Overpaid intelligentsia.
I disagree with the notion that everyone deserves a college degree or even needs a college degree or is even smart enough to be in college. Whatever happened to Trades & Crafts? I know electricians that are doing quite well along with construction workers and other folk. I think the boom under Trump will create many of these jobs.
And the Academic and other critics of the “military-industrial complex” ignore President Eisenhower’s 2nd warning a couple of paragraphs later in that same farewell speech:
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
• and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
President Eisenhower’s entire farewell speech is at: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html
I would like to see all federal funds going to colleges be pulled and reevaluated based on S.T.E.M. scores. No more federal loans to would-be lawyers, actors, poets, social justice warriors, community organizers, or journalists. Let the state or the communities subsidize that themselves.
Would like to see a chart/map of where all academic federal dollars go and a breakdown of the Majors of federal student loan recipients.
Student loans for real life learning skills
Lefty college professors, who couldn’t make a living in the real world, are living off taxpayer programs, ancient endowments and off the backs of students piling up debt.
If students really wanted to protest something, they should demand colleges get rid of these leaches, and deliver affordable education that is worth something.
If Academia spent just a few dollars doing what they have taught consultants to do...they could cut the costs by 30-50%.
Of course, that would mean cutting non useful programs, slashing research, and allowing the football team to drop a couple of divisions and whither on the vine.
What good is academia if instead of thinking, it is used to agree only with government propaganda?
I have one child in college, #2 next year, #3 2019, #4 2022, #5 2027. No loans so far.
When I went to college my family paid $3800/year. When I went to medical school, it was $1600/year, the State of NY paid half and I paid the rest.
The status quo is so absurd, on so many levels, it’s hard to even think about it, much less write about it.
Unless and until federal student loans are abolished, the problem is going to get worse and worse.
Basically, it is a subset of the problem of substituting debt for money, so as to enslave the world.
Kill off "Studies".
Let the "Student"-Athletes join a minor league system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My own ideas of fixing the degenerate swamp that is our college and university system.
1. No tax monies. Period.
2. Students get jobs outside the college/university to pay their tuition. Learn to work while they learn their schooling.
3. Specialize “trade” schools for sciences and medicine. Cut out the fluff and nonsense requirements that don’t directly apply to the sciences.
4. Drop the whole non-science degree mills.
5. Make High School valid again.