bingo...
Posted on 10/24/2009 11:44:00 AM PDT by george76
I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas.
The key quotes:
1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education. The problem is it doesn't match the work anymore." (That is to say, not enough students are getting science and math degrees.)
2) "I don't have these graduates in Europe and Asia telling us they want to live with mom and dad or they don't want to relocate to Asia."
(Excerpt) Read more at curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com ...
Well it isn’t useless if she goes into teaching!
I've heard rumors that Computer Science depts. are dumbing down to keep more students in, especially women students. Anyone hear something more concrete?
What is an ‘education’? Is it a degree, or 2 or 3 of some sort? Or is education the ability to think, reason and understand?
In some states, why is a college graduate with an “education” major, with no other experience of any kind, qualified to teach high school chemistry and a practicing lab director from a major pharma firm NOT qualified to teach?
Much in the 1st and 2nd year of modern college coursework should have been, and used to be, completed in high school. Most of the information and skills from the first 3 years of an American university can be had from readily available and cheap USED textbooks and the internet.
Advanced coursework and graduate studies are so thoroughly pickled with uber-liberal and socialist professors and instructors that young minds don’t stand a chance for success unless they toe-the-line and conform.
It has been claimed that the production of college graduates is simply a way to keep otherwise un-qualified practitioners employed.
I tend to agree.
Then the colleges let them in to meet their unofficial racial quota's and steer them to African studies and other nonsense courses. The professors are then forced to pass them or be accused of racism in disparity in the number of blacks who fail compared to whites and they are then put through because of it in spite of their incompetence.
Tell me where I am wrong.
Because of the above all degrees earned by blacks are suspect.
Which is a shame, because 40 years ago, if a black man had a college degree you not only knew he earned it, but that they had overcome massive discrimination to get it.
Well lets see. I did the equivalent of full IB in hs which is much like what HS used to be before it got dumbed down. I have a history degree, with about 60 credits in physics and maths, where do I fit in?
I love my degree, and would greatly appreciate it if a business person would actually hire me to do things that I’m trained to do. Most of the work I find has to do with my experience in data entry. Many times I find the boss wasting his time on things I could be doing for him (faster and better), rather than building his business. It’s frustrating. I know his wife would like him to keep decent hours and he’d be less burnt out and could get more accomplished, but he just sees me as a complete waste of space, and hates, hates to pay anything.
Any boss who gets all moralistic about a living situation, well why on earth is it your business? If a person comes to work on time, and works hard, isn’t that all that matters?
Used to get into it with the manager at my other job who really had no clue what it is that I did. I would try to explain it to her, and she basically treated me like her sales staff. It was frustrating. I told her that I had so much that I needed to get done in a day, and that once I’d finished it I could go home. You were paying for the work, not to have me clock in and clock out. It was like talking to a brick wall. She’d rather waste my time by having me ‘face’ the stock and straighten up the place rather then simply leaving when I was finished.
I told her, if you would be willing to pay me simply based on the hours I want to work at this job, I’d put in many more hours, and the job would get done faster. But you don’t want that. You want to limit my hours and output and at the same time. I can’t go over a specific limit, and I have to stay there for so many hours.
I smell production in our future now!
Good God what have we wrought?
.
And it’s good for security purposes, too.
bingo...
Yeah...and laughed big time!~
The world is small!
One of my best friends graduated from St. Johns a few years ago before going to work for the one of the big Presidential candidates in 2008 (she spent most of her time at the Santa Fe campus instead of Annapolis). She now works at a bank. She’s traveled to Africa, helps build orphanages in Latin America, and managed to save enough money so that she has a sizable personal portfolio. Her education allowed her to read the New Testament in the original Greek, something she says was a wonderful experience and drastically improved her understanding of the gospel.
There is no reason your son can’t be rich. My friend didn’t come from money and yet she has enough cash saved to qualify to invest in my companies (trust me - that’s impressive because the threshold is high; it’s in the six figures).
If your son can solve a problem for society, he can make money. To get into St. John’s, you have to be intelligent so he’s already ahead of most people.
Conclusion:
USA college hard science programs rule.
USA college paper writing majors are junk.
I agree. Sometimes I feel I wasted my time getting a science degree when my brother who dropped out of college...started his own business...and is 12 years younger...now making twice what I make!
I don’t think there was ever that much stigma attached to adult children who could afford to live on their own living with their parents if they did as young people used to do and paid their part of the bills, a lot of parents have benefitted by having that spare room occupied by an offspring who made their lives easier. Once it was even common for three generations to live in one house and many found it a great blessing to live out their lives with their grandchildren or even great grandchildren in the same house with them but they weren’t expected to support the whole infernal brood forever.
The problem now is all the adult children who expect their parents to keep supporting them until they marry at thirty three and even after they move to their own home and have children to support.
Children used to be regarded as assets, now they are mainly liabilities.
I have spoken to young people who said they went for the history degree because it was considered the easiest course of study and you need a degree of some kind just to get a job that used to go to a high school graduate. The worst part is that most of them don’t know the history that I learned PRIOR to entering HIGH SCHOOL.
How does someone get a degree in history without knowing what year the American civil war started and in fact not being very sure about the century, with no idea what the battle of Hastings was, not to mention when, never having heard of the Magna Charta? These are questions I have posed to young graduates, I am not just making things up.
I once believed a scientific degree was of value, too.
Has there ever been a stigma attached to adult children living in their family home?
In my family and the area I grew up in, it was normal, expected, that one would live at home until one married. My husband didn’t grow up in a close family so he succeeded in getting as far as way as possible from them (he was barely home as a teen and once he left for college, he never went back).
And I’m talking about the 70s and 80s so it’s decades ago and not something new. And, it was normal back in the 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s from what my parents told me. It’s new to move out of the family home prior to marriage. It wasn’t happening in Philly back during the Depression or WWII or thereafter. Children stayed/lived in the family home until marriage. At least where I came from. My husband, they moved out as soon as possible (late 80s).
Me neither. I was fortunate to have the opportunity, provided by my “working poor” (that’s a family joke, since they were working and were poor and never took anything they didn’t earn) parents to attend college. They valued higher education and encouraged us kids to work our hardest to attend. Something they didn’t have the opportunity to do.
We have 4 kids and one is in college now. Three more to go if they so choose. The opportunity is there for them if they choose to use it. I’m pretty sure the other 3 will go (senior is definitely going so it’s really two down and two to go for us).
I wouldn’t trade my college years for anything.
“I met two lovely young 20-somethings in a dining group I belong to. Both ready to get their MBAs. Didn’t have the heart to tell them that their degrees were close to worthless.”
I have both a Master’s degree in Management and an MBA, am gainfully employed and received a great raise when I completed the MBA.
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