Posted on 12/27/2016 8:10:36 AM PST by Academiadotorg
On second reading of what I posted in #5, I had a double negative there. My bad.
I almost fainted when I found out a 40-something friend of my brother-in-law was making $150,000 working on the piers. I thought about my White Collar income and almost cried LOL
If you look at what is claimed to be the 10 most popular college majors in 2016. Only 3 out of 10 accounting , nursing & business BAs/BSs have high probability of giving any ‘Return-On-Investment (ROI)’ to the taxpayer (and the college/university- as gifts, etc.) if USG-backed student loans are used to finance. Any USG-back loan system should take ROI into account before financing.
Aside: I have no insight as to who or how this list was compiled but it seems to “fit” personal anecdotal evidence as both a student & parent. I got it off the “Internet” so take it with a grain of salt!
true and scary. I had to lay the law down for my 13 year old niece. My sister was proofing her work and then sending it to me to proof. I said you can send it to me after Bianca proofs it twice and corrects it twice. And if I find a lot of mistakes that means she’s not paying enough attention. She’s doing much better now. Sometimes a parent needs an outside View. I wonder how many parents are doing this and are really depriving their kid of some of the education. My sister didn’t mean harm and I was glad I opened her eyes.
My daughter’s art degree is one that most around would find useless.
But she is working, and selling her art and making a fine living. Its been two years since she asked for any money, she lives in an apartment, she’s paid off a car, and pays her student loans on time...plus a little.
I know there is a lot of talk about “useless” degrees. I would argue that its not the degree per se, but the person. She works harder for every dollar she earns, compared to me. But that just means she is beating the competition.
I’m a college-educated white-collar professional.
My plumber lives down the street from me, in a nice middle class suburban house that’s just as nice as mine.
you should be on the transitions team;>)
1. Develop a faculty who have private sector jobs, and teach a limited number of focused hours per quarter/semester. This does several things, including decreasing the dependency of universities on federal grant dollars, and bringing in more diverse ideas and real-world experiences into the universities. Yes, we already have this with ‘adjunct’ faculty, but that's not a sufficient model. These should be ‘full’ faculty members. It would be the faculty member's choice to be either funded by grants pertaining to their academic focus, or by their private sector activities.
2. Set an absolute limit of the amount of federal grant money that can go to non-citizens. It is the tax dollars of Americans that fund these grants, and they should go to advance American science, while bringing in a smaller number of scholars from abroad who truly want to train in and be part of the American system.
3. Institute mandatory ‘exit’ testing for all universities receiving federal funding. Graduating students would be required to take an exit test which would be used as a general measure of whether or not they have obtained sufficient knowledge within their chosen field of study. The questions for these exit tests would be taken from a pool of questions solicited from private citizens working in these fields, and would not be written either by government or come from university faculty. To begin, the numbers wouldn't be presented as individual scores, but as an average from each institution - and made public - such that the ability of each institution to impart knowledge to their students would be publicly available information.
4. Make it mandatory that every university that either receives federal money, or is designated a not-for-profit, has to make publicly available their entire budget, their income (including all ‘gifts’ - including gifts of stock), their investments, the outside affiliations of the administration, faculty, and boards, and to document how every penny of ‘overhead’ money they receive from federal grants is spent. Any significant discrepancies would be grounds for cessation of federal grants to that institution.
There's plenty more, but this is a start.
If we took 1000 examples, your daughter would be a minority. Truly an exceptional young lady and a living example of the old saying - “Exception-to-the-Rule”. If the USG could only finance those like your daughter we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Yes, I paid for my kid's college and grad school. Yes, the price was ridiculous. If I were King, I'd make colleges, not the taxpayers, underwrite school loans. Schools would need to take into consideration what they were lending money for, and to whom. Then the prices might not be so high, and the majors so silly.
I dunno, you almost got me to look up what a DoTorg is....
“saying that based on his travel to Europe”
A good number of my professors during the early 60s had travel to Europe and even the exotic south pacific which travel was provided by the military. I don’t think they viewed these experiences as sophisticated as it included actual combat with implements not words. Amazing how they had a very American focused view of the world.
We are born and we die.
What happens in between is our “life”.
How do we determine whether our life is “good” or “bad”?
Is it based on wealth?
Is it based on looks?
Is life merely the acquisition and breaking down of food to power the pumping of the heart?
You train for a job.
You acquire an education to improve your person.
Education is a good thing.
It’s just so poorly done.
I am in awe of a Downs Syndrome child who smiles “just because”.
But I grieve that he will never know or understand the beauty of a Robert Frost poem.
My best education didn’t come from sitting in a lecture hall. It came while riding a tank.
Yes, everyone deserves an education but perhaps that education can be found sitting under a tree or at the dinner table.
My teachers at the university were mostly a miserable lot trying to sell themselves as an education.
Yep.
S.T.E.M students might not fair the best on tangible ROI. Technology and Engineering pay off with good solid jobs, but encumber the graduate and overwhelm whatever extra Salary benefits they received.
Science and Math are worse. If you’re not in the top .2% you’re basically a high school teacher candidate. University level if you’re in the best of the 2nd tier group.
Each one of those in the S.T.E.M. class though has an added benefit. They’re good bets. if even 1 out of a 100,000 are successful per generation, that could be a great economic win for the country.
— which leads to another gripe. University level schooling in the United States is not the right of foreign students, like it has become. Foreign should be limited in mass and controlled by the government in the form of largesse to countries with exemplary cooperation.
Our Colleges and Universities are letting in elements of foreign students that are subversive to U.S standards.
To piggy back on your post, student loans should be made like other types of loans. The amount of the loan is made in direct proportion to the ability to pay it back.
In this fashion, students in the S.T.E.M. fields would get a proportionately larger loan than those in a “Studied” program.
Over the long haul, most of the “touchie-feelie” faculty would diminish or become nonexistent as less and less students enroll in these fields.
The bonus is that it is the liberal faculty that are the supporters of “safe-spaces” other such nonsense, and less of them there are, the more students will be prepared to interact with, survive in, and excel in the real world.
For instance, I had a Resident Advisor in college who was brilliant. Smart, motivated, hard-working. Great all-around guy. Could do anything he wanted. Personally, I thought that he'd be a good doctor or engineer, because he was good at figuring things out.
His Major? Elementary Education. He wanted to teach little kids. I'm certain that he's a whiz at it, and that his students are all better off for him being in the classroom.
But....to my point....it's the person, not the major. The problem is, useless, zero-standards "Fill-in-the-blank" Studies majors, along with cheap government money, open up the college experience to people who've no business being there, thus reducing the value of degrees for people who actually earn them.
“My plumber lives down the street from me, in a nice middle class suburban house that’s just as nice as mine.”
thanks for the straight line: Doctor has a faucet leak calls in a plumber. Plumber looks at it says it will cost $150 to fix it. 15 minutes later the drip is fixed. Doctor says, wow, that cost $150 that is like $10 a minute. He adds, I don’t make that much doing physicals for which I am paid about $300 for an hours work. Plumber agrees with him saying I used to get paid that much for physicals when I was a doctor too.
I’ve long believed that if you study a discipline where the preponderance of core learning doesn’t involve closed-form formulas or the rigorous understanding of algorithms and the statistical basis on which many are formed, then you are investing in something that has value that is yet to be determined.
The exception to this of course are disciplines like medicine and a couple of others, but the core to me are the ones that advance us as a civilization. This touchy-feely crap is way too susceptible to the baser human proclivities for my taste.
Jobs by designated education level of occupations, May 2013
34% of jobs require "some college" up through doctorate degrees. 18% require a bachelors degree.
39% of jobs require high school graduation. 27% require less than high school.
The majority of degrees required for the available jobs that do require degrees are probably a wide variety of useful curricula, (the traditional matches of degree/job) i.e medical, business, technology, engineering, math, science (real science).
Roughly a third of our work force needs a college education, and an education that is related to a particular job field.
I have never heard of job markets advertising for any of the "studies" majors, the "snowflakes" fields of study; nor any advertisements for "climate scientists" or any other communist propagandist outside of government fabricated fields.
All of the education, sociology, social work, psychology, and criminal justice majors are dependent on high government growth and a huge push toward a dystopian society to manufacture their jobs, funded by unwilling taxpayers.
What can start at the federal level is to quit funding for any college or university that supports or promotes the counterproductive, brain-damaging curricula that spawned the recent wave of snowflake riots.
States can clamp down on their state colleges and universities, and can do so more effectively and quickly. Let the taxpayers vote directly on whether they want to continue funding athletic programs that are nothing but continuous rape-fests for sub-human illiterates. Let the taxpayers vote directly on whether they want to continue funding the brain-washing of snowflakes by communist professors.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.