Yup.
Posted on 03/24/2011 4:30:16 AM PDT by suspects
It’s college admissions season, when parents will open their mailbox and find out the bad news: Their kids were accepted to an elite, big-name college.
That’s right: bad news.
Higher education is one of those topics — like the current state of Islam, illegitimacy rates in the black community or Bill Belichick’s overrated reputation — that people in polite society are not allowed to discuss honestly. And the obvious, glaring truth is that too many parents are sending kids to college, kids who don’t have the academic firepower to make it through a round of “Jeopardy,” much less four years of university study.
You’re not sending Junior off to school so he can pursue his dream of becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer. You’re sending him so you can brag to your friends. Meanwhile what Junior actually ends up pursuing is cheap beer and sorority girls.
Alas, only the beer is cheap. In his book “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College,” Andrew Ferguson writes about the cost of the admissions process alone: Admissions “consultants” who charge $40,000 to wrangle a student into a coveted admission slot; thousands spent traveling on all-but-mandatory campus visits.
And all for what? For some students, it’s to become elite professionals and academics. But for many others, it’s to load themselves down with massive debt before taking their degree in 19th-century Persian Literature into the job market.
It’s economic idiocy and everybody knows it.
In an article entitled “Harvard Isn’t Worth It Beyond Mom’s Party Chatter,” Amity Shlaes quotes a new study showing that while graduates of elite universities hit...
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
If you want to get laid, go to college.
if you want an education, go to a library.
~Frank Zappa.
College: A place where young people go to get drunk.
Don’t worry - they’ll keep inflating grades to compensate.
Yes economics is the biggest factor in the employment situation but it’s undeniable that many degrees and qualifications aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on as many applicants/interviewees are shockingly ignorant of their purported specialty area.
We need plumbers,electricians and mechanics too, Oh I forgot with todays cars if you don’t have a college education in computers you can’t fix one.
Any significant financial outlay, particularly something as expensive as college, that isn't subjected to a cost/benefit analysis is economic insanity.
Yup.
If you ever see a kid in the hall doing work on his laptop, once you get close enough you can see he's surfing face book or some other non academic site.
The problem is they are not serious and do NOT know how to study. Of course that is here in MY building.... Elsewhere on campus, maybe where they don't have classes with titles ending with the word ‘studies’, kids are actually serious and do study, I only know what's here.
Online degrees will replace most brick and mortar universities over the next 20 years.
With an online degree, you still get the piece of paper, you just don’t pay as much for it.
I’m going to post a “talk” on FR this Friday night. It was given by an education professional about 2 weeks ago by a Berkeley PhD, who used to be a professor at Berkeley. He gave the talk in front of current Berkeley students.
It will make your hair stand on end.
Let me know if you want a ping to it.
I worked at an inner city private school which had a posted goal of getting 90% of its students into college by the time they graduate high school.
Never mind that they were 3 years behind grade level upon acceptance to the school with absolutely no creative or critical thinking ability (even compared to a child of average ability).
The whole thing was lunacy, especially when there were thousands of openings for technical jobs across the area and not enough qualified people to fill them. They would have a very bright future if they went to a cheap technical school. Instead they will go to college to major in a “study” and gain no skills other than America-bashing, anti-white hatred, and community organizing.
Determination and the will to learn, access to a good library, that's just about all you need.
I am a professor and took a visiting professor position at a large Midwestern University last Fall. While there, I taught an introductory course for majors.
About 5% of the class did well, many did poorly, a good fraction were just plain dismal. If I would have graded fairly-—awarded the actual grades the students earned-—I would have flunked about 25% of the class. Most of the rest would have received low grades. This would have punished my students because they could have taken my class with another professor and passed. After all, they are staying at this university and I was only visiting. As it was, I had the highest dropout rate among the other professors teaching the same class.
Students had a clear sense of entitlement. Their lack of basic knowledge was shocking. They were not motivated. They did not study. They would not read. The absentee rate on Fridays was marked. I had one student show up to an exam on a Friday morning straight from a Thursday night party (the school has a reputation for “partying”). I speak here of the majority; there were, of course, rare exceptions.
This is a bare summary; it was actually worse than I am painting it.
“We need plumbers,electricians and mechanics too, Oh I forgot with todays cars if you don’t have a college education in computers you can’t fix one.”
Nobody fixes computers on today’s cars, except, maybe, a place that specializes in that (not even sure there). Certainly dealers don’t fix them (and the computers never break either, unless they get flooded). However mechanics do plug in scanners which tell them EXACTLY what part is broken - which they then quickly replace. Makes doing repairs MUCH EASIER than it used to be when you had to isolate problems indirectly, based on sounds, some readings, and experience. I only wish cars were as easy to work on back when I was in high school...it was a struggle back then.
I understand that many college kids will get drunk, join a fraternity/sorority where partying is a lifestyle etc... That being said, not all kids act that way. When I went to college, I had a part time job (36 hours a week) and helped out significantly at home. We do need plumbers, electricians etc.. but we also need nurses, doctors, dentists, teachers, accountants, physical therapists.... all require a college degree or masters. With the rotten economy, my fear is that only the “wealthy” will be able to send their children to college. The separation between the rich and poor will become wider. IMHO
Translation: keep your uneducated spawn away from our future leaders you useless bitter clingers!
MIND YOUR PLACE PROLE!
Colleges are businesses that have been turning out inferior products for years. The only way to change that is stop buying their products or start demanding better.
A friend was a Grad Instructor and the ironic corollary to your story is that she couldn’t issue A’s to all those who had earned them! Dept and university policy forced her to evenly distribute letter grades regardless of the actual performance of the class members.
Elementary/secondary teacher moan about standardized tests but they have outpaced students in the race to the bottom by teaching ONLY standardized test material, hence the constant and annoying question ‘Will this be on the test?’ heard at colleges everywhere. Solid, comprehensive knowledge that a) is the correct prep for the rest of life and b) would make any standardized test a breeze is the exception rather than the rule.
Those kids would do better if they lived at home and went to the community college.
I'm glad I didn't have that standard at college. I had one class that I jokingly referred to as "Ripping CDs for a grade". More seriously it was the hardest signal processing class in the electrical engineering graduate program. Half of the class was lectures by the professor and the second half was students giving reports on their special projects and mine was a replacement of the standard frequency analysis portion of an MP3 compression program with other methods. This was a couple of years before ripping CDs became common and that type of data compression was on the cutting edge of geekdom. After about half the students had presented their papers, the professor told us "You all do a good job. I think you will all get As." I think for once we all deserved that type of grading.
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