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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 most people really aren’t up to it anyway, does it matter?
Meanwhile, the people who are capable of it, can do it themselves, as truly smart people have done for centuries.
Anecdote to anecdote then? This is less and less common.
We’ve been here before. Turn of the 20th century was the same. Primary education was over around 14 or 15. Higher than that, but not quite university, was paid or by scholarship. Others could work without.
Watch the first few minutes of Idiocracy.
We should be trying to get children out of school as early as possible, not extending their stay. If a child shows the right interest and aptitude, there is no reason why they shouldn’t have college credits at 14. I remember high school being filled with two study halls a day and English classes being exactly the same 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grade. My high school curriculum could have easily been consolidated into one year. But we can never do that because that wouldn’t fly with the teacher’s unions. Yet another reason why they are pure evil.
We would solve so many problems if we addressed the actual issues with education instead of making excuses for the institution itself. We wouldn’t have as many adult children still trying to “find themselves” at 29. We wouldn’t be financially crippling them before they even own property because they wouldn’t need higher education. If they did, they wouldn’t need to go for as long. We would probably eliminate an awful lot of real and make believe mental illness because school would be focused on efficiently pumping out productive members of society. We wouldn’t be handing out sociology degrees to reward work-avoidance. By not forcing students to sit in a prison for four times as long as they need to, we would give them more time to start building work skills and maybe even put away some savings while they’re still teenagers.
So many of our biggest problems can be addressed right now if we trimmed all the fat off of our education system.
This is what I think, and there is more than one way to do this.
I forget which comment it was above, but I was really struck with that analysis about IQ and higher education. You could come up with multiple options that respected that problem and still find ways to improve people’s human capital.
A big problem there, of course, is that so much unskilled and even a lot of semi-skilled and skilled labor has in effect been outsourced, to mechanization and other technology.
Two things. I am only talking about general human capital development. Not necessarily getting a job. You could combine the two things. You are going to be better off if you read a bunch of decent books and discuss them before you go out into the world.
Second. This is why I always talk about why the monetary policy is so screwed up versus the wage deflation and job destruction from automation and globalize labor.
THey are connected
Hank, it’s probably the opposite. I think that the IQ literature shows a negative correlation between IQ and fertility — that is, more intelligent people have fewer children, on average.
It’s hard to get a handle on these facts, because the field of IQ is so misrepresented. There are good researchers who seem to do a good job, and they are the ones called racists and pseudoscientists.
The point in The Bell Curve was that assortative mating, by IQ, would tend to cause class divergence. So smart people would tend to marry other smart people and have smarter kids, who would have a bigger advantage over the kids of less-smart people.
To the extent that they addressed the effect on average IQ, my recollection is that Herrnstein and Murray thought that the general trend was downward, because the less intelligent had higher fertility rates.
I love this. lol
Maybe the ones they call “intelligent” really aren’t. They might be more “educated” which is the problem because these days “education” tells people that having children is bad. Truly intelligent people would know that’s wrong. They would understand, hopefully without even having to have it explained, that on average each woman needs to have two children – one to replace herself, and one to replace a male – just to keep things steady.
Yeah. Anyway, I did my bit to lower the grading curve for everybody. We have five kids.
Personally, I find it hilarious that the government has set up Ponzi schemes based on birth rates, Social Security and Medicare. Then they underfund them and birth rates are going down at the same time. The pill, abortion, Medicare, and feminism affectively all happened at once. Real genius. Procreate for the state comrade!
It’s a hell of a topic, for a gigantic pile of reasons.
My goal was honestly more but pregnancy sucked, so I’m content with above replacement at 3.
I refer again back to the Mark Steyn interview, in my comment #54.
Also, they are set up for redistribution without being explicit about it. The capital expansion comes from birth rates but it’s redistributive. It’s really criminal that they don’t get this explicitly straight in everybody’s head what is going on. Government is such a scam.
This is why I always tell people to listen to that Mike Green interview, and nobody’s going to do this of course. It’s a difficult interview but he gets in the weeds on everything that is screwing up society.
I find it sufficient to know that’s screwed up, I don’t think it’s necessary – at least not for me – to know all the fine mathematical details etc.
I have some personal baggage involved, but I think the whole concept of telling people they “should” have kids is ridiculous. It’s even worse when the government is set up to require it, even though they actually interfere with the size of families. Real genius.
Everybody needs to understand that they are stealing from one generation to give to another and how it happens. Furthermore it’s setting us up for collapse and social problems. Literally within eight years of Medicare being started both parties knew it was an actuarial disaster. I think by a factor of 100.
Social Security was set up with a bunch of lies and then in the late 50s they just switched it to being redistributive without really telling people. Something like that. It’s a joke.
I’ve seen videos about how to set this stuff up so it actually conserves capital for society’s growth, but that’s not what we do.
Well, I didn’t say that I thought the average intelligence was increasing. Rather, I thought — based on Murray’s observations about self-selection and partitioning — that particularly intelligent people might be associating more with similarly intelligent people than people tended to do in the past, and so might be inclined to produce increasingly intelligent children (given that some fraction of intelligence would appear to have a genetic linkage).
I mean, one would hardly argue that we aren’t breeding, say, pugs to be so charmingly pug-like, basing that conclusion on the fact that dogs overall may be getting less pug-like. Right? (I have no idea if we are focusing attention on producing better pugs. Murray was inexplicably silent on that in his writing.)
What we need are smart Mormons. Except Utah used to lead the consumption of depression pills by a wide margin. lol
Well, being an obsessive stickler for the facts on Social Security, I always have to remind people that by law, Social Security and Medicare are not permitted to fund future benefits, like a private pension fund or insurance company, which would require government purchase of private assets. Government’s source of funds for the current year is mainly current taxes and borrowings from the public.
If you want the government to fund future benefits, vote in a Congress that will change the law, which will require a Constitutional amendment.
I would read it if a transcript is available.
Then what does “unfunded liability” mean in that context? It seems to me that would mean it’s strictly unfunded because people aren’t having enough babies.
With arranged marriages, IQ would not have been harmed if elite families trended intelligent. Given the familial backgrounds of some of the best minds of the past, it should be safe to say arranged marriages produced a highly intelligent upper class just fine.
IQ measures a very specific piece of what we consider to be intelligence. The two things are not interchangeable.
I just want to point out that Mark says I got this right with a “like”.
This whole situation is even stupider than I thought it was. Unbelievable.
Look at what we are talking about. I have no idea why people have a warm feeling about politicians or anything but libertarian governance. Screw that.