Posted on 04/04/2019 1:12:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
American college is terrible and, as a society, we should stop doing it – at least how it is being currently done. The greatest benefit of a system where most citizens are pushed to get college educations, whether they truly need and want one or not, would be a society of really smart, informed, and engaged citizens. Do you see that happening?
No, you do not.
Instead, we have a bunch of people who are dragged down by crushing debt after wasting years of their youth chasing a piece of paper that often has no relationship to these graduates’ futures. Compounding the failure is how these grads march off campus infatuated with ridiculous commie notions abhorrent to a free people. The college system is a disaster – an expensive disaster that picks our pockets as well as those of the suckers who matriculate – and we should stop tolerating it. Time for conservatives to reform academia the hard way, and by “reform” I mean, “Destroy it, sow the campuses with salt, and rebuild academia into something that isn’t useless.”
About 99% of current college grads will feel that “sow with salt” line zoom over their empty heads. Most of them probably think “Carthage” is a rapper, or maybe a lesser Kardashian.
The college admission scandal, where a herd of rich Democrat donors paid a ton of dough to get their half-wit progeny into Snooty U, was the perfect encapsulation of how big a rip-off college really is. Did you notice how the parents forked over cash to get Junior into school because Junior scored 112 on his SAT and then…Junior stayed in the elite school with no problem? You might think that if these schools were rigorous institutions of higher learning instead of ruling class credential rubber-stump machines, they might flunk out? But no. When the internet famous daughter of that (former) Full House / Hallmark-movie-about-a-widow-finding-love-with-a sexy-carpenter-at-Christmas starlet Lori Loughlin was busted, she was literally sailing around the Bahamas on a yacht owned by a USC trustee.
I guess she needed a break from her work carrying on Dr. Hawking’s particle physics research.
Of course, according to our betters – the same betters who pulled off this scam and all the myriad other scams that are wrecking our culture – the answer to this outrage is to eliminate standardize testing. That way there will be no objective criteria for college admission at all, and the elite can simply wield its influence, pull a few strings, and voilà – Kaden has his gender studies degree from Yale!
But your kid, like every other Normal kid, will have even less chance of being accepted at, say, Harvard, because they can’t test in anymore. Harvard is, of course, the best school in the world, according to Harvard and the people who went there, a fact about them that you will learn within 15 seconds of meeting one. And your kid will have even an even worse chance if he or she (though not xe – that’s a plus) is both Normal and Asian. Apparently the hard work and talent of Asian-American students give them an unfair advantage over people lucky at being born or who get on TV spouting approved liberal clichés.
It’s apparent that the current collegiate system serves several functions, all of them a symptom of a deeper problem with our society. We have seen how admission to one of the elite schools is a de facto degree, which in turn is a de facto ticket into the ruling class. Any actual education is purely coincidental. It is also clear that attendance at non-elite schools is today merely a signal to employers that the person might possesses the basic readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic skills we used to expect from a high school graduate. This is because high school’s purpose is not to create a baseline educated citizen anymore but, rather, to provide comfy sinecures for Democrat-voting unionized teachers and the swollen ranks of lazy, useless administrators. Again, education is an afterthought – public education’s real goal is to provide jobs for Democrat constituencies.
Academia is similar. It exists to mass produce ignorant future elitists and to provide jobs for liberal indoctrinators fueled by our tax money. The state and private schools both take our dough directly as well as through guaranteed student loans. Student loans are a giant scam, of course. Students get grifted into chaining an anchor around their necks in exchange for credentials most don’t even need. Colleges can raise tuition as high as they like because the government will just back the loans these suckers take out. It’s a great system, if you’re an academic. Not so much if you are a student or a taxpayer.
Of course, the schools love the “free college” movement. Nothing costs as much as “free.” The only thing better than having the millennial dummies willing to borrow 200 grand for a degree in the feminist literature of Mongolia pay for it is to make you and me pay for it.
How about no?
Now, the college scam has insinuated itself into our culture like a malignancy, and cutting it out will be traumatic, but we need to do it or it will destroy us. First, we need to demand that high school do its job and turn out students who can do the basic things citizens must do without taking remedial courses in college so they can master See Spot Run. Outlawing teachers’ unions sounds like a great start, as well as refusing federal aid for any district that has more than a 1:1 teacher to administrator ratio.
Second, we need a cultural rethink of the concept of college itself. A four-year degree – as opposed to a four-year party – is not for everyone. It’s not even for most people. You know who do well today, who aren’t MFA grads yet making our coffee for us? People with skills. Plumbers. Electricians. Welders. Trades are the future.
And a four-year degree should not always be a prerequisite for a professional degree either. I did four years of undergrad, where I majored in beer and girls with a minor in 80s post-punk alternative music, then three years of law school (albeit interrupted by the Army). That seven years could have been condensed to five, maybe four. Same with med school; docs learn as on the job as residents. You should not have to spend nearly a decade taking classes to do the vast majority of jobs. I deal with other lawyers for a living. Most are quarter-wits aspiring to be half-wits.
Third, we need to realize that our elite schools are not elite. Their status comes not from the quality of their education but the selectivity (at least, the selectivity they claim to the public) of their admissions. Guess what the median grade at Harvard is. Go on, guess. Our most rigorous school, right? It should be really hard, right? Lots of “C” and “B” grades because of said rigor, right?
It’s an “A-.” The median grade at Harvard is an “A-,” which is supposed to be “outstanding.” But a Harvard A- is not “outstanding.” It is the default. Think about it. Half the grades at Harvard are “A-” or above. Would you give our ruling class an “A-”?
And beside all this, the universities as bastions of leftism and censorship. That needs to end too. President Trump’s free speech executive order is just the first step in defeating academic fascism.
Academia is a scam, as well as a campus gulag archipelago of hellholes of leftist oppression, and we need to tear it down and start over.
It needn’t be destroyed directly. Just totally separate the Federal Government from it except for the Service Academies. No grants. No research funds. No loans. No government scholarships or loan guarantees. Not one federal tax dollar to Education at any level. The market will take care of the problem quickly.
If and I say IF I had the money, I would send my grandkids to Hillsdale College. If they would go, otherwise I would let them do what they want without my financial help. A crap education is a waste of money and time. The other colleges I’ve been too have been crap. You want good output go to good processors.
College shouldn’t cost as much as a house and nobody should take on epic debt to pay for it whether they are a student or a parent.
Degrees are now required for taking customer orders by phone. A job like that doesn’t even begin to make 100,000 or more in debt worth it.
Sure, kids can get good grades and scholarships. Many scholarships aren’t strictly merit based though. If you’re white and you come from a middle class family it’s harder. There are scholarships for every minority under the sun, trannies, gays, you name it. There’s even a scholarship for children of strawberry pickers.
I believe people should start with community college to get the basic requirements, then transfer to the four year college to get the desired occupational classes and finish the degree. That route is good for determining if a student is cut out for college in the first place and it saves a lot of money.
A college degree has no guarantee of riches and success. A college degree doesn’t make someone better than the guy who went to trade school. Unless you’re planning to be in tech, medicine or law all it says is you’ve been properly indoctrinated into “polite” society and even paid for the privilege proving yourself to be a model prisoner and suitably malleable.
ivy plague destroyed themselves, we had nothing to do with it
I have an undergraduate in Engineering and four masters degrees.
My most recent degree was awarded just last year, and I can attest that at least some colleges and universities today have become infected and polluted beyond the point of repair.
They are not "storehouses of learning", but boot camps for race baiters, leftists, Marxists, homosexuals, radical atheists, and purveyors of destructive ideologies.
Moreover, while the media is focusing on these rich parents who bribed officials so that their children were admitted, no one in the media or politics wants to discuss affirmative action and the policy of admitting students who are illiterate and/or have IQs in the mentally retarded range. Many of these students are not only admitted; they are given a free ride because of their race, or because they can play college sports.
Which means EVERYBODY in the school knew what was going on.
A good time for Donald to step in.
Some of these elite schools are nonprofits; they don’t pay taxes on profits their invested endowments make — which saves them a lot of money.
One report noted that between the 2011 and 2015 fiscal years, the Ivy Leagues received a $9.6 billion tax break on the $27.3 billion growth of their collective endowments invested in public equities, fixed income, hedge funds, private equity, real estate and natural resources.
At the same time, the mega-rich schools receive tax dollars from the government for a number of purposes, which supposedly finance “cutting-edge research,“ and millions in federal grants for other projects.
One report noted $10 million in federal tax dollars went towards sex-related research, ranging from “Injury in Latina Women: Variability in Anal, Genital & Oral Injury in Women – Consensual Sex” to “ Skin Elasticity and Skin Color: Understanding Health Disparity in Sexual Assault.”
Between 2010 and 2015, the eight Ivies received $23.89 billion in federal grants..... $10.6 billion of which came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health.
Other sources of federal education grants:
<><> the National Science Foundation,
<><> the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
<><> the Department of Defense, and,
<><> the Department of Energy.
Federal tax dollars also fund work-study programs and Pell Grants.
“Destroy” is sensational - hard to take the author seriously after using a TMZ headline.
Well yes. But...
This is not in any way or to any degree a degradation from the university system since the mid eighties.
It has been this bad for that long.
No question.
I will not be sending my kids to college. It is trade school r getting married young and starting a family for them.
JoMa
Organizations that accept bribes should face more severe punishment than the people offering the bribes.
Universities have muddied the admissions process with their racial, ethnic and other agendas. They do this intentionally so...in the end....they can create a system that benefits the universities...not the students.
Our politicians have created a similar system for campaign donations. An industry must donate money or face regulations that can destroy them. Gov’t bids are not awarded on lowest bid, but now with points systems for various agendas, like minority-owned, minority-employed, and other cloudy criteria that allows cronyism and bribery to take place.
This is socialism on display.
So would I
Propaganda and golden tickets for the elite are the real purposes of education, start to finish.
With skills training for our worker bees and nice jobs for leftists next in priority.
The smart kids are the ones who realize college is not for everyone.
Affirmative Action means no one has to worry about their child being too dumb for the school. Affirmative action with scholarship means that less qualified kid pays less. Athletes? Exceptions were just an excuse to fill the team with students who didn't belong in the college academically. Even rich kids from wealthy suburbs know there's a quota on how many they'll take from each school.
I'm not excusing the parents or students who knew about it, demonstrated by posing for pictures of them faking it for a sport or letting someone take their SATs. Or pols kids at schools? Are they always qualified? Schools look at a variety of factors for admission. Their ONLY standard should be most qualified academically. Choosing for other attributes should only happen among those truly and equally qualified candidates. That's the necessary first step to cleaning up the farce that "selective" school admissions have become, after decades of doing what they damn well please in choosing students.
That's today rant from me. If it sounds angry, it is. I have my reasons.
Higher education commission to monitor what is being taught and review the curriculum before our tax money goes to funding, period!
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