Business, Education, Political Commentary

Obama Has A Point

7 Comments

Mark the day that Glenn Reynolds agrees with the president. I don’t think he goes far enough here, though:

Right now, too many people go to college by default, even if they don’t usually major in art history. College is a status symbol that many regard as essential to membership in the middle class, but now it’s a status symbol that requires a six-figure investment, often supported by student loans.

There’s nothing wrong with going to college, and there’s nothing wrong with liberal-arts majors, so long as they’re rigorous: The world does not enjoy a surplus of people who can think critically and write clearly, and America is certainly not overloaded with experts in foreign languages. The real problem is with non-rigorous majors, which are common. Those cost just as much, but leave their graduates no better off than when they entered, and often in debt to boot.

If they were only no better off, it wouldn’t be as bad, but many of them come out of the experience notably less educated and malinformed, in the sense that they have been indoctrinated into the nonsense that the faculty provides.

7 thoughts on “Obama Has A Point”

  1. It’s not just ‘non-rigorous’ versus ‘rigorous’ though.

    There are plenty of majors that are fundamentally “-upper- class majors”. That is, requiring knowledge and scholarship in directions that just are -not- economically sensible. As he mentioned, there’s art history. It can be quite rigorous, but (a) there’s a limited number of actual jobs specifically interested in that major, and (b) even if you get one, it’s not going to be lucrative.

    Plenty of these majors are sensible if you’re looking to a little nepotism or ‘old boys club’ to get you a position at Sotheby’s.

    But studying medieval French literature when your extended family saved up to help the loans be almost enough to get through -> not the plan.

    1. Well this will cheer you up.

      Feminist groups at more than a dozen universities are planning to participate in another mass “edit Wikipedia day,” because the free, volunteer encyclopedia website is obviously horribly sexist.

      Sarah Stierch, a Wikipedia contributor and researcher for the Wikimedia Foundation, said the problem isn’t just that most Wikipedia user are male. The layout of the website is itself “very masculine,” she said.

      “It’s aesthetically very masculine in its design,” said Stierch in a statement to The Daily Dot, also noting that, “The average Wikipedia editor is a well-educated white male. Well-educated white males have been writing history and the story of the world since ancient times.”

      To fix this, feminists at colleges around the country are launching another ‘Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon.’ Next week, feminists are encouraged to change rewrite the online encyclopedia to make it less masculine, according to Campus Reform.

      Daily Caller link

      So a bunch of 19-year old angry feminists are going to spend a day, um, “feminizing” the pages on Justin Bieber, One Direction, and Bruno Mars. Onward!

      1. Isn’t it more likely that Obama was just informed that one of his daughters intends to major in Central American festival dance rituals with a minor in African Islamic lesbian feminist empowerment literature studies?

  3. I asked my sister (on the school board) how many teachers at the local school district had majors in actual subject areas – English, History, Math?
    She thought none – all Eds.

Comments are closed.