Posted on 06/13/2018 4:55:49 AM PDT by C19fan
YES! It is individual drive and determination that makes one a success in these matters. I admire your tenacity and willingness to get the job done. Kudos X E128.
All university administrators (except maybe at Grove City and Hillsdale) are low-level government employees.
No wonder they are statists.
Yup. Too many pointless majors.
Quite a number of years ago now, I earned a liberal arts degree. Throughout my program, I had no idea what my professors thought about anything, except the subject matter they were teaching.
I was taught that, when reading literature, I had to consider the times in which it was written. Context was important. We also looked at “great themes:” life, death, love, honor, and so forth.
A few years later, a family member was taking a college English class and was struggling. She had an important paper to write and was having a hard time and asked if I could help. I told her that I would try. The paper was to be based on a Hemingway short story.
I had never read that particular story, so I did so. I made some notes and did some thinking. I then wrote down some notes that I thought my relative might use in writing her paper (I did not write it for her).
She answered me back: no, no, this won’t do. It’s not what my professor is looking for.
What? She sent me a copy of her class notes taken from the professor’s lecture.
The story I had read was fairly early Hemingway; it was written shortly after he returned from Europe, where he had been an ambulance driver in wartime. Silly me, I thought that had had some impact on the story he wrote.
What did her professor read in the story, that I did not see? Feminism. FEMINISM? HEMINGWAY? Really? The notes consisted of a bunch of abject nonsense, conjured totally out of the professor’s head and not from the actual story.
After more thought, I gave my relative a different set of points to use in writing the paper. I told her that what I was giving her was complete nonsense BUT it was what her professor wanted to hear. She used what I gave her and the professor loved it and gave her a high grade on the paper. (My professors probably would not have given the paper a passing grade).
The professor wasn’t interested in a paper reflecting the students’ own thoughts and analysis of the story; she was interested in having her own ideas and biases reflected back to her.
(I could imagine my own professors’ response to her paper. “That’s what I said in my lecture. You just repeated it back to me. I want to know what YOU thought!”)
We subject students to that sort of teaching and expect critical thinking in return?
I ended up going into a completely different professional field, but I’ve always regarded my liberal arts education as foundational. I never regretted getting that degree.
I’m sure it helps that I graduated with a grand total of $1200 in student loans!
You may have gone to college with dreams of a PhD and great contributions to science, but you are sheltered if you think that’s what the majority of STEM majors do.
Because colleges are not colleges. They are institutions wholly owned by the left in which they are free to implement leftist principles to their heart’s content without oversight. They do not plan to teach. They plan to indoctrinate with leftist principles that will destroy the family and the value systems passed on down through the ages by family and church.
Ironically, the author of the book has one of the most worthless of worthless college degrees for the vast majority of sociology majors.
Good for you. All of my degrees are non-traditional to some extent. The hardest was the law degree received at 65. Much good luck with your program and look hard for the master’s that would do you most good or be the most fun, perhaps both. My master’s was in computer systems management, kind of a soft-compsci/mba hybrid.
Because ‘education factories’ hire instructors that have medium to low-medium IQ’s.
Oh, they're learning plenty:
-- They're learning they are victims in one form or another, far too many categories to list here
-- They're learning to hate this wonderful country that has given them so much
-- They're learning to hate anyone who disagrees with the "holy" leftist ideology with which they have been indoctrinated by taxpayer-supported institutions for most of their lives
-- They're learning that bigotry, intolerance, bullying and violence are acceptable social behaviors when confronting anyone not on the Left as these uneducated, unworthy "deplorables" are not just wrong ... they're evil and they must be destroyed ... not just defeated.
Oh ... college students -- particularly at "liberal arts" colleges are learning plenty!
College is a school of floundering because at this point almost all educators and students were not rigorously educated in grammar school and high school. Reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, literature, memorization, history, study habits, respect for authority, exercise and leisure, stable family,government and self control mostly gone.
My area of fun/expertise is cyber security. I have recently found out that Colorado Technical University has a doctor’s program in cyber security. So my masters would be aligned with that. The idea being that I could use my Doctor’s degree to teach in a local college / university after I retire from the industry.
That’s an easy question. Colleges aren’t TEACHING anything to them.
The problem goes far beyond unfocused students and liberal professors/administrators. I blame the judiciary and bureaucrats who have criminalized intelligence and basic skills tests from the employment interview process because certain protected demographic groups consistently score low on these exams. As a result, many employers now use a college degree as the minimum qualification for employment upon the erroneous assumption that people with a college degree are smarter and have better skills than applicants without a college degree. This has caused parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to push college over technical training, which has resulted in a student body that lacks the motivation, intelligence, and skill sets to succeed academically and socially in college based upon the collegiate standards that applied to the baby boomers and prior generations. College and universities expanded to accommodate the influx of students and they now need to fill seats to pay the bills, which has perpetuated the downward spiral. Just my not so humble opinion.
I agree with 9YearLurker. Where I went to get my EE degree they provided the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of the underlying math and physics. But you could also get by with "plug & chug", i.e. just memorize the appropriate formulas without really understanding them and get the right answers.
There were a heckova lot of plug-and-chuggers who just wanted to get the degree so they could get to work and start making money.
No shame in that, but they definitely weren't in college to get a broad education. I thought of them as mercenary engineers.
Excellent. I know someone who is doing precisely that in cybersecurity. He might not have the doctorate, but that is less important. Consider also that you can do the doctoral program without the master’s first. Might take a few more courses, but is often not required.
Thomas Paine once said “to argue with a person without reason is like administering medicine to the dead”.
Universities/Colleges should not have to be teaching 6 years worth of remedial skills.
The public schools are failures and the raw material for colleges are now at third world levels.
Time to clean leftism out of academia.
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