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Education: Just one more place America spends WAY too much and gets WAY too little

Hawkeye10

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The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education


BRYAN CAPLAN

I have been in school for more than 40 years. First preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, and high school. Then a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, followed by a doctoral program at Princeton. The next step was what you could call my first “real” job—as an economics professor at George Mason University.

Thanks to tenure, I have a dream job for life. Personally, I have no reason to lash out at our system of higher education. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, has convinced me that it is a big waste of time and money. When politicians vow to send more Americans to college, I can’t help gasping, “Why? You want us to waste even more?”
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But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race.
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The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/

We have got to deal with the wreckage that is the American University, it has to be one of the first things we fix. So many people who have navigated the credentials rat race are stupid as ****....and they dont even know......and we have not only wasted A **** TON MAGNITUDE of money but we have facilitated the rot of minds and spirits at the university....the very failed university.
 
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I can't agree. I have been going to school and taking classes every year since I started plumbing in 1980 and I am only certified in a small percentage of the plumbing and heating equipment out there. To properly install and repair todays equipment will require college for the average plumber.
 
The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone

Students don't seem to be getting much out of higher education


BRYAN CAPLAN


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/

We have got to deal with the wreckage that is the American University, it has to be one of the first things we fix. So many people who have navigated the credentials rat race are stupid as ****....and they dont even know......and we have not only wasted A **** TON MAGNITUDE of money but we have facilitated the rot of minds and spirits at the university....the very failed university.

Yeah, never mind that 17 of the top 23 universities in the entire world are here in America.

Oh, wait - I forgot! Since universities teach FAKE NEWS like climate change and the benefits of social justice and history written by someone who is not a Fox News commentator, all those universities are just wastes of money and time and brains!
 
I can't agree. I have been going to school and taking classes every year since I started plumbing in 1980 and I am only certified in a small percentage of the plumbing and heating equipment out there. To properly install and repair todays equipment will require college for the average plumber.

If Plumbers are going to University to learn plumbing something has gone Oh SO VERY wrong.
 
I can't agree. I have been going to school and taking classes every year since I started plumbing in 1980 and I am only certified in a small percentage of the plumbing and heating equipment out there. To properly install and repair todays equipment will require college for the average plumber.

That is absolutely true - the experience I gained in piping installation and maintenance down in the engine room (not to mention qualifications in steam power, fuel storage and transfer, hydraulics, pump operation and maintenance, and HVAC) in the Navy doesn't come close to what's required out there today in the civilian world.
 
Yeah, never mind that 17 of the top 23 universities in the entire world are here in America.

Oh, wait - I forgot! Since universities teach FAKE NEWS like climate change and the benefits of social justice and history written by someone who is not a Fox News commentator, all those universities are just wastes of money and time and brains!

University is a shadow of what it used to be in America....just look at where America is for proof.

It is their job to keep us out of the ditch.

THEY FAILED
 
And how much first-hand experience do you have with plumbing installation and maintenance in the modern world?

This is not Question Hawkeye on the Nature of his Life Hour.

SORRY
 
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University is a shadow of what it used to be in America....just look at where America is for proof.

It is their job to keep us out of the ditch.

THEY FAILED

Um, no, they didn't fail...but because Fox News says they did, that's what you want to believe. You can't conceive that maybe, just maybe the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket...because Fox News would never, ever lie to you. Everybody lies to you except for Fox News...and Trump - he never lies either.

There - feel better now?
 
This is not Question Hawkeye on the nature of his life hour.

SORRY

Hey - you replied about the education needed for plumbing in the modern world, and I replied to you. And of course you're not going to directly answer since you probably have little or no experience in the area and don't want to admit it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.
 
Um, no, they didn't fail...but because Fox News says they did, that's what you want to believe. You can't conceive that maybe, just maybe the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket...because Fox News would never, ever lie to you. Everybody lies to you except for Fox News...and Trump - he never lies either.

There - feel better now?

I am so sad to find out that you dont know that America is very ill these days, and that first and foremost this is the Universities fault. .

I'll be moving along...
 
From the article:

First and foremost: From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.

From what I see (as a professor of philosophy in a top-100 university), the above attitude has been prevalent for something like the past 30 years in education, and it's had devastating effects. The reason to study literature, the arts, the humanities, and even (what horrors!) philosophy is that you do use it every day of your life--just not necessarily on the job. But so long as you're deprived of that kind of learning, you're more and more likely to accept that the job is all there is, and you'll shut up and work for less and less over time. There's actually quite a bit of evidence for this effect; it's not something I'm just making up. Martha Nussbaum wrote a book called Not For Profit that puts the case together pretty well.

In a nutshell, education in all the stuff you won't use on the job educates you about how human life works. How societies have worked in the past--how they've succeeded, and how they've failed. How people make good, and how they screw up. It teaches you how to imagine something better and then go make it into reality. It teaches you how to recognize when the powers that be are taking advantage, when they're doing something that will subtly benefit them at everyone else's expense. And so on.

Well...it will do that if students will actually learn. I do agree with this author when he says that most students are Philistines. That's more or less my experience. And the problem, summarized here:

Indeed, today’s college students are less willing than those of previous generations to do the bare minimum of showing up for class and temporarily learning whatever’s on the test. Fifty years ago, college was a full-time job. The typical student spent 40 hours a week in class or studying. Effort has since collapsed across the board. “Full time” college students now average 27 hours of academic work a week—including just 14 hours spent studying.

What are students doing with their extra free time? Having fun. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa frostily remark in their 2011 book, Academically Adrift,

If we presume that students are sleeping eight hours a night, which is a generous assumption given their tardiness and at times disheveled appearance in early morning classes, that leaves 85 hours a week for other activities.

Arum and Roksa cite a study finding that students at one typical college spent 13 hours a week studying, 12 hours “socializing with friends,” 11 hours “using computers for fun,” eight hours working for pay, six hours watching TV, six hours exercising, five hours on “hobbies,” and three hours on “other forms of entertainment.” Grade inflation completes the idyllic package by shielding students from negative feedback. The average GPA is now 3.2.

Yep. This is because teachers are now generally evaluated on the grades they give. You're usually expected to have about a B-average in your class, and so if basically all of your students in philosophy 101 don't do the reading and sleep through the lecture, you've still got to give them at least B's if you want to keep your job. Universities now structure pay packages so that even tenured profs (such as myself) won't be fired for giving low grades...but the ultimate upshot is that you won't be paid enough to make your student loan payments, whether or not the students deserved their low grades (the way this works is too complicated to try to explain--just take my word for it).

Students are like anyone else: they'll put in the effort required, and no more. If you want to fix higher education, the pressure that causes grade inflation needs to be eliminated. The overall problem is really one of administrators sticking their noses in where it doesn't belong.
 
From the article:



From what I see (as a professor of philosophy in a top-100 university), the above attitude has been prevalent for something like the past 30 years in education, and it's had devastating effects. The reason to study literature, the arts, the humanities, and even (what horrors!) philosophy is that you do use it every day of your life--just not necessarily on the job. But so long as you're deprived of that kind of learning, you're more and more likely to accept that the job is all there is, and you'll shut up and work for less and less over time. There's actually quite a bit of evidence for this effect; it's not something I'm just making up. Martha Nussbaum wrote a book called Not For Profit that puts the case together pretty well.

In a nutshell, education in all the stuff you won't use on the job educates you about how human life works. How societies have worked in the past--how they've succeeded, and how they've failed. How people make good, and how they screw up. It teaches you how to imagine something better and then go make it into reality. It teaches you how to recognize when the powers that be are taking advantage, when they're doing something that will subtly benefit them at everyone else's expense. And so on.

Well...it will do that if students will actually learn. I do agree with this author when he says that most students are Philistines. That's more or less my experience. And the problem, summarized here:



Yep. This is because teachers are now generally evaluated on the grades they give. You're usually expected to have about a B-average in your class, and so if basically all of your students in philosophy 101 don't do the reading and sleep through the lecture, you've still got to give them at least B's if you want to keep your job. Universities now structure pay packages so that even tenured profs (such as myself) won't be fired for giving low grades...but the ultimate upshot is that you won't be paid enough to make your student loan payments, whether or not the students deserved their low grades (the way this works is too complicated to try to explain--just take my word for it).

Students are like anyone else: they'll put in the effort required, and no more. If you want to fix higher education, the pressure that causes grade inflation needs to be eliminated. The overall problem is really one of administrators sticking their noses in where it doesn't belong.

The way I hear it the battle is already lost...... the bureaucracy is huge, it is all powerful, and it is run by people like the feminists for whom education is a low priority.

EDIT: I also point out that it is clear that the #1 problem with High School, the reason Universities get students who are a lot dumber than they used to be, is that too little is demanded from the students, because education is just not that important to the people who run the schools. It is by no accident that the American Intelligentsia has gotten to be so ignorant as they are now, the failure of education drives this, and this failure was programmed by people who have decided that there are other things that are more important for our schools to do,,,,,in the case of the University selling a life experience, one that pays a lot of people very well for very little work required (administrators)
 
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I love when the people who are angry because they didn't go to college try to demean the system....
 
The way I hear it the battle is already lost...... the bureaucracy is huge, it is all powerful, and it is run by people like the feminists for whom education is a low priority.

EDIT: I also point out that it is clear that the #1 problem with High School, the reason Universities get students who are a lot dumber than they used to be, is that too little is demanded from the students, because education is just not that important to the people who run the schools. It is by no accident that the American Intelligentsia has gotten to be so ignorant as they are now, the failure of education drives this, and this failure was programmed by people who have decided that there are other things that are more important for our schools to do,,,,,in the case of the University selling a life experience, one that pays a lot of people very well for very little work required (administrators)

Well...I don't think the battle is lost. It only looks that way for now. There is a resilience to knowledge, learning, curiosity, inquiry. It can be stomped down for a while, but it springs up again.

Yes, unfortunately the same problems I pointed out in University have also infected schools generally, high school included. The assault has come from both liberals and conservatives, for very different reasons on each side. But yeah, education has been devalued in this country--it's all about money, money, money, and the folks at the top just don't understand the role that the humanities play in a healthy functioning society.
 
Our education system is broken in a lot of ways

Standardized testing which just determines whether or not a student can memorize a fact, instead of learning to critically think

Schools that have to act more like babysitters than education facilities

Teachers that have given up on themselves, their students, and their school and are ROAD (retired on active duty)

Not enough money to provide the very basics in the classrooms....the loss of the arts (music, drama, art, humanities, etc) because of budget cuts

More administrators than teachers in some systems it seems....

And finally, parents that just dont sit with their kids to help them enough

All problems that can be fixed....if we are willing

If we have the guts to fight the strong unions, the city councils, and make our schools better

Is college a waste....for some, absolutely....

I like the Germany form of education in which by the age of early teens, you are designated into a university program, or a technical program

My wifes family all still lives over there, and i am not an expert on it, but based on what i have learned, it seems like a good system

Not every child has the ability, or ambition to attend college...but almost every child can learn a good payable skill which will translate to a decent wage....isnt that what we should be shooting for? We still wont get to 100% for both areas, but maybe we can get to 85-90% which is a lot better than we have now
 
Well...I don't think the battle is lost. It only looks that way for now. There is a resilience to knowledge, learning, curiosity, inquiry. It can be stomped down for a while, but it springs up again.

Yes, unfortunately the same problems I pointed out in University have also infected schools generally, high school included. The assault has come from both liberals and conservatives, for very different reasons on each side. But yeah, education has been devalued in this country--it's all about money, money, money, and the folks at the top just don't understand the role that the humanities play in a healthy functioning society.

No Sir, it is all about money and/or UTOPIA....sedating that massive fear these very ill moderns cant escape but damn they sure try by buying a BUS TICKET TO UTOPIA.

And ya I listened to Jung well enough to know that what is suppressed always erupts with massive force in the most unexpected places....the UNIVERSE is just in the end.

Sometimes I forget.

Thanks for the reminder!

:2wave:
 
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