Parenting in America Today released on Tuesday, Pew researchers Rachel Minkin and Juliana Horowitz highlighted this and other findings collected from a survey conducted from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2, 2022, of 3,757 U.S. parents with children younger than 18. The data was collected as part of a larger survey to better understand how American parents approach parenting.
The survey showed that only about 41% of parents say it’s extremely or very important that their children earn a college degree. When broken down by race, the data shows stark disparities between how white parents and minority parents value higher education.
“When it comes to the importance parents place on their children graduating from college: 70% of Asian parents say this is extremely or very important to them, compared with 57% of Hispanic parents, 51% of black parents, and just 29% of white parents,” the researchers wrote.
Data from a Pew Research Center Survey conducted in 2015 showed that a majority of parents in general, including white parents, said it was either extremely important or very important that their children earn a college degree. According to that survey, 86% of Hispanic parents, 79% of black parents and 67% of white parents agreed on this.
Researcher Renee Stepler suggested at the time that the reason for the gaps in the views on college between the racial groups may be linked to how each group saw “a college degree’s importance in moving up the economic ladder.”
“Roughly half (49%) of Hispanics and 43% of blacks say that a college education is a requirement to be part of the middle class, compared with just 22% of whites. However, white adults are more likely than black or Hispanic adults to already be in the middle class or higher, which may account in part for the fact that fewer whites see college as essential,” Stepler argued.
Jean Eddy, president and CEO of the national nonprofit American Student Assistance, told The Christian Post in a statement that she is not surprised that parents are thinking outside of the college degree when it comes to mapping financial success for their children.
“It’s not surprising that parents are thinking outside of the college degree, as more and more young people are increasingly skeptical of the high school-to-college route and desire more flexible post-secondary education pathways,” Eddy said. “In the spring of 2022, there were 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs compared to the previous year, and a recent study found that just 53% of today’s high schoolers say they are likely to attend college.”
Yep, and with no diverse employees.
I picked my path for a reason.
Wow. That's quite a place. I've seen some bad schools, but never heard that before. Do you homeschool your own kids?
All depends on what the child’s interests are. Although at age 18ish, it’s virtually impossible to know what your talent and passions are.
Apparently-—NONE of these parents have realized that basic READING-—WRITING-—and MATH are the MOST important.
Really glad I went to a ONE ROOM SCHOOL.
You totally discount the fact that being educated is a worthy endeavor
I support “being educated”.
I am opposed to leftist college indoctrination.
These days a young person can learn anything about anything with a click of a mouse.
There are no excuses to not being educated—regardless of where you go to school.
A degree is essential for a career in academia.
Anything else, the credential might offer a few introductions. For learning things, there are many other ways to do that now.
Bogus, worthless degrees and sports scholarships keep the minorities going to these brainswashing and programming institutions. If it wasn’t for the opportunity of getting into professional sports, a lot of minorities wouldn’t bother going.
> It’s a scam,
Especially borrowing money to take the goofy electives that are pushed these days. Going into to debt to further some clown’s goofy agenda is just plain counter productive.
That strong lower division at UCSD made it easy to get a First Class Radiotelephone license and Extra Class ham license to leverage my life long interest in electricity/electronics. Instant employment. Field Service Engineer servicing 180 tuna boats and 14 base stations. A nice balance of physical field work, customer service and bench electronics technical repair. My German language proficiency was helpful when a German full duplex VHF radio needed repair. The service manuals on the boat were all in German. No problem. Ordering repair parts from Germany was the most difficult part of the process due to currency and shipping distance.
The point is that the college degree offered the breadth of skill acquisition to rapidly adapt skills and job opportunities. I switched to software engineering as most of my income generation.
That could be the case, or it could be that the student wants to become the next generation of intellectual expertise. Put more simply, the "original" purpose of college was for people who were either so rich they could afford it, or so smart they could become scholars (hence "scholarships").
One of the unintended consequences of the GI Bill was turning college into a means of entering the managerial class, to rise from labor into management. Learning became secondary to obtaining the sheepskin, to the point that today the sheepskin is no longer a door to anything--unless you happen to be from the underclass, in which case it is a means of rising up from poverty without physical labor. The only exceptions to this are the professions, which is why the "popular" programs are nursing, education, and criminal justice.
As a consequence of unconstitutional federal funding for INTRAstate schooling, and associated unconstitutional federal interference in schooling, high standards for schooling have vaporized imo.
In other words desperate, corrupt. elite Democrats and RINOs effectively gave away "free" college degrees to buy special interest / minority votes at the high cost of compromising a quality education imo.
In fact, consider that President Thomas Jefferson, in a State of the Union address, also Justice Joseph Story, had both indicated that the states would first need to appropriately amend the Constitution in order for Congress to be able to dictate, regulate, tax and spend in the name of intrastate schooling — something that the states have never done.
“The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphasis added].” —Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806." (Jefferson is indicating that Congress cannot tax and spend in the name of intrastate infrastructure imo.)
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The power to regulate manufactures is no more confided to congress, than the power to interfere with the systems of education, the poor laws, or the road laws of the states [emphases added]." —Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 2, 1833.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
The bottom line is that patriots have gotten practice helping Trump to drain the swamp by primarying bad-apple “Republicans,” and we're going to have to do that again in 2024, also in 2026 for Trump 47's last two years in office.
In the meanwhile, ALL the states desperately need to put a "permanent" stop to unconstitutional federal taxes, and likewise unconstitutional interference in the affairs of the sovereign states, by effectively "seceding" from the unconstitutionally big federal government.
The states will "secede" from the corrupt feds by repealing the 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments (16&17A).
If the proposed amendment was limited strictly to repealing 16&17A, relatively little or ideally no discussion would be needed before ratification of the amendment imo.
And one of the boxes is the piece of paper.
You may, may get some entry level position. I have had friends who have done this and guess what--they get told if they want to keep moving up--need the piece of paper.
Sure, maybe you will get a job with a small business but it's going to be very limiting without the piece of paper.
And I agree, it's generally worthless and a scam but it is what it is.
>> Do you homeschool your own kids? <<
Catholic school. And NOT the one right next foor.
That is essential if you want to advance to higher paying administrative positions. Let's say a person has an associates degree in accounting. After a lengthy time of paying their dues they can become a supervisor over a small accounting team, but it is unlikely they will advance to managing a major accounting department for academia, gov agencies and fortune 500 companies.
If you "have to" get the paper, at least get the paper in a field of study that isn't worthless.
You get out of college what you put into it.
If you go to college to party, meet Mr\Mrs Right\Wrong or because you can’t think of anything else to do then “zip” and nonsense is probably what you will get out of it.
Maybe that’s why my Alma Mater seems to be turning itself into an HBCU.
So, we are making people without that intellectual horsepower go through the scam.
Hard work, enormous drive and total passion for their interests is what’s needed. College isn’t for everyone.
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