>imho the govt should only provide financial aid for math, science and computer science.
This country gives lip service to “we need more students studying science.”
My child is applying to colleges for the fall for dual majors in Marine Biology and Molecular Biology. Science scholarships for undergraduates are virtually non-existent. If you’re going for post graduate science degrees many more scholarships are out there. How do they expect kids to get to the graduate level if undergraduate scholarships are not available?
My kid was told by one of the colleges that in the next five years half of all government scientists will be retiring, so the jobs will be out there. Sure beats getting a degree in feminist studies!
Yeah, let’s turn everyone into miserable, one-track-brained zombies.
There is more to being educated than having a narrow set of skills.
>If government would stop paying for ANY courses, then employers would start paying ONLY for courses that actually provide useful knowledge. And more importantly, that would spell an end to the artificially extended adolescence that results from endless years of being a "student" before being eligible for well-paying employment. People would be a lot better off taking one course at a time for 16 years, while working full or nearly full time, than being full-time students for 4 years, having no clue what real-world employers actually want or need, and ending up with a lot of debt accrued in the pursuit of often useless degrees.
As a guy with a BA, I think that most BA programs should be abandoned.
One should either get a major in a science/math discipline or get a full up classical education based on the trivium and quadrivium.
I wouldn’t necessarily be that tight about it, but I agree that there are some seriously nonsense degrees being handed out. In my hometown of Olympia, WA, is a useless little college called “Evergreen State College”. They’ve lost their accreditation at least once because of their goofy curriculum, and their “free-form” “self-designed degree” garbage.
It wouldn’t burn me much to limit government aid to mainstream curricula and degrees. But I’d be careful about drawing that line *too* sharply. Lots of BA degrees like Finance, Accounting, Economics and such are perfectly serviceable fields of study in the real world.
Kill the humanities.
Or how about the ultimate "Mickey Mouse degree" - - "African-American studies", where the only job you are prepared for is.... teaching "African-American studies".
My child is also being courted by multiple universities in England. One of their recruiting points is you get your B.S. in only three (3) years because you only have to take courses related to your science degree. No forced liberal studies. No feminist studies, no African American studies, no Hispanic studies, no native culture, basically you will not be required to take any course that only qualifies you to teach that course.
For the record, my child who has been a science geek her entire life is into art also. Taught herself to draw, taught herself acoustic & electric guitar, and taught herself to play the piano. Currently teaching herself Japanese and Finnish. Science geeks are not one dimensional.
No longer should the government be paying 18-year-olds to start courses on celebrity journalism, drama with waste management, or international football business management.Thanks neverdem. Meanwhile, the UK discontinues classical studies and other "liberal" arts, and in the US the leftists, unchastened by the unravelling of their global warming conspiracy (for which all of them should hang), continue to attack the educational system.