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A Higher Education Apocalypse? I Hope So.
Darling Daughter tells me the scuttlebutt among her college friends is that, if the school doesn’t reopen for business as usual in the fall, most of them intend to take a gap semester rather than doing the courses online. I’m sure that would be devastating for a great many of our colleges and universities, with their bloated administrations full of well-paid yet academically superfluous employees.
I’m not one to wish ill on businesses: I want the economy to come roaring back, businesses to reopen yesterday, everyone back at work as soon as possible. I’m pro-market, pro-business, pro-capitalism, pro-employer, pro-worker.
But I won’t mind at all if a bunch of colleges and universities fail, because I think our institutions of higher learning have become, in far too many cases, destructive of young minds and the ideas that made America great.
It’s hard to overstate how foolish and trivial America’s liberal arts programs have become. The obsession with identity, with victimization, and with fanciful sexuality has transformed what were once competent classes about literature and history and art and philosophy into soapboxes from which self-righteous intellectual mediocrities prattle on about imagined oppression and nonexistent genders. The young people who survive this incomprehensibly woke environment emerge debt-ridden and misinformed, unprepared for a world that can bend only so far in accommodation of their newly acquired intellectual confusion.
So, while it almost pains me to hope for the failure of any institution in these troubled times, I’m going to give a little cheer for every one of the nests of censorship and social justice and self-indulgent outrage that closes its doors. We can start with Middlebury and Evergreen.
I do hope STEM programs rebound. We need people who actually know something.
Published in Education
The availability of work is something we wonder about as we have two at home just finishing or finished with their online experience.
Last summer, one waited tables and the other worked in a donut shop (not as fun as a parents as we’d hoped). Although our state is a 25% capacity state, I doubt there is much demand for the marginal worker as they probably have not brought back all the core staff. More will be revealed as the kids start to look this week.
Not being a sports person, this is a side effect I wouldn’t have expected. Things are so much more intertwined than at first glance.
I’m hearing that the big five conferences have about had it with the NCAA. There are rumbles that they will eventually just walk away. A time of chaos is an opportunity, as Rahm Emauel once said (more or less).
How is all of this stuff organized, legally? Some people make a hell of a lot of money off of it. Some colleges just get the shaft.
The Alabama coach was whining about the “pitiful bowls” (that’s not what he said but that’s what he meant) that the non-big five schools go to and like it was also sad.
It strikes me as some scam from Russia.
I think the college playoff system is boring as hell.
Good question. It was formed to help improve football safety, and sort of metastasized into the organization it has become. Wikipedia sez: “In its 2016–17 fiscal year the NCAA took in $1.06 billion in revenue, over 82% of which was generated by the Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament.” The basketball number for 2020 would be a big fat zero, unless they had some scammy thing where tv pays them even if they do not run the games.
He should worry more about the SEC scheduling one more crap team every year than the other leagues do. The patsy teams Alabama plays are particularly awful.
Maybe they want to see an NCAA national vodka drinking championship. The trophy would be a big cup, of course.
It should involve more playing to earn the championship and less coronation for big-name teams.
The NCAA and the big five are fascist crime syndicates. I comprehensively hate them.
There was nothing wrong with the old bowl system.
I just want to see good games every week, I want most of the minor sports preserved, I want this very distributed among all colleges, and I don’t want the athletes screwed over too much. Is it that hard?
Title IX has probably done more damage to minor sports than the Corona virus will.
i.e.
http://ricochet.com/podcast/national-affairs/a-new-education-agenda-for-the-right-with-rick-hess/.
I’ve worked in higher education (in the humanities, no less) for 13 years and it’s just not in how these institutions work to let external circumstances make them change–they just get more indignant at the notion that they ought to. I think society is going to let universities get away with it for decades to come, simply because being “anti-education” is political suicide, but that alternatives (of the sort @limestonecowboy catalogues, and many of which I’m involved in as well) will grow also and receive more recognition from those who are concerned more about competence and less about status.
My wife loves football and has a decline when the season ends. The minor sports for men were destroyed by Title IX. Women’s sports will be destroyed by transgenders.
Surely to God the NCAA will come to it’s senses and get XY athletes out of women’s sports.
And liberal arts programs that still teach Plato and Shakespeare and Latin or Greek.
What bothers me is, this stuff supposedly had value for centuries and now so many people talk like it doesn’t.
I remember in college so many smart people that were just really bitter about being forced to take anything it wasn’t directly related to making money.
The structure of the conversation has to improve.
I think there’s never been a very broad market for education for the sake of knowledge, versus education for the sake of making a living. Perhaps the greater problem is that we’ve mixed the two. I don’t know much about the education business, but my suspicion is that things went off the rails when people decided that everyone should go to college. The only way that can work is for college to teach mostly practical things, because that’s what most people value and are capable of learning. But teaching practical stuff is harder than teaching abstract stuff, because practical stuff can be objectively evaluated, whereas abstract lends itself to subjective evaluation and, hence, fraud. And so we have fraudulent universities today, teaching nonsense under the guise of higher learning — and not nearly enough trade and engineering schools.
This is dead-on. Stop forcing people to do this. It’s outrageous.
This is when it turned into a racket. A very overpriced racket. Accreditation is the weapon for this mafia.
When the liberal arts get their backs against the wall they will figure out a way to make it valuable and sell it, or they will just get crushed by deflation and Schumpter’s law.
I would love to see any argument against anything anybody said in these comments or the post, but that is never how it’s structured. It’s like the logical sunlight we expect in most areas of life just never hits education.
I’ve posted this a million times, but this is the best thing I’ve ever heard about the racket of higher education.
https://reason.com/podcast/thad-russell-education-academia-podcast/
Setting aside the productivity stuff, and the stuff you make money off of, either it develops human capital or it doesn’t. It should be your own damn business how are you do this or if you do this.
They should just have certification systems in the things that require certification.