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What’s the Point of College?
Too many people are going to college. In response, colleges have trivialized their curricula, introducing vacuous and pointless programs like Gender Studies, Popular Culture, and Journalism. No one needs to major in these things, and the world isn’t made a better place because these majors exist.
The reality is that only a minority of us are really equipped to think deeply about abstract things. The rest of us would be better served, would be better providers and better people if we simply learned to do something of value and to do it well. Then college could do what college was originally intended to do: teach people complex ideas that require a depth of study and commitment beyond what most people are interested in pursuing.
Instead, college has dumbed itself down to provide something for everyone, while growing ever more expensive and ever less useful.
Published in Education
If you are interested in this topic, I totally recommend the Nic Gillespie reason magazine interview of Thaddeus Russell of Renegade University. It was in 2017 I think. That guy is importing liberal arts for a fair price and he is getting all kinds of professors on board. He makes it very clear that accreditation is a destructive racket.
Journalism is two, maybe three classes that can be taught in a single semester. I know. I have a college degree in the inverted pyramid.
The best course I took in my core curriculum was mass media law. We not only covered the nuts and bolts of what was lawful but also what was ethical.
It’s pretty clear that college is not for learning. It’s for social standing. It’s easy for bureaucrats to see a check in a box. To a bureaucrat and leftist, all people are the same potential, it’s the check in the box that matters.
Huh?
Skyler, that touches on something else that I want to post about one of these days. I think the checkbox mentality is part of a broader movement toward reduced transaction costs, reduced friction, smaller margins, and greater automation of decision-making. I think it’s unfortunate, but it might be unfortunate in the way that cheap foreign manufacture is unfortunate: productive of a real short-term benefit for many, but with potentially greater long-term costs.
I’ve read it was the 1971 Supreme Court Griggs decision which declared that aptitude tests given by a company to prospective employees were discriminatory (disparate impact), having no way to know the qualifications of applicants they started requiring college degrees for jobs where a high school diploma had sufficed in the past. In a few years all the HR gate keepers had degrees making a degree in any major at all essentially mandatory for employment.
Go STEM or don’t go at all. Anything else you can learn for free on YouTube or a public library.
Under the current ridiculous set up that’s probably true. You ought to be able to go to a class etc.
The inverted pyramid is the basis for all newspaper writing. The idea is that the story is top heavy with the most relevant and important information and the least important stuff goes at the bottom. Then, during the physical creation of the newspaper, you can cut the article off at the tail and it still makes sense and retains the most vital information. It is (or at least was) the first thing they taught you in j-school or on the job.
Even as physical newspapers recede it’s still important because there’s no guarantee that articles won’t be truncated on a digital platform. And there is also no guarantee that the reader will stay til the end, either.
The most important part of journalism is the idea of professional ethics. The disappearance of those is what has doomed us. ITV and Apple are pushing a new “documentary” called The Year the Earth Changed in which they proffer the notion that reduced human activity due to Covid-19 has allowed the planet to “heal.” As “proof” they show two photographs of the Himalayas. In the first photo the mountains are barely visible because of pollution, the second show the same mountains in all their majesty. Only there are people in both pictures. Wearing the exact same clothes and all of them in the exact same body positions. The “pollution” in the first pic is photoshopped in.
And don’t get me started me on B-roll…
This is an interesting assertion. I have two thoughts in response.
(1) If true, what are the implications of this assertion for the viability of representative government? Perhaps a substantial majority of the population is unable to reason accurately about anything complex. I would expect such people to be susceptible to demagogues with impractical ideas. Notice that Marxism reared its ugly head about 50-75 years after the first modern experiments in representative government. If your assertion is correct, there may be no way out of this problem.
(2) If true, how do you quantify this problem? What percentage of people have the ability to think deeply about abstract things? My general impression is that an IQ of about 115 is necessary to do college-level work. People with IQs over 115 are about 16% of the population, far lower than the proportion going to college. (My quick computation is that a bit over 50% of young people go to college — a quick google search indicates that the high school graduation rate is about 88%, and that about 66% of high school grads proceed to college.)
My own impression is that college-level work isn’t generally enough to be competent in any complex area, but it’s a good start. The IQ cutoff might be more like 125-130, which is about 2.5%-5% of the population.
There needs to be higher education to help anybody that wants it to be a better citizen. It doesn’t have to be a great big deal but it has to be libertarian and conservatively oriented. Honest history, literature, economics, sociology etc.
My nane for college is the “Cerifcation Maif”. My favorite education quote is by Mark Twain and it’s so applies to Modern College.
“I try to not let my schooling, get in the way of my Education.”
It used to be that people with college degrees, on average, made a lot more money. So the solution was, send everyone to college. The degree didn’t magically make you money, but the people who were able to get a degree tended to be smarter and, perhaps, more ambitious. But when you start saying, “Everyone should go to college,” then you pretty much turn college into 13th grade.
Maybe I’m an elitist but college should be hard enough that most people can’t make it through.
When I first joined the military, I was told that the goal was for all officers to have an average IQ of 120. I suspect that is no longer the case. With an average, there are bound to be half the people below it, but I’ve met too many officers that are seemingly well below it.
The average IQ of black Americans is 85, the average for all Americans is 100. The drive to have higher and higher numbers of black officers has necessarily resulted in many who do not attain that 120 average or anything close. I’ll never forget the second lieutenant in my class at the USMC’s The Basic School who was struggling to do some land navigation homework. We were in the laundry room and he asked for some help. I quickly learned that he couldn’t perform simple addition and subtraction of angles. The idea that you can add angles’ values was so alien to him that he could not conceive of how to apply basic math to the problem. It was shocking to me that this man graduated from Texas Prairie A&M with a degree of any kind. He eventually dropped out, which is almost unheard of after an officer is commissioned.
Our colleges graduate people of all races who do not have basic intelligence. I only point out the blacks because the example is so stark. These people go into the world and struggle to succeed at levels that they are incapable of competing at. It’s no wonder that many blame others; they’ve got the credentials, it can’t be their fault they fail. I think this explains a lot of why many black Americans gravitate to spewing nonsense about Black Lives Matter. The leader of BLM has millions of dollars now. I’m sure she thinks that her ill-gotten gains are vindication for her personal value.
Meanwhile, colleges suck in money with no consequences for whether the loan was a good risk or not.
I met my wife and a best friend in College and other friends.
You are right.
It is front and center of going to college. I want my kids to have a degree to have a degree. Then they have it and no one can take it from them. Soon it will be a Masters.
Coding does not take a college degree. Do people hire coders without degrees? I know at least 5 places personally who will not even see the resume without the degree. Automated systems dump them.
My wife applied for a $34k a year job that she used to have before kids as a Health Inspector. They now want a Masters for it. A Masters to inspect restaurants? You don’t need even college for that. It is not that hard.
Parents do not want their kids to be on an equal playing field to other kids – They want them to have an advantage so that they can get better access to resources. This is why people pay for private schools. And people may say one thing, but what they do is another. Look at rich lefties. As long as College is a check box to careers as opposed to jobs, people are going to want it.
College may not be sufficient for a good life, but it is close to necessary unless you are a prodigy entrepreneur.
I don’t feel like going into it right now because I go into it all the time, but we have to stop with the inflationist big government system we have because of this. There is too much deflation being created by people with high IQs and globalized trade. It worked before the Soviet Union fell and computers, and now it doesn’t. This is why you are getting populism and Socialism shoved down your throat whether you like it or not. This is why the debt to GDP keeps going up. You can fix it the way the Austrians recommend or you can do it the way this guy talks about on this podcast
https://investresolve.com/podcasts/mike-green-the-fourth-turning-and-reimagining-the-american-dream/
If you want to help the people that have a low IQ, like me and the poor people, watch this video. The deflation has to be dealt with one way or another otherwise it’s going to manifest as violence.
I am in Tech for 30 years – we hired and trained people to become software engineers without formal training or a degree (we trained them on the job) – some of the best I engineers I had working for me started out this way
I can definitely confirm that there are English courses concentrated on Wes Anderson movies. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even read an entire book until after I dropped out of college. Then I went back to a different school to get an English degree but had to transfer because it wasn’t serious.
It seems that colleges believe the point of college is to tell young people how amazing they already are. My sense is that woke ideology has less to do with any change in political sensibilities than it does with students genuinely buying the whole “future leaders of tomorrow” hokum.
The primary purpose is a racket to get money. The second purpose is indoctrination.
Fund the institutions, not the children.
Also a subject of the Greatest Interview Ever, with Mark Steyn:
https://www.adrive.com/public/DS9Nut/NARN%2012-02-06%20NARN%201%20Hour%202%20Mark%20Steyn.mp3
We should genetically engineer people to have higher I.Q.s.
We are probably doing that, but the old-fashioned way: people are increasingly self-selecting their social circles based on, to a significant extent, intelligence. That’s one of the points to which Charles Murray has been calling attention in recent years.
Theoretically, that would be nice, but it’s hard to imagine how it could happen in an ethical way. What do you do with the people created who accidentally have the opposite effect? It’s kind of scary to think of.
It seems like a lot of women are seeking credentials in a mate, via largely-useless college degrees etc. So it may actually be that the opposite is happening more often.
Exactly. Journalism, and by extension writing as a whole, is something you can only when you feel you have to. You can’t train a journalist; you can’t pour liquid curiosity into someone’s ear and then step back to watch them work.
High school is free, and easy to graduate from. And if you want a complete high school education you have to go to college.
Once people have their degree, where will they go to get a college education?