34 thoughts on “No, Not Everyone Should Go To College”
What are the limits to this thinking?
By the same rationale that Michael Graham lays out, not every kid should go to high school, right? And not every kid should learn to read? After all, it is your money! What should it be taken from you and used to pay for universal literacy? After all, if the leftwing trolls didn’t know how to read, they wouldn’t pester us on our perfectly nice conservative blogs!
My impression while I was in high school was that about a third of the student body should have been allowed/encouraged to walk (this was a 95%+ Caucasian, suburban school in the 2nd-wealthiest district in the state). Most of them would probably have picked up a GED within a few years. In the meantime they wouldn’t have been getting in the way of the rest of us.
Asserting taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for future hair dressers and delivery truck drivers to take critical lit courses in college = Non Progs don’t want you to learn to read.
Check.
Flip that around. Not every student should pursue a PhD. For one thing, there aren’t a hundred million jobs that require a PhD, and by the time you make PhD’s that people of below-average intelligence can attain, a PhD is rendered meaningless.
High school was supposed to be the final preparation for 90+% of students, enabling them to pursue any job that didn’t require a professional degree (such as a doctor, scientist, engineer, or professor).
A bright kid without a college degree should still be able to function quite well in society, doing things like founding Microsoft. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Harry S. Truman did pretty well without a college degree, as did John Jacob Astor, Dan Aykroyd, Louis Armstrong, Woody Allen, Ray Bradbury, Richard Branson, Robert Byrd, and so many others.
Yes, that’s right. Compulsory schooling is wrong. It’s justified by dismissing the rights of children to be free from oppression and the rights of parents to raise children the way they see fit. The slippery slope of taking away childrens rights very quickly results in taking away parent’s rights and then the rights of everyone else. “Free to be illiterate” may sound like a freedom you don’t see the value of, but I do.
I’ll go the other way: every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree. Sure, some will squander it. But enough generations of universal engineering degrees, and the dumb ones among us will resemble Niven & Pournelle’s Watchmakers, and out of the chaos will emerge really great coffeemakers.
Sure. And you’ll pay for it all, because it’s all so important.
And you’ll trust your lives to the bridges, buildings, vehicles built by ‘social graduates’ with feel-good engineering degrees.
Right?
Because when the perpetually unemployed “Anarchists for Statism!” are rioting, we’d really rather they had solid degrees in competently forming nuclear, chemical, and biological hazards – and how to deliver them with robotics.
Luckily, they (and their supporters) are too stupid to get the right degrees at the moment, so we have whiners complaining about how much debt their degree in puppetry caused. With puppets. Instead of complaining about how much they hate their nuke-e degree. With nukes.
every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree
We’re already giving the education away free, but you want to skip that and just award the degree? I guess I can see your point; who needs all that messy coursework and grades and stuff. And after the ego-shot you took when you looked into your nephew’s statics text last week… We really don’t need any more people feeling bad about themselves. That’s our main problem anyway. To little self esteem in this world.
This idea, of course, is life imitating art imitating life. Heinlein’s book Friday had California (of course) doing just that, after a study showing that a degree increases lifetime earnings.
BTW Rand, the new site still looks horrible in IE, and it’s because of having “Georgian” in your CSS. Using the IE Dev Tools to disable that rule makes the site readable. Could you remove that rule from your style sheet?
Well, I changed it to Times. Is that better?
I’m reading it in IE right now and Times looks… well, I’m not a big fan of Times New Roman. I’m at a work computer, though, and it’s actually another person’s computer (since I work here part time I don’t have my own desk), and the person who sits here the rest of the time set the resolution at one for an older non-HD monitor, and then they gave her a new HD monitor, and now the aspect ratio is screwed up just enough so that I notice but no one else here does.
Anyway, Georgia should actually look better, because it was created especially for internet browsers. Of course, when it comes to IE (I never use that at home), all bets are off.
Times is the default anyway, so simply eliminating the rule would have worked. Altho, as Andrea says, Georgia (not Georgian) looks nicer than Times.
If you want to know what I really think about education, I agree with this guy:
“Re-minding.” “Teaching minds.” “Eduradicals.” My, don’t progressives love their fancy new buzzwords.
I haven’t actually read through the guy’s site, but the fact that he uses the above makes me highly suspicious. I’ll read on, but if I see him use the word “mindfulness” I’ll know we’re in for a ride on the Kumbaya Express.
Nope, he’s not like that at all. I’m pretty sure that the libertarians here would like him. He certainly doesn’t think everyone should go to college.
Unfortunately, his site and blog have been cluttered with self-promotional stuff, but that’s a combination of capitalism (which is fine) and ego (goes with the territory).
Anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough. Why engineer and not brain surgeon? No one will be able to fix a toilet but everyone can call themselves “Doctor.” Only, when it comes to them doing the surgury, you can go first.
I agree there’s a bit of a slippery slope there, but his overall point is correct. I’m from the generation that was told that you simply need to have that degree stamped on you like a USDA certification on a side of beef before entering the marketplace. But while our public education system is a disaster, I think we can agree that, were it NOT run by incompetent socialists, we would all benefit from having an educated populace, to the point where we might even be willing to spend tax dollars on it. What’s tricky is finding the artificial tipping point where it goes from basic civil knowledge essential to functioning in our republic and becomes questionably useful enrichment siphoned from the public trough.
Also, as a gamer, I resent his slam on COD players… even if I myself ditched COD for Battlefield.
Then again, if you go at midnight to wait for it, you’re kind of being silly. Amazon does release-date delivery, plus pre-order bonuses and cash back. So yeah, they’re stupid.
“F’ckin’ socialist calculation problem! Why won’t it go away?”
A significant percentage of incoming college freshmen arrive so poorly prepared that they must take remedial math, science and English classes. These classes cost just as much as regular classes but don’t count towards graduation. Basically, colleges are having the students pay to learn the things they should’ve learned in high school but didn’t. Many of these students will leave college before graduation with nothing to show for it but debt. They would’ve been much better served by getting a good trade school training program. Not everyone is able to do college level work even at lower tier colleges.
“…every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree.”
They’ll be worth every penny, too…
If you think that everyone should have a college degree, I’d suggest you call a Ph.D the next time your toilet’s stopped up or your power’s out.
Personally I admire the hell out of tradespeople – they make our world livable. Had I been born 40 or 50 years later, I’d have gone for it. (Info for the younger among us : back when I was a teenager getting ready to enter the working world, a female electrician/plumber/carpenter/etc. was unheard of, and no training in the trades was available for girls.)
Bob-1, making people feel good will not make them smarter. I feel great most of the time, but I can’t do differential equations. Life doesn’t work that way.
Florence King has an essay on how the old way of splitting up students into vocational (who got to graduate out of what used to be called “grammar school” and go into trade), and academic (these students would go on to high school which was preparatory school for getting into a university where it was expected they would go into one of the professions — law, the clergy, or medicine) was better in many ways then keeping people with widely disparate interests and intellectual capacity jammed together for their entire youth and young adulthood. On the one hand, that system fostered a class attitude. But on the other, it separated the jocks from the nerds, and kept the former from making the lives of the latter miserable, and then kept the latter from in turn making the lives of their grown-up adversaries miserable by ruining society with things like communism.
Of course, those were the days when you could graduate from 8th grade actually knowing how to read and do things like algebra and trigonometry, which trades like carpentry needed. Now you’re lucky if someone entering college knows how to write their own name.
I absolutely do not think self-esteem should be the goal of education. And while I meant “make everyone EARN an engineering degree”, I wasn’t being serious.
I seriously do endorse the website I linked to above.
Unseriously, what’s the difference between making somebody earn something, and telling them they did.
The problem with vocational vs academic tracks is that it devolves pretty quickly into Japan’s cram schools.
From an economic standpoint, why don’t we send our kids to college in India? The degree will cost a few thousand, at most, including room and board. It would benefit both economies, eliminate the burden of student loan repayments, soon allow us to talk to an actual American when we contact tech support, and the studies majors would perhaps learn to cook interesting food, preparing them for the restaurant job they were going to end up with anyway.
We can emulate India. I’ll bet its colleges aren’t heavy on career-irrelevant curricula.
I want the propagation of liberal arts to be more dependent on online forums than academia.
Indian colleges stink. American schools are quite good at educating people in what they want to be educated in, its just that what they want to be educated in is stupid, and the schools have no incentive to tell them so.
Many foreign colleges are about feeding the students large amounts of data to rote memorize, and not at all about developing thinking skills. India’s not a stand-out in this regard: Feynman talked about it in Brazil (or some other South American country, I forget which one) in his autobiography.
That’s, in it’s own way, just as bad a problem.
But rote memorization is the best training a waitress with a degree in Existential French Literature Studies can have. Getting a large table’s order right, without jotting a single thing down, usually results in large tips.
Yeah, but you can get that kind of training in high school.
Besides, all these X Studies people are taking food service industry jobs away from aspiring actresses and novelists. Won’t anyone think of them!?
What are the limits to this thinking?
By the same rationale that Michael Graham lays out, not every kid should go to high school, right? And not every kid should learn to read? After all, it is your money! What should it be taken from you and used to pay for universal literacy? After all, if the leftwing trolls didn’t know how to read, they wouldn’t pester us on our perfectly nice conservative blogs!
My impression while I was in high school was that about a third of the student body should have been allowed/encouraged to walk (this was a 95%+ Caucasian, suburban school in the 2nd-wealthiest district in the state). Most of them would probably have picked up a GED within a few years. In the meantime they wouldn’t have been getting in the way of the rest of us.
Asserting taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for future hair dressers and delivery truck drivers to take critical lit courses in college = Non Progs don’t want you to learn to read.
Check.
Flip that around. Not every student should pursue a PhD. For one thing, there aren’t a hundred million jobs that require a PhD, and by the time you make PhD’s that people of below-average intelligence can attain, a PhD is rendered meaningless.
High school was supposed to be the final preparation for 90+% of students, enabling them to pursue any job that didn’t require a professional degree (such as a doctor, scientist, engineer, or professor).
A bright kid without a college degree should still be able to function quite well in society, doing things like founding Microsoft. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Harry S. Truman did pretty well without a college degree, as did John Jacob Astor, Dan Aykroyd, Louis Armstrong, Woody Allen, Ray Bradbury, Richard Branson, Robert Byrd, and so many others.
Yes, that’s right. Compulsory schooling is wrong. It’s justified by dismissing the rights of children to be free from oppression and the rights of parents to raise children the way they see fit. The slippery slope of taking away childrens rights very quickly results in taking away parent’s rights and then the rights of everyone else. “Free to be illiterate” may sound like a freedom you don’t see the value of, but I do.
I’ll go the other way: every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree. Sure, some will squander it. But enough generations of universal engineering degrees, and the dumb ones among us will resemble Niven & Pournelle’s Watchmakers, and out of the chaos will emerge really great coffeemakers.
Sure. And you’ll pay for it all, because it’s all so important.
And you’ll trust your lives to the bridges, buildings, vehicles built by ‘social graduates’ with feel-good engineering degrees.
Right?
Because when the perpetually unemployed “Anarchists for Statism!” are rioting, we’d really rather they had solid degrees in competently forming nuclear, chemical, and biological hazards – and how to deliver them with robotics.
Luckily, they (and their supporters) are too stupid to get the right degrees at the moment, so we have whiners complaining about how much debt their degree in puppetry caused. With puppets. Instead of complaining about how much they hate their nuke-e degree. With nukes.
every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree
We’re already giving the education away free, but you want to skip that and just award the degree? I guess I can see your point; who needs all that messy coursework and grades and stuff. And after the ego-shot you took when you looked into your nephew’s statics text last week… We really don’t need any more people feeling bad about themselves. That’s our main problem anyway. To little self esteem in this world.
This idea, of course, is life imitating art imitating life. Heinlein’s book Friday had California (of course) doing just that, after a study showing that a degree increases lifetime earnings.
BTW Rand, the new site still looks horrible in IE, and it’s because of having “Georgian” in your CSS. Using the IE Dev Tools to disable that rule makes the site readable. Could you remove that rule from your style sheet?
Well, I changed it to Times. Is that better?
I’m reading it in IE right now and Times looks… well, I’m not a big fan of Times New Roman. I’m at a work computer, though, and it’s actually another person’s computer (since I work here part time I don’t have my own desk), and the person who sits here the rest of the time set the resolution at one for an older non-HD monitor, and then they gave her a new HD monitor, and now the aspect ratio is screwed up just enough so that I notice but no one else here does.
Anyway, Georgia should actually look better, because it was created especially for internet browsers. Of course, when it comes to IE (I never use that at home), all bets are off.
Times is the default anyway, so simply eliminating the rule would have worked. Altho, as Andrea says, Georgia (not Georgian) looks nicer than Times.
If you want to know what I really think about education, I agree with this guy:
http://www.rogerschank.com/
“Re-minding.” “Teaching minds.” “Eduradicals.” My, don’t progressives love their fancy new buzzwords.
I haven’t actually read through the guy’s site, but the fact that he uses the above makes me highly suspicious. I’ll read on, but if I see him use the word “mindfulness” I’ll know we’re in for a ride on the Kumbaya Express.
Nope, he’s not like that at all. I’m pretty sure that the libertarians here would like him. He certainly doesn’t think everyone should go to college.
Unfortunately, his site and blog have been cluttered with self-promotional stuff, but that’s a combination of capitalism (which is fine) and ego (goes with the territory).
But here’s his blog, Educational Outrage: http://educationoutrage.blogspot.com/
Deweyism 2.0!
Anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough. Why engineer and not brain surgeon? No one will be able to fix a toilet but everyone can call themselves “Doctor.” Only, when it comes to them doing the surgury, you can go first.
I agree there’s a bit of a slippery slope there, but his overall point is correct. I’m from the generation that was told that you simply need to have that degree stamped on you like a USDA certification on a side of beef before entering the marketplace. But while our public education system is a disaster, I think we can agree that, were it NOT run by incompetent socialists, we would all benefit from having an educated populace, to the point where we might even be willing to spend tax dollars on it. What’s tricky is finding the artificial tipping point where it goes from basic civil knowledge essential to functioning in our republic and becomes questionably useful enrichment siphoned from the public trough.
Also, as a gamer, I resent his slam on COD players… even if I myself ditched COD for Battlefield.
Then again, if you go at midnight to wait for it, you’re kind of being silly. Amazon does release-date delivery, plus pre-order bonuses and cash back. So yeah, they’re stupid.
“F’ckin’ socialist calculation problem! Why won’t it go away?”
A significant percentage of incoming college freshmen arrive so poorly prepared that they must take remedial math, science and English classes. These classes cost just as much as regular classes but don’t count towards graduation. Basically, colleges are having the students pay to learn the things they should’ve learned in high school but didn’t. Many of these students will leave college before graduation with nothing to show for it but debt. They would’ve been much better served by getting a good trade school training program. Not everyone is able to do college level work even at lower tier colleges.
“…every kid should be given, free of charge, an engineering degree.”
They’ll be worth every penny, too…
If you think that everyone should have a college degree, I’d suggest you call a Ph.D the next time your toilet’s stopped up or your power’s out.
Personally I admire the hell out of tradespeople – they make our world livable. Had I been born 40 or 50 years later, I’d have gone for it. (Info for the younger among us : back when I was a teenager getting ready to enter the working world, a female electrician/plumber/carpenter/etc. was unheard of, and no training in the trades was available for girls.)
Bob-1, making people feel good will not make them smarter. I feel great most of the time, but I can’t do differential equations. Life doesn’t work that way.
Florence King has an essay on how the old way of splitting up students into vocational (who got to graduate out of what used to be called “grammar school” and go into trade), and academic (these students would go on to high school which was preparatory school for getting into a university where it was expected they would go into one of the professions — law, the clergy, or medicine) was better in many ways then keeping people with widely disparate interests and intellectual capacity jammed together for their entire youth and young adulthood. On the one hand, that system fostered a class attitude. But on the other, it separated the jocks from the nerds, and kept the former from making the lives of the latter miserable, and then kept the latter from in turn making the lives of their grown-up adversaries miserable by ruining society with things like communism.
Of course, those were the days when you could graduate from 8th grade actually knowing how to read and do things like algebra and trigonometry, which trades like carpentry needed. Now you’re lucky if someone entering college knows how to write their own name.
I absolutely do not think self-esteem should be the goal of education. And while I meant “make everyone EARN an engineering degree”, I wasn’t being serious.
I seriously do endorse the website I linked to above.
Unseriously, what’s the difference between making somebody earn something, and telling them they did.
The problem with vocational vs academic tracks is that it devolves pretty quickly into Japan’s cram schools.
From an economic standpoint, why don’t we send our kids to college in India? The degree will cost a few thousand, at most, including room and board. It would benefit both economies, eliminate the burden of student loan repayments, soon allow us to talk to an actual American when we contact tech support, and the studies majors would perhaps learn to cook interesting food, preparing them for the restaurant job they were going to end up with anyway.
We can emulate India. I’ll bet its colleges aren’t heavy on career-irrelevant curricula.
I want the propagation of liberal arts to be more dependent on online forums than academia.
Indian colleges stink. American schools are quite good at educating people in what they want to be educated in, its just that what they want to be educated in is stupid, and the schools have no incentive to tell them so.
Many foreign colleges are about feeding the students large amounts of data to rote memorize, and not at all about developing thinking skills. India’s not a stand-out in this regard: Feynman talked about it in Brazil (or some other South American country, I forget which one) in his autobiography.
That’s, in it’s own way, just as bad a problem.
But rote memorization is the best training a waitress with a degree in Existential French Literature Studies can have. Getting a large table’s order right, without jotting a single thing down, usually results in large tips.
Yeah, but you can get that kind of training in high school.
Besides, all these X Studies people are taking food service industry jobs away from aspiring actresses and novelists. Won’t anyone think of them!?