Posted on 09/19/2013 5:40:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Fidel Castro once boasted that in Cuba even the prostitutes had university degrees. That was probably true. Communist countries had made a habit of running diploma mill educational systems in which much of the population, even the illiterate, would have some kind of degree.
Cuban education is actually pretty terrible. Its med school grads don’t even qualify in other Latin American countries. And we’re headed the same way with education being treated as a social program and schools that act like diploma mills with graduation quotas.
We’re spending insane amounts of money on overeducation that has no actual use. Instead more janitors in the US have college degrees than NASA employees and we have the best educated nannies in the world.
Elizabeth Chuck of NBC News reported this week on a “fast growing segment of the nanny industry”: American-born college graduates. Since the mid-nineties, the profession has seen a rise in these well-credentialed caretakers, who “could go into law, medicine or other fields but are choosing to become career nannies,” often because they cannot find work elsewhere.
Cliff Greenhouse, president of New York City’s Pavillion Agency for personal service placement, confirms it. “More and more families are saying, ‘I just want someone with a Master’s degree,’” he told me over the phone. “Whether or not it’s in child psychology or some other field, it shows a commitment to education that families believe will rub off on their children.”
That’s nice I suppose. Unfortunately much of this is being subsidized by taxpayers. And it means that we have students piling up six figure debts and then going to work as nannies.
As Christina Hoff Summers frequently points out, women are a majority on campus.
Women in the United States now earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates.
But what isn’t discussed is what happens to a lot of them. Quite a few apparently become nannies. A job once meant for women from the low end of the upper class with no other prospects.
We’re not quite at the point where everyone has a degree, but we are on the road to there. College degrees don’t mean the jobs of tomorrow, no matter how often Obama says it. Often they mean getting the same job that people without college get, but with the added bonus of a pile of student loans and a job market where employers now learn to demand people with Master’s Degrees for work that doesn’t require it.
/johnny
I recommend tax accounting.
Lots of work!
Universities world wide have a problem with dropping enrollments. The human population growth is slowing As a result you are seeing many small institutions have increasing problems. The first thing that is going to get the axe are things like “Gender studies” which can be absorbed into areas like Anthropology, Sociology and the like.
There is going to be a huge retrenchment of higher education in the next 50 years or so. I sort of think as a professor that I am living in the twilight of the institutional university
/johnny
pingo
Big Education is one of the funding mechanisms for liberals. That’s why budget for it will be impossible to reduce. As long as kids (suckers) are willing to borrow to the hilt to pay for unusable degrees, the charade will continue.
Bloomberg reported today that all the increase in women’s employment comes from waiting tables. You don’t need a college degree to ask, “You want fries with that?”
Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.
What’s the problem? Just have the IRS issue everybody a college degree and a check for $1,000,000. We’ll all be smart and rich!
The longer they stay in school, the more highly indoctrinated they can become and as a bonus they are NOT out in the workforce looking for those non existent jobs. Its a win win for the Marxists,
Mike Rowe (from the reality show "Dirty Jobs")
Great post, and the reason it’s done is to route taxpayer subsidized funding via colleges to overpaid profs and admins who donate heavily to Democrats.
Meritocracy. A degree, no matter how useless, for the sake of having a degree. It’s the bar to entry put up by the HR folk who share similar views. A meritocracy degree shows that you have been properly indoctrinated, that you can “play ball”, that you will “get with the program”.
“A degree, no matter how useless, for the sake of having a degree. It’s the bar to entry put up by the HR folk who share similar views.”
Well, to some degree (so to speak), a non-technical degree is proof that you went through remedial HS education (if needed), and have some level of capability to finish something that you don’t “have” to finish.
College grads can always work up to being manager of McDonalds.
Tell young people to go to a two-year trade school that will place them in the fracking industry. Then come to PA.
Years ago I worked with an Iranian who left just before the Shah went down. I was grumbling about the bureaucracy in this country.
He gave me an Iranian example. He had to have his exit papers cleared by the authorities and had to go through 22 different guys, each adding his own rubber stamp. As No. 22 finished, he pointed to No. 23 and told the guy to go there. No. 23 precisely folded the papers twice, inserted it into an envelope and told him he was free to go.
The guy said that everybody who could went to college, but when they got out, the economy had no jobs for them, so the government took up the slack. It was the same with every department, bloated with college types with no place to go.
RE: Tell young people to go to a two-year trade school that will place them in the fracking industry. Then come to PA.
They could probably come to New York if by some miracle, our government allows fracking...
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