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American Colleges Are a Valuable Resource. But Not for America.
Conservatives love higher education. The whole point of conservatism is to attempt to give all American citizens equal opportunities. So affordable higher education is important. And Republicans like the economy to grow. And if you understand the value of engineers, doctors, computer programmers, and so on, a good way to get more of those is to subsidize their education. So subsidizing higher education makes sense, from a conservative point of view. It grows the economy while helping young people of modest backgrounds improve their lives. For a conservative, that’s a win-win.
Until you stop choosing the smartest and hardest working college applicants, and start selecting students based on other criteria, like skin color or 40-yard dash time. And then, of course, most of the students who aren’t capable of majoring in chemical engineering start majoring in Psychology or something. And things continue to deteriorate over the years, so now they have to invent new areas of study for this ever-growing influx of “students” who wouldn’t even have been in college a few decades ago. So pretty soon half the college is majoring in Petty Jealousy Studies (PJS).
And then the chemical engineering majors start to wonder why they’re studying 80 hours a week to try (and often fail) to keep a “B” average, while they lose out on all the academic awards to PJS majors with 4-points. So more and more STEM majors switch to various grievance studies departments, and understandably so. So now, a large majority of the college is engaged in activity which is far, far removed from the original goals of the university.
The Republicans who proudly tout their endorsement of public subsidies of higher education (“Investing in our children!”) are now starting to wonder what they’re getting for their tax dollars. Where are all the engineers and computer programmers? And what the heck is going on in the Department of Trans-Gender Canadian Bagpiper Studies? Why are we paying for all this again?
So Republicans are starting to view American higher education as a failure. Or at least, a very poorly utilized resource.
Democrats, as you might imagine, take a different view. Many leftists have traditionally viewed college more as an opportunity to “find themselves” rather than learn a trade. So the left has long held a somewhat less pragmatic view of higher education than conservatives. But over the years, this college thing has worked out better than any Democrat could have dreamed.
By taking millions of kids right out of high school, and having four of their most formative years to indoctrinate them into leftism, Democrats have stumbled on one of their most valuable resources. If Democrats move so far to the left that they start losing voters, it’s no problem – they just make more. Why develop policies to satisfy your constituents, when you can just create new constituents who have been trained to support your policies? Combine this will illegal immigration, a reliably leftist administrative state, and a leftist media, and the policies of Democrats can really be whatever they want. The views of the American voter thus become much less important.
Democrats no longer need to fear elections like they once did.
If the American system of higher education collapses (or, at least, is drastically transformed), that would be a major setback for the Democrat party.
As the safety-obsessed leftists who run universities decide to close their campuses for fear of COVID-19, but still bill students over $50,000 a year for a glorified Netflix subscription for video lectures, many students are deciding to drop out. And as that income stream dries up, many of these poorly run organizations will move from illusory solvency to financial crisis in a matter of months. Many schools will not survive this sudden drop in revenue.
Look for Democrats to do all they can to preserve their most valuable resource.
Republicans, who typically are eager to “invest in our children,” should stop and think for a moment before agreeing to increase educational subsidies in the upcoming college apocalypse.
College is not what we would like it to be, and it is not what it once was. Our higher education system was once a valuable resource for the United States. It is now a valuable resource for the Democrat party.
There will always be a market for engineers and programmers. Thus, there will always be a market for educating them.
Subsidizing Petty Jealousy Studies is unhelpful. You’re wasting the time of the students, and wasting tax dollars that could be better used.
American tax dollars should not be intentionally used to create voters for one of our political parties.
The upcoming collapse of American higher education will appear sudden, but it’s not. It’s been building for years. What’s about to happen to American colleges has really already happened.
We should just step back, and let it happen.
Published in General
Going forward is one issue, current circumstance is another.
<snark on>
Why do you think they worked so hard to become cheerleaders for a major league sports team? At least get a good sugar daddy.
<snark off>
I know, that’s unfair to many cheerleaders who do enjoy the sport.
This is where a lot of these Antifa rioters come from. Young women especially.
You forgot, um… lawyers.
I think this was more deliberate that you suggest. I think the US government started funding psychology departments, the root of all PJS, back in the fifties.
In the late 80s Atlanta was known for its abundance of nudie bars; excuse me, “Gentlemen’s Clubs” (the most in the southeastern U.S.). I always wondered how many of those ladies who majored in “Health Promotion” ended up at those places.
Dr. B,
Tell’em. Pretty soon the PJS students develop their extortion tactics and start attacking any prof on campus that won’t rubber-stamp their nonsense. They’ve got faculty that make their living off the PJS program and will back up their evil attacks.
The American university system, the best university system in the world, has now been rendered inoperable.
Regards,
Jim
Buckhead. Up and down West Paces Ferry Road.
Why I know that is classified.
Copy that. The only reason that I remember The Gold Club and The Cheetah is that I drove past them on the way to work. Of course, some days it took longer for me to drive past than others…
Rosedale Bible College?
I’m a bit of an oddball: I hold both that universities should burn to the ground and that a liberal-arts education (a real one, of course) is worth pursuing. This is because my own talents make me completely useless, and I need to fit somewhere, no?
You might like a book by Elisa New, The Line’s Eye, which touches on the history of liberal arts education. Also, The Reasoning Architect by Garry Stevens.
So what you’re saying is that socialists eventually run out of other people’s money?
Yes good idea. We must end Federal money to students or colleges. There is no way to make the Federal government accountable to citizens and the schools will be accountable to who pays the bills. Make the kids pay tuition and hold them to it. What’s gone on in the past should be ended, but not painlessly.
No. I didn’t.
I feel exactly the same way, and I don’t find that odd at all.
A liberal arts education is extremely valuable. Which is why it’s tragic that it’s no longer available.
Liberalism killed liberal arts.
Once any thoughts other than extreme liberalism were banned from campus, and once you could get good grades by just repeating back to the professor whatever leftist crap he spouted on about in the classroom, then that was the end of liberal arts. It’s tough to refine your skills at critical thinking if you’re not allowed to think critically.
Yes. I have degrees from an engineering school and from a law school, and my late father was a professor of engineering, so I’ve experienced the “trade school” view of higher education. But as I’ve lived and worked in commercial industry, I see the value that a good liberal arts education can provide, and that a person well educated in the liberal arts can bring a lot of value to all kinds of useful activities.
As you say, the modern indoctrination centers that have replaced universities aren’t providing that good liberal arts eduction. So the graduates no longer bring the value of a good liberal arts education to the commercial world. Hence the current perspective that a liberal arts education is worthless, or even less-than-worthless. Because the liberal arts education is not being done correctly.
This is huge. Ordinary people can be fired for making a post saying they don’t support BLM. But professors can say the most outrageous things, and are protected by tenure – unless the outrageous thing is conservative, then the school somehow finds a way such as “Professor Xyz doesn’t share our values” or garbage like that . . .
Here’s an analogy…banks and mortgage brokers, notoriously, made loans to people who had little or no realistic chance of repaying them. They (the banks/brokers) didn’t care, because those loans were quickly sold off, securitized, and sold in tranches to investors, some of whom turned out to be a lot less sophisticated than they thought they were.
Similarly, universities have continuously expanded their recruiting net to include people who don’t have much chance of finishing a degree, and those who will finish but in programs with little career value. The universities don’t care: they get the money up-front, either from tuition or from student loans.
I kinda think that’s the whole point of those majors. An MRS degree.
What Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” is a very real problem, and it’s in conservatives’ interest to take it seriously.
What should society do with the in-between people — the people who lack both a blue-collar mechanical bent and the mathematical intelligence necessary for STEM careers? (I’m not being facetious; this is an earnest question.) In pre-modern and early-modern societies, composed largely of illiterate peasants and yeoman farmers, this wasn’t a problem, since illiterate peasants and yeoman farmers don’t know what they’re missing and don’t expect much from life. But now that the illiterate peasants and yeoman farmers have become semi-literate sociology majors with sky-high aspirations, it’s not clear where they fit in.
A lot of college students — myself included — start out with the intention of majoring in something “practical,” then discover that we just aren’t cut out for the work involved. We then flee to less valuable majors, such as sociology. Then we graduate, struggle to find jobs and communities, stew in poverty and loneliness and resentment, and channel our rage into radical politics — either of the left-wing or right-wing kind.
So, to quote a famous Russian, what is to be done?
Sure you can. They just have to not know where they are going. Lies about where their leader is taking them work pretty well for that.
I like this, but I’d make it a sliding scale between 90% and 100%, with less than 100% liability awarded to schools that successfully place graduates in jobs in their fields.
But carrying too much debt into that field of endeavor also limits one’s opportunity for advancement, post-graduation.
Concur. Graduates of law schools exhibit a rather remarkable non-bell curve salary distribution. Or rather, one bell curve for privileged grads with a mean well into six figures, and a separate bell curve for non-privileged grads, with a mean well below the curves for any STEM degree. That is not something we as a country should be subsidizing.
The in-between people end up in service jobs. Of which there are normally plenty. We should be honest with them and suggest they not burden themselves with student loans before they start working. (Firmly suggest, that is, by denying their student loans.) Some of those in-between people are women who might actually settle down with a good man if they didn’t have student loans to pay off. Too sexist to suggest of course. Especially since the men who land in-between are not excused from pursuing manual labor. Also sexist, but an approved variety.
And I don’t believe they struggle to find jobs as you suggest. They struggle to find jobs they don’t think are beneath them. I have much less sympathy than you. Or am much less blinded by their emotional appeal.
Which guarantees the cycle of resentment and political revenge, since everyone hates service work. (Been there, done that.)
That you suggest this as a solution suggests that there is no solution, and that we’re doomed to a future in which resentment is the major driving force in American politics. I, for one, won’t mind participating in such a future. It sure beats flipping burgers!
Dude, that’s life. Always has been. People work to live because they must. America’s children have been sold the lie that we are wealthy enough for that to no longer be necessary. So, when you go to a restaurant, do you expect to be served? Who will be that server? If there isn’t a server, is there any possibility to make a restaurant work?
Your objections seem to ignore the fact that the key utility of money, and by extension, wealth, is that it enables you to purchase the services of other people. Whether directly (waiter/waitress) or indirectly (some physical product), money purchases other people’s labor. There will never be a lack of need for people in service industries, so there will never not be a need to push people to do those jobs if they aren’t fit for anything else.
People get paid to work. Not everyone gets to do “work they love”. That’s another lie told to America’s children.
The good news is that progressives are over-playing their hand with such incompetence that they’ve become rhetorically impotent. Properly reared youngsters are becoming nearly inviolable these days – they’re aware of the fact that most people who talk politics are single-mindedly interested in programming. There aren’t very many hip, seemingly open-minded, liberal professors. Most couldn’t be compared that favorably to one’s mother and father. The females tend to be frantic, hyper-sentimental, and are wont to keep talking long after making their “point.” The males are brusque, easily irritated, and ranty. I can think of an exception, a lovely Turkish woman who taught a class on American foreign policy in the Middle East. She seemed to genuinely try to get the conservative students to speak. If those students can find their voices, while remaining humble (a tall order for young people, I know), I think they’ll discover their own potential to become true leaders.