Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time.
Quote:Don't Go To College
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Kurt Schlichter
Posted: Mar 22, 2018 12:01 AM
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"Higher education"? is terrible.
Please note the quotation marks, you doofy liberals who will no doubt fill the comments with high-pitched typing about how "Conservatives hate knowing stuff."? What passes for "education"? today is nothing of the sort, and what calls itself "academia"? is really just a venal trade guild packed with mediocrities desperately trying to keep fooling people into forking over $60,000 a year -- usually obtained via ruinous borrowing that ties a financial anchor around the defrauded grads' necks for the rest of their lives.
Today, academia's product is largely garbage -- gender studies, twisted history, and pointless sociology spin-offs like communications and political science. Yeah, we need more students studying politics when they don't even know that the Constitution says they can't shut people up because their feelz has got the hurtz.
Sure, the STEM fields produce a few grads who are going to be more than mere cogs in the corporate machine like their marketing major pals, and some STEM research is useful, but don't think STEM is immune from academia's endemic idiocy. Why, the latest thing is how science is racist because...well, probably because these hacks say everything is racist and the weak-willed gutless wonders of America's faculty are too scared to stand up and say, "Uh no, that's stupid and it's not a thing and stop it."?
What's worse is that most professors are not so dumb as to actually believe the nonsense we hear coming off our college campuses -- well, some of them are, but most aren't. They know it's poisonous baloney. They're just too scared to stand up to the sophomore bully boys, bully girls, and bully non-binaries who scour the countryside for witches to burn. Academics are the Ivy League version of that Broward County sheriff's deputy, knowing they should put themselves in harm's way to protect their students from this ideological assault, but being too cowardly to do it.
Pathetic.
Contemporary college is a scam, and if you fork over your money blindly you're the mark. A quarter million and what do you get? A piece of paper that memorializes your indoctrination plus cirrhosis of the liver.
Hillsdale College excepted, of course. And I wish I could except the service academies too, but when West Point is knowingly commissioning open commies it's clear that it's chosen not to meaningfully differentiate itself from the civilian four year resorts. Well, that's not quite right. At least after you graduate from one of the academies you will get a job -- hell, it doesn't seem the Army can even summon up the cojones to can Comrade Lieutenant yet. But you can't say that for the rest of academia. Here's your Feminist Theater Theory degree; welcome to funemployment! I guess being a barista with a $150K student loan debt is a kind of a career.
"But Kurt, what if I want to nurture my mind and explore my options in an environment of scholastic dedication and intellectual curiosity?"
Then you should run away from most colleges. Open environments? If you want a sneak peek at the kind of nanny state regime the liberals dream of for all of America, check out your local college campus. An unaccountable ruling class of overpaid administrators controls every aspect of the proles' lives -- yeah, you students are the masses, and if you think they're going to let you lose your chains you've been taking too many bong hits back in your dorm room. Justice? That comes pre-determined based on whatever ideological label they pin on you. Remember, evidence is a bourgeois conceit, while due process is racist and misogynist. Free speech? You're free to say whatever the grim gargoyles of the Social Justice Stasi approve of, but remember -- you can never be woke enough. You'll always be wrong somehow, because it's by declaring you a wrongthinker that they gain their power.
"But Kurt, I have a practical concern -- I want to go to law school."?
Don't go to law school. In fifteen years, robots will probably be doing most of what lawyers do today, and most of them will probably wear better suits. Getting a law degree in 2018 is like getting a phrenology degree in 1918.
So what do you do after high school? How about live? How about do something besides march into another soul-crushing conformity factory for four years? Get a job. Do something, anything besides rush to sit behind a desk for another half-decade. Join the Army -- realistically, you have a pretty good chance that your platoon leader won't be an America-hating Marxist or some virtue-signaling, girlfriendless geebo with a #VetsForGunReform bumpersticker on his Prius. Just do something real.
Then, once you've lived a little, and once you've learned enough about the world to resist the blithering nonsense you'll be bombarded with on campus, maybe you can consider college. Maybe you've earned some dough, or earned the GI Bill, and you don't have to wreck your financial future. Maybe you'll have a little maturity, so your college days won't just be a drunken haze, and you'll be able to cut through the guff and use the opportunities that college offers to meet your needs instead of just stumbling through it. I came back from the Gulf War and went straight into law school, back when it wasn't financial and intellectual hara kiri. I was ready, and I made it work for me. UC San Diego undergrad, not so much. Oh, I had some adventures, but I was four years older than most of my law school classmates and every single day I was prepared for class because that's what I had learned to do leading soldiers. I was ready.
Luckily the college as booze cruise model is collapsing under the weight of its infinite expense and finite returns, as well as under pressure from technology that allows people who really want to learn to use the same machine you are reading this on to find pretty much any knowledge they seek. The academic monopoly is slowly breaking apart, and that's good. So let's hope this is the last generation that has to spend the rest of its life paying off a grift.
B-b-but they're
accredited, how can they be committing academic fraud????
Quote:How Colleges Are Ripping Off a Generation of Ill-Prepared Students
Walter E. Williams / @WE_Williams / April 25, 2018 /
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Colleges are admitting students who have not mastered what used to be considered a ninth-grade level of proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. (Photo: Skynesher/Getty Images)
Earlier this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the nation's "report card,"? was released. It's not a pretty story.
Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.
The atrocious National Assessment of Educational Progress performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.
For blacks, the news is worse. Roughly 75 percent of black students received high school diplomas attesting that they could read and compute at the 12th-grade level. However, 83 percent could not read at that level, and 93 percent could not do math at that level.
It's grossly dishonest for the education establishment and politicians to boast about unprecedented graduation rates when the high school diplomas, for the most part, do not represent academic achievement. At best, they certify attendance.
Fraudulent high school diplomas aren't the worst part of the fraud. Some of the greatest fraud occurs at the higher education levels--colleges and universities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70 percent of white high school graduates in 2016 enrolled in college, and 58 percent of black high school graduates enrolled in college.
Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them?
It's inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and cannot perform at the college level. Colleges cope with ill-prepared students in several ways. They provide remedial courses. One study suggests that more than two-thirds of community college students take at least one remedial course, as do 40 percent of four-year college students. College professors dumb down their courses so that ill-prepared students can get passing grades.
Colleges also set up majors with little analytical demands so as to accommodate students with analytical deficits. Such majors often include the term "studies,"? such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and American studies. The major for the most ill-prepared students, sadly enough, is education. When students' SAT scores are ranked by intended major, education majors place 26th on a list of 38.
The bottom line is that colleges are admitting youngsters who have not mastered what used to be considered a ninth-grade level of proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Very often, when they graduate from college, they still can't master even a 12th-grade level of academic proficiency.
The problem is worse in college sports.
During a recent University of North Carolina scandal, a learning specialist hired to help athletes found that during the period from 2004 to 2012, 60 percent of the 183 members of the football and basketball teams read between fourth- and eighth-grade levels. About 10 percent read below a third-grade level. Keep in mind that all of these athletes both graduated from high school and were admitted to college.
How necessary is college anyway? One estimate is that 1 in 3 college graduates have a job historically performed by those with a high school diploma. According to Richard Vedder, distinguished emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University and the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, in 2012 there were 115,000 janitors, 16,000 parking lot attendants, 83,000 bartenders, and about 35,000 taxi drivers with a bachelor's degree.
I'm not sure about what can be done about education. But the first step toward any solution is for the American people to be aware of academic fraud at every level of education.
Ray says everyone needs an education, but notice he didn't say everyone needs a college degree.
Quote:OPINION: Higher Ed Is Robbing America's Future
9:00 AM 01/27/2019 | Opinion
Nick Adams | Founder and Executive Director, Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is still paying off $15,001--$50,000 in student loan debt. A policy priority of hers happens to be canceling all student loan debt. Here's a prescription that would actually benefit younger Americans and not sink the economy: Avoid owing institutions of higher learning loads of money in the first place.
U.S. student loan debt recently reached a record $1.465 trillion, double what it was when the recession ended in June 2009. Anthony Carnevale, Director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce, pointed out that millennials with degrees make up about 40 percent of the unemployed.
It doesn't bode well for higher education that four out of ten Americans looking for a job hold a college degree. Indeed, if there's a forty percent chance you're going to be unemployed after graduation, does it make sense to spend four or more years on campus? From a financial perspective, an increasing number of Americans are rightfully saying, "no."?
According to a first-of-its-kind study on attitudes towards higher education, nearly half of Americans do not believe college is worth the expense. One-third believe it was more important to get a college degree thirty years ago than it is today. Further, Americans believe starting their own business is a better measure of success than possessing a college degree.
There are 44 million American student borrowers and the average student in the class of 2016 left school with $37,172 in student loan debt, notes Forbes. It's even worse when you break down the numbers.
As of August, SmartAsset.com informs us that the average salary for a millennial is currently $35,592 a year. That's not enough to survive in a big city like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.
Still, let's say that a millennial graduate decides to live in a city with more affordable rents like Cleveland, where you can get a decent studio apartment for $684 a month. After state taxes, their annual take-home pay will be $28,728, $8,202 of which will go towards rent, leaving them with $1,723 a month of disposable income.
Factoring in food, phone bill, and electricity bills, that doesn't leave enough money for even cable television and a few movie nights, let alone a student loan payment.
The average 2017 salary for a college graduate is $59,124, but in terms of earning, they're four years behind someone who went to work straight out of high school. On average, their non-college counterparts have already raked in $142,368.
There's no guarantee that if you go straight into the workforce from college, you'll succeed. On the other hand, there's also no guarantee you'll succeed if you first go to college.
In pursuing happiness, it helps to have money in your pockets. To have money, you need to make yourself of value. But that can only happen when you are good at -- or, ideally, the best at -- what you do, regardless of vocation.
The skills taught by trade schools are specialized and are not available at most universities. "Critical thinking" -- the focus of higher education -- helps you earn money, but in no way is it comparable to specialized skills, which virtually guarantee solid income. And there is growing shortage of well-trained technicians and tradespeople.
In 2017-18, the average in-state tuition at a public university was $9,970 while the average out-of-state tuition was $25,620. The average private-school tuition was $34,740. On top of that, as of 2015, universities held nearly $550 billion in endowments. One would assume that money would go towards, well, teaching and educational resources. One would often be wrong.
A 2018 Washington Monthly article revealed that while the prominent University of Texas at Austin received $603 million of endowments from an oil company between 2011-2017, only $143 million of which was used on general administration and $38 million for financial aid.
Then, for instance, there's Colgate, the prestigious liberal arts college nestled in Hamilton, New York. It receives, as reported in a 2017 Forbes article, so much money that its cost-per-student of the entire teaching faculty is $14,500. This is opposed to Colgate's actual tuition: $62,540.
All of this, in addition to over-the-top political correctness and a lack of viewpoint diversity on campus, should be enough to make you reconsider the value of sinking tens of thousands of dollars into higher education.
Americans must confront the educational industrial complex's big lie: Everyone needs a college degree. The economy is changing rapidly. But with new obstacles, there are new opportunities. It's time to respect them as much as the increasingly underperforming four-year degree.
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