14 thoughts on “The Most Worthless Degree?”

  1. Hear!Hear! A holder of an education degree is the most poorly educated college grad bar none. They cannot read, write, spell, or do simple arithmetic very well, but they are “qualified” to teach your child how to do all four. A Physical Education major has more academic rigor than an education degree program.

  5. This again is a consequence of the “everybody must go to college” mindset. If everybody must go to college, there must be degrees for those that can’t hack the productive ones.

  6. If everybody must go to college, there must be degrees for those that can’t hack the productive ones.

    Indeed, there are plenty of such degree programs. These include:

    Political Studies (political science is an oxymoron)
    Ethnic Studies
    Women’s Studies
    Journalism
    Art History

  7. Advanced degrees used to be indicated for only two reasons:

    1) one was aiming to practice one of the professions – doctoring, lawyering, engineering or college teaching. In the first three of the four cases, there was the expectation that one should be capable of establishing a practice in one’s chosen field.

    2) one was aiming to work in an intrinsically difficult or demanding field such as math or one of the sciences.

    Not every person in the first category of graduates went solo, of course, and fewer and fewer do so now, especially engineers; but the idea was that they could.

    The idea that the corpus of knowledge about how to impart knowledge to others constitutes a large enough intellectual mass to be deserving of regard as the basis of a profession is a recent – and false – proposition. Teaching is, at best, a skilled trade. There are some useful approaches and techniques that can grease the pedagogical gears, to be sure, but they are neither numerous, extensive nor particularly abstruse. The critical requisite for effective teaching is a thorough grasp of one’s subject matter. This is the opposite of what is pursued in modern college-level schools of education; the trend has been to impart less and less subject matter knowledge to aspiring teachers. In its place there is, instead, a toxic stew of crack-brained educational “theory,” unmoored from empirical practice, and the usual heavy ration of leftist political cant that has infested the rest of the so-called Humanities.

  8. I would say those seking the advanced degree today, found out that they could get an extra lump sum from the federal government for enrolling and attending the classes, period .
    However, I did hear that if you get a degree from a high quality culinary arts institute (Le Cordon Bleu) you can actually get a job as a maid and cook in D.C. without showing your green card first.

  9. People should also examine “Busy Ness” schools.

    Here’s one example. Harvard Business School developed a close association with one firm. They sent some of their best graduates there. They wrote the firm up glowingly in publications. What was the firm? Enron.

    Graduate schools in general — even in the so called hard sciences — might need reform. When you are in a graduate program until you receive your Ph.D. at 29, then pursue post doctoral studies until you are 35, you are not a student, you are an abused worker who is not being paid what they are worth. Such programs also serve as barriers to entry to many fields. Here’s one interesting comparison. Edward Teller was born in Hungary in 1908. He received his Ph.D. in physics in Germany in 1930. That would be impossible for the most brilliant today.

  10. If you read the late Ben Rich’s book, “Skunk Works”, there’s a wonderful section where Ben decided to go to Harvard Business School (HBS) for some advanced managerial training. Kelly Johnson tried to talk him out of it and stressed getting the training he needed on the job. Rich went anyway.

    When he returned, he presented Johnson with a plaque that read “2/3 HBS = BS.” Johnson loved it.

  11. Studying how people learn is legitimate. Knock elementary and high school teachers all you want but they actually have a methodology behind their classroom management.

    Contrast with college professors who for some reason think that a Masters or PHD somehow magically makes them able to teach. There is more to teaching than knowing the subject content. Good teachers are the exception to the rule and it is not because they are stupid but because they don’t know how to teach.

  13. When you become king be sure to kill off all of the humanities departments also (thought a case can be made sparing philosophy.) These worthless subjects are nothing but a drain on taxpayers since those degreed in such subjects end up on the public dole and add nothing of value to the market.

Comments are closed.