Posted on 03/04/2013 1:02:10 AM PST by Kaslin
Conservatives should welcome the decline of academia as we know it. I, for one, will celebrate its death by engaging in the same activity that characterized my four years at what some call its pinnacle– drinking a lot of Coors Light.
There is still nostalgia among conservatives, especially older ones who have forgotten what college is really like, for the idea of higher education as a rigorous venue for intellectual growth, an environment of exciting and vibrant ideas shared by wise, caring educators dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
Today, it is nothing of the sort.
For the vast majority of traditional, liberal arts students, college is a four-year blur of cheap alcohol and tawdry hooks-ups, with their few sober moments characterized by interaction with pony-tailed TAs spouting off about “patriarchal paradigms” and trying to pick up on cute sophomores. Worse, this bacchanalia will saddle the participants with a couple hundred thousand in student debt that they get to carry off into real life, where they will discover that the only thing their degrees in Comparative Norwegian Feminist Literature qualify them for is exciting careers in the world of artisanal coffee retailing.
Call it the College-Progressive Complex. The first part consists of the schools themselves, with their herds of administrators, professors and impoverished grad students chasing the brass tenure ring. Think of it as a liberal tick, sucking blood and growing fatter off the efforts of Americans who actually produce something while contributing nothing to society except the clearly secondary contributions of those few in the fields of science and mathematics.
The other component of the Complex is the progressive element. Colleges and universities serve as a reservoir of leftism in society that serves several functions for those trying to turn America into a less blonde, less macho Sweden. First, it provides a taxpayer-subsidized lifestyle for millions of liberal voters to enjoy without actually having to produce anything. No wonder university types vote 95% for Democrats – they are voting themselves a salary and a sinecure. It’s welfare for people with graduate degrees and “Coexist” bumper stickers.
The Complex also provides an infrastructure for developing progressive ideas and a stage for agitation. It provides leftist access to the vulnerable minds of the future leaders of the nation, making the Complex a tool for the indoctrination of progressive obsessions that people in the real world would reject out of hand. Try talking about the importance of transcending traditional gender roles to an iron worker – he’ll probably think you’re hitting on him.
Sure, there are some relevant areas of study within the Complex, generally ones involving numbers. Rule of thumb: If it doesn’t require that you know calculus, it’s a phony major. The hard sciences are just afterthoughts today – Chemistry is boring and hard, but Oppressions Studies is so cutting edge! Yet, it is unclear why research and the training of scientists and mathematicians and such could not be done more efficiently in the real world. Bill Gates is famous for not being a Harvard alumnus – many of the high tech visionaries dropped out of school and found their own way out in the – gasp! – free market.
So, how does the Complex work? It’s actually kind of brilliant. It convinces otherwise intelligent people that their children must have a sub-par, dubiously useful product and then charges them through the nose for it. The government helps by providing loans at subsidized rates, but which can never be discharged. Make no mistake – the government is in on the scam. Every time the Complex hikes its fees, the government increases loans, which sparks more price hikes, in a vicious circle that leads to 50 year olds carrying $100,000 in non-dischargeable debt.
Except now the higher education bubble (to quote Instapundit Glenn Reynolds) is bursting. People are starting to see that maybe getting that piece of paper isn’t worth carrying around an anchor of debt for the next three decades. It makes no sense to go into hock when there is no job waiting at the other end of the tunnel. No, that’s not a light down there at the other end – it’s an oncoming train.
Look at how law school applications are in free fall. I hire lawyers and train them myself. They usually have about $200,000 in debt. To service that debt, I’d have to pay them about $133,333 per year. Do you think I pay a kid with zero experience $133,333 a year? There are far too many graduates and too few jobs, so I can hire a new lawyer for $50,000 – which is less than I made when I started 20 years ago. And that’s one near the top of his class at a prestigious school. Supply and demand is awesome for me; for young people, who largely voted for Obama, not so much. They get the hope but those of us who are established in liberal-approved fields like the law get to keep the change.
So, we have a higher education system that 1) empowers our opponents, 2) costs too much to both individuals and taxpayers, and 3) provides a crappy product 4) for which there is little market. What can’t go on won’t go on, and we conservatives need to help the Complex to die, preferably without dignity.
Let’s start by rejecting the insane notion that everyone should go to college. Fortunately, the old idea that your kid is a failure (meaning you, as a parent, are a failure) if he didn’t go to college is fading away. There are plenty of successful folks out there who avoided the schooling scam. In fact, getting some real life experience actually doing something useful is now the guarantee of a good career that college used to be.
Electricians, technicians, plumbers – people like that can't not get a job for good money. Let the smug gal with the sociology degree sneer at the auto mechanic pulling in $75,000 a year as she hands him his grande Javan Sunrise. Maybe her tribal tatts and self-esteem will keep her warm when she and her roommates can’t pay the gas company.
While common sense and caveat emptor will put two rounds in its chest, technology will put the coup de grace in the Complex’s head. A decade from now, why will someone bother sitting in a huge lecture hall listening to some second-string professor drone on and on when he can download a lecture by a Nobel Prize winner for free? “Bueller, Bueller, Bueller” is going to be replaced by logging in when and where it’s convenient.
The centuries-old lecture hall model will crumble. Distance learning is coming, and while the big name schools like Harvard will always have suckers lined up to park their kids for a four year vacation, the mid- and low-prestige schools are going to dry up and blow away. One piece of the puzzle, credentialing (which is all higher education is about anyway), needs to be worked through, but once folks like me who hire people realize that there is little meaningful difference between on-line degrees and in-person ones, the levee will break.
And we conservatives should rejoice at the resulting tsunami that will wash away one of the left’s most powerful bases of operations. Sure, the savings will be welcome and seeing liberalism lose its bully pulpit for zombifying future generations is gratifying. But the real joy will come from watching millions of the College-Progressive Complex’s inhabitants forced to actually produce something besides fascist speech codes and dissertations like A Three-Hour Cruise to Male Oppression: Gender Identity Issues on Gilligan’s Island.
Now fetch my latte, professor.
RIP Higher education.
I hate optimists.. they do live in reality..
They OWN utopian academia in socialist cabals.. will NOT let it demise..
They have no problem with academia or re-education “camps”.. same to them.. either way..
Or even concentration camps.. or all three..
This kid has no idea what he is dealing with..
They will NOT let the media recover either..
Only way out of this box is the shedding of BLOOD....
Always was so, will remain so..
A corrupt people will make this so..
The evil stalking the land will not go away easily..
Only a courageous few can change “this”.. may not be many left..
http://www.afailureofcivility.com/
Some of the mountains of skulls in Cambodia were the end product of a brilliant plan by Pol Pot to get rid of his opponents in academia. He closed the universities and drove its inhabitants into the jungle. Having no basic survival skills, they died. He didn’t even have to buy bullets.
...”the idea of higher education as a rigorous venue for intellectual growth, an environment of exciting and vibrant ideas shared by wise, caring educators dedicated to the pursuit of truth.”
...and it’s so much more meaningful when academic fraud
is what really gets you through it all. “No worries!”
Don't try to kill them all off ... my son is headed off to one of three Texas private Universities in the fall and they are all as conservative as can be. A tour guide told us that they had a gun control discussion in one Poly Sci class and, out of a class of 30, not one student (male or female) was in favor of gun control.
The entire government schools system will be overturned within the next couple of decades.
http://theadvocate.com/home/5303014-125/lsu-going-online
LSU going online
This is the truth. We know GaTech engineering grads who were hired (at least they were hired)...for $38K per year.
And there are many entry level jobs that require a grad degree (MBA or Masters in their business field) in order to be hired, and the starting pay is around 40K. But as I said, at least they are employed...and if they prove a valuable employee, the raises come after a couple years of proving themselves.
P.S. None of the grads I'm referencing voted for Obama :)
Peer pressure is especially potent during the late teens and early twenties.
Good post and a good adjunct to the Mike Adams article you also posted.
Another problem is corporate America insisting on degrees for the mail room boy.. Guess they’re in on it too
Fixing our colleges is relatively easy.
Strip the taxpayer funding out so the best and brightest don’t have to slog through a sea of mediocre students and professors.
I believe that says something about supply and demand. There's a glut of people looking for jobs, so potential employers can pick the cream of the crop.
An example is employers who won't hire applicants with a misdemeanor on their record. It used to be that only felonies mattered. (It happened to my grand son).
“RIP Higher education.”
Let us hope. It’s no longer education as we all know.
The reason for a degree for the mail room boy is to evidence certain prescience that can be leveraged so he can one day be promoted.
Plan ahead.....
It would be easier and cheaper for employers to able to use their own selection criteria, such as general aptitude tests, but those are racist.
They don’t need our help. They’re quite capable of doing it themselves as they nearly have.
Can you name them ? :)
“This is the truth. We know GaTech engineering grads who were hired (at least they were hired)...for $38K per year.”
And an 18 year old fresh out of school can make about 50% more than that in the oilfields of West TX.
Just about anything you want to learn in the fundamental sciences is available for free on the internet (with more to come as MIT and other high power outfits go to open course formats) *except* for lab experience.
And forward-thinking companies (like pharmaceutical firms) that want to get a shot at candidates smart enough to avoid 6-figure debt in learning the fundamentals of their field could readily provide lab training for the folks they’re interested in.
So in the sciences, and perhaps in engineering, a requirement for college could easily fall by the wayside - and that would be great.
So far as most of the other stuff colleges offer - nowadays it’s mostly political indoctrination, and if that’s all they’ve got to offer, they’re going to have a tougher and tougher time convincing folks to fork over a quarter million dollars to get it.
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