posted 04-29-2008 03:15 PM            

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I believe that colleges should be required to prominently report the following data . . .

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Why, and required by whom? Isn't the marketplace working here? I can find many guides rating colleges. Or, is the misleading marketing that egregious?

posted 04-29-2008 03:55 PM            

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Also, the past advantage of college graduates in the job market is eroding. Ever more students attend college at the same time as ever more employers are automating and sending offshore ever more professional jobs, and hiring part-time workers. Many college graduates are forced to take some very nonprofessional positions, such as driving a truck or tending bar.

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I'm calling BS on this one. This has always been so. Labor intensive farming gave way to mechanization. I'm sure Henry Ford's assembly line destroyed many a job with a long and rich history. Electronic computers put out of work all the human computers. Yet somehow things haven't degenerated to the point where we are a country of truck drivers and bar tenders. The author over-states the case here.

Still the article does raise some damn good points. I actually started my college education at a local junior college. In california the system is set up so that transfers from JCs are more likely to get in than freshman. Many UCs are heavily impacted at the lower division courses (i.e. those ginormous lecture halls) and so transfering in with a good GPA is preferred.

Also, you spend your time in classes with about 30 or so other students. The professor's teach the courses and do the office hours. And the cost is a fraction of the cost of a four year institution, and given the number of JCs one can often live at home which is another cost savings.

All that, and in Cali, you find the...ahhh...less intellectually inclined females at the JCs which, oddly enough seems to be correlated with looks.

------------------
Steve
"In a nutshell, he [Steve] is 100% unadulterated evil. I do not believe in a "Satan", but this man is as close to "the real McCoy" as they come."
--Jamey Lee West
steve_v@steveverdon.com
Deinonychus antirrhopus

posted 04-29-2008 03:56 PM            

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Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.

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That is shocking in that they are persevering that long that ineffectually and no one (counselor) has taken them aside and applied a gentle clue-bat

posted 04-29-2008 04:07 PM            

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That is shocking in that they are persevering that long that ineffectually and no one (counselor) has taken them aside and applied a gentle clue-bat

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Here is one, somewhat cynical, explanation: race. Non-white and non-asian students tended to have the worst records when it came to getting their 4 year degree. At UCLA there were all sorts fo "free" programs to help this ethnic group, that race, and even women get their grades up. And lets not even talk about remedial level courses. There was a buttload of them at freaking UCLA. I don't doubt that Berkely would be any different.

posted 04-29-2008 10:43 PM            

Thomas Sowell once described our national obsession with giving everybody a degree in terms of people watching a football game. If one person can see better by standing up, can't everybody see better if we all stand up? Well no, obviously if everybody stands up we all see the same as if we were all sitting down. Similarly, when most people didn't have degrees, those who did tended to make a lot more money, but that doesn't mean that if everybody has a degree that we'll all make more money. Sowell said something to the effect that we can't all jump ahead of each other in the employment line.

posted 05-01-2008 06:15 PM            

Many of us are old enuf to remember trade apprenticeships, shop and home ec classes. Many of us provided valuable help on farms, watching younger children while parents worked, earning extra money to help family finances, cooking, gardening, etc. The Right and Left Coasts have taken care of that. Taxes are so confiscatory that few can afford a one income family that sustains itself for the most part. Children are parked in daycare or in front of a TV or computer screen until parents come home.

Teenagers are distinct from children. In the days of yore, they were adults. I repeat, today they are effectively useless.

A 4-year degree used to mean something. No more. Now it means that you have a smattering of education about nothing very useful and probably don't know how to mop the floor of a convenience store.

HWMBB and I both worked during high school. All four of our children worked during high school, thus providing themselves their own allowances and relieving us from that weekly expenditure.

Any of you have teenagers? Are they able to earn their own wages? Or are they not permitted to work according to state child labor laws. Ah. Laws.

I'm left wondering how colleges, which charge increasing high tuitions, produce such a low percentage of usefully educated graduates. It looks like a "chew 'em up and spit 'em out as sophomores" process to me.

A college graduate has been pushed, prodded and had dynamite under their butts to excel and achieve what is generally a sub-standard education. Armed with a degree, they can't find jobs and will not deign to do menial work.

Which brings me to the immigration problems...

posted 05-03-2008 03:49 PM            

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It's not what you know, it's who you know

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Under this philosophy, college is not so much education as initiation into an old-boy network. There are even some professors who believe this. After all, getting tenure is basically a matter of persuading your future peers that you deserve it.

For college students who believe this, we can expect them to treat college as one big party. They do enough academically to keep from flunking out, but the important thing is to meet and impress as many of your fellow students as possible. This is best done at social gatherings.

posted 05-04-2008 07:39 AM            

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Originally posted by Victor:
For college students who believe this, we can expect them to treat college as one big party. They do enough academically to keep from flunking out, but the important thing is to meet and impress as many of your fellow students as possible. This is best done at social gatherings.

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There is a scary amount of trooth in this statement.

posted 05-04-2008 11:48 AM            

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Originally posted by Victor:
...For college students who believe this, we can expect them to treat college as one big party....

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posted 05-04-2008 02:33 PM            

An article was blaming at least some part of the current mortgage "crisis" on people taking out home equity loans to fund their children's tuition at the most prestigious colleges to which they were offered admission. The theory was that they believe that it's not what you know but who you know that gets you ahead economically and socially in life. Consequently women often began to work full time jobs so that the family could afford a more expensive home in a neighborhood with better public schools and later took out home equity loans for the better college. Now they find themselves upside down because of falling real estate values and if one of them loses their job, ...

posted 05-04-2008 04:09 PM            

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Teenagers are distinct from children. In the days of yore, they were adults. I repeat, today they are effectively useless.

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posted 05-04-2008 11:19 PM            

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Originally posted by Victor:
They do enough academically to keep from flunking out, but the important thing is to meet and impress as many of your fellow students as possible. This is best done at social gatherings.

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posted 05-05-2008 10:19 PM            

As [b]Jessho[b] so eloquently points out, humility is often the key to personal and professionally rewarding success. Advertising ain't engineering, but there's a significant nose to the grind stone and grind it out factor.

I gave up and went freelance in the mid 80s, thus was able to work with Creative Directors (the word sometimes came first) who were talented and experienced. Was a complete pleasure and earned me an award as most valuable freelance writer. No bragging involved, I was simply the most experienced, versatile writer in town (it was an east coast training thing). Admitting I had taken the wrong tack and was in need of redirection and more information was an asset. I learned more; clients got more.

I've worked with a lot of engineers over the course of years... hot shot kids who disdained my lack of technical knowledge and really experienced beard strokers who would slow down and enable me to translate their technical expertise into understandable English. I made some good friends who were patient with me and spoke in words of one syllable when I needed them to do so. I value their friendships.

posted 05-06-2008 08:46 PM            

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Originally posted by jessho:
The best example I've ever seen of this was a 19 year old baby huey college student that didn't know how to use a shovel. He tried it with one hand...no luck. We finally gave him instructions and he learned, after an hour of intense instruction, how to pick up debris and dirt from paving. Of course, he became overheated in the 80 degree heat and had to spend the rest of the day sitting in the truck. He was relieved when I fired him.

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Last night I went to our local grocery store, and one of their employees, I'm guessing ~18 y/o, was sweeping the front sidewalk. He used a broom exactly the way that my four year-old uses one. I can't even describe it in a way that does it justice. It was going to take him hours to do a ten-minute job. I almost wanted to snatch the broom from him and say "Look! Watch me!" and show him how to sweep. But I restrained myself.

I believe that Alexander conquered the world (as he knew it) at the age of 22.

posted 05-07-2008 10:44 PM            

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Dr. Pournelle,

Does it strike anyone that the idea of saddling our children with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt before they have even started their working lives is simply crazy? Are there any other successful industrialized nations which do this?

It seems to me that the most successful period of real (not virtual) economic growth came in the wake of the largest publicly financed education effort in history – the GI Bill.

I’m sure that some, if not most, of my fellow Chaos Manor followers hate the “liberal” idea, but expenditures on infrastructure really are investments. And, there could be few more important aspects of our infrastructure than higher education. Just as a well-armed population can be an insurance against tyranny, so can a well-educated one.

In other words, higher education should be free to all who qualify for it. That is, it should be paid for out of the pockets of taxpayers. Did I really say that? Yup.

Richard York

It's certainly crazy.

As a product of the Korean GI Bill I can hardly denounce the concept. The problems really came when the intellectuals convinced people that "investment" in trade schools and such like wasn't as desirable as "investment" in higher education meaning universities. At the same time, the State Colleges became "State universities" and in the "upgrade" put more into graduate schools to the detriment of undergraduate education. We then poured more money into the "university" system which is quite unsuitable for education of more than about 25% of the population (I'd put that at a lower figure, but we can stay with that).

Now a lot of students who would do well at "college" level education can't get that; they have to go to "universities" and learn French Narrative Theory in Freshman Comp.

If investment is needed in "education" -- and it is -- it's in training in technical skills. Most of that could be done in high school. Of course the high school teachers don't want to work that hard and will stand in union solidarity with the college professors who want the large number of students willing to borrow money to go listen to foreign graduate students teach introductory math courses in incomprehensible dialects, but it's "world class" isn't it? Doesn't everyone deserve a "world class university education"?

So we continue to neglect the great majority of our citizens to benefit a handful of intellectuals. And they never catch wise.

============w

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Well, even a clown is right twice a day ...