There is nothing you can do that won’t prevent some idiot from mistaking almost anything for a firearm. It’s hoplophobe nation.
Category Archives: Education
A College Education
The false promise.
It seems to me that the big problem is that there is no relationship between student loan rates and prospects of paying them off, because the government got involved and completely eliminated the connection between them. In a sane world, an art history degree would carry a much higher interest rate than an engineering degree, and the market would send a signal to the students that maybe they weren’t making the best choices in major.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Jerry Pournelle:
What everyone seems to overlook is that the cost of college tuition will always rise to exceed the amount of money seeking tuition. The more money the government puts into the market, the higher the price of college, and it will trickle down from Harvard to the meanest community college. When more money chases goods, the price of the goods goes up; and if government then acts to increase the money supply, the price will rise without limit. Evan as I write this, the faculty of the California State Universities is voting to authorize a strike because they have not had raises in four years, poor things. The California State Universities were in the master plan to be the State Colleges, undergraduate institutions kept cheap and open essentially to everyone qualified to be in a a State College. They were to incorporate the State Teachers Colleges, and be the primary undergraduate education system; outstanding students would be accepted at or allow to transfer to the State University system, which would have a monopoly on graduate education.
The State College took over the State Teachers Colleges and next thing you know they needed to offer graduate degrees in education (although there is no evidence that those who have graduate degrees in education are any better at teaching, and in fact California State Colleges for twenty years taught such an ineffective system of reading that the illiteracy rate in California soared; but that’s for another story. If you know anyone about to enter the California state public schools, go to www.readingtlc.com and get my wife’s reading program so the kid will learn to read even if the teacher is a Cal State grad.) Anyway, all the Cal States offer graduate degrees in everything, and most of them are not very useful; but so long as the money supply lasts the costs will continue to rise, the faculties will be paid and paid and overpaid and pensioned off at very high levels, and the dance will continue.
So now it is becoming manifest that not only is the public school system nearly worthless, but half the graduates of the higher education system are unemployable.
There are solutions to this, most of them drastic, and we know how to have good higher education institutions. But so long as we are willing to pay for it, we’ll continue to have what we get. Charlie Sheffield and I played with this decades ago in a book called HIGHER EDUCATION. Alas it is not yet a Kindle book (I’m working on it). But the decay of our institutions of higher education under the relentless attacks of the government shoveling in money and the Iron Law assuring that the money will be accepted and overspent continues. And the beat goes on. We sowed that wind a long time ago, so why are we astonished at what we reap now?
Not all of us are.
[Update a few minutes later]
Glenn Reynolds expands on the thought:
What would a serious student-loan reform look like? Well, it would look more like normal loans. Students’ ability to borrow would be based on the likelihood that they’d be able to pay. Plus, loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy if things turned out badly.
Right now, student loans are sold on the basis that “college” promotes higher earnings. But “college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Some degrees — say in Electrical Engineering — increase earnings dramatically. Others — in, say, gender studies — not so much. A rational lender would be much more willing to finance the former than the latter.
Oh, and in ordinary credit transactions, creditors bear some risk. Loan someone money that they can’t pay back, and you take a loss if they go bankrupt. In the housing bubble, this discipline broke down because the people writing the loans weren’t going to hold on to the mortgages. Similarly, colleges today get their money upfront; if the student can’t pay it back, that’s someone else’s problem.
Let’s give colleges some “skin in the game” by making them absorb the loss, or at least part of it, if students can’t pay. Perhaps if students can’t pay their loans by 10 years after graduation, they should be allowed to discharge them in bankruptcy, with the institutions that got the loan money on the hook for, say, 20 percent of the loss.
If not a higher percentage. This would go a long way to fixing the broken incentive structure. But what Obama is proposing is just more of the same, pouring more gasoline on the flames.
[Afternoon update]
More thoughts from Nick Gillespie, and a response from Instapundit. Yes, humanities degrees aren’t intrinsically worthless, but the way that many of them are taught these days makes them so in many cases.
Advice To Aspiring Journalists
Get a degree in something societally useful.
Seventeen Equations
…that changed the world. One of the signs of the disaster that is modern academia is that it is not only acceptable, but for many a point of pride, that they don’t understand math.
[Via Geek Press]
Oh, The Humanities
A better question is, should they be, at least in anything resembling their current form. It won’t change until parents realize what a massive fraud the whole thing is.
Social Darwinism Versus Laissez Faire
A primer for Barack Obama. He, and the Democrats in general, badly need one, but they probably won’t even understand it.
More Thoughts On Social Darwinism
Over at Althouse’s place:
Strangely enough, “progressivism” was broadly associated with eugenics and racism and yet the only people who remember that are the people accused of being social darwinists.
There’s a lot more to unpack here than I have time for, but a key point made by another commenter is that no one calls themselves a Social Darwinist — it is an illegitimate epithet reserved for the perceived enemies of same, whereas many have been, and continue to be proud to call themselves Marxists and socialists. And they should be ashamed to do so, given the history of the twentieth century.
The President’s SCOTUS Attack
Was it good politics?
the president’s demagoguery did agitate the constituencies that matter most: the pro-Obama media, the even more pro-Obama media, and Europeans (who, let’s face it, are just more soignée than we are). Judging by my Facebook feed, he’s doing a pretty good job of getting his rank and file followers to mouth the appropriate slogans as well.
But I think Pruden is missing a piece of good news in all this. Obama has also demonstrated the limits of propaganda that was perfected in the era of totalitarianism. It was easy for FDR to make a crude campaign against the court stick because (sorry, Greatest Generation) Americans back then were across the board less educated and less skeptical, and they had access to a universe of information so small that, by the standards of 2012, it can barely be said to have existed.
Last month, an ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated nearly 70 percent of Americans believed the Court should strike down the individual mandate or the entire PPACA. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll also showed majority belief that the mandate was unconstitutional. I don’t read too much into that. (Among the many ways we’re smarter than our ancestors is that we’re more skeptical of opinion polling.) But if you had taken a similar poll taken in 1935, the majority of responses to a question about judicial review and constitutionality under either the commerce clause or the necessary and proper doctrine would have been “Huh?” That Obama is out of his depth just shows again that he’s everything Bill Clinton wasn’t: inflexible, intellectually lazy, and tied to a vision of America the rest of the country stopped caring about decades ago.
We’re just not as stupid and ignorant as they wish we were. Or they are.
Colleges Skimp On Science
…but spend big on diversity. Must be part of that “Republican war on science.”
This doesn’t just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
But, to quote George W. Bush, is our students learning? Not very much, concludes the California Association of Scholars in its 87-page study of the University of California system.
Students aren’t required to study American history or Western civilization. But they’re subjected to a lot of political indoctrination by leftist activists. “Far too many” have not learned to write effectively to read “a reasonably complex book.”
“In recent years, study after study has found that a college education no longer does what it once did and should do,” the report concludes. “Students are being asked to pay considerably more and get considerably less.”
That’s the sort of thing that happens when you pump money into an insular system and don’t hold its leaders accountable for results.
And man, that’s an unflattering picture of Sherry Lansing. She looks like she’s auditioning for the Walking Dead.
“Unilateral Intellectual Disarmament”
Why the Left is losing the argument:
In sum, the left systematically has dumbed its side down, to the point where supposedly well-educated elites are untrained and unaware of our country’s history and constitutional traditions. The left thinks words have no fixed meaning (health care and health insurance, are close enough, so they insist we can define the latter to be the former.) The liberal elites have a poor grounding in market economics so they swallow the idea that health-care insurance is “unique” because others’ purchases affect your cost of goods. (Surprise: all markets operate this way.) They advance illogical and counterfactual arguments (e.g., withdrawing a 100 percent subsidy for health care to seniors is a “mandate”) because they are unused to vigorous debate that upsets their preferences dressed up in a thin veil of factual distortion. (Sorry, taking away a freebie is not remotely the same in logic or in law as requiring you purchase something.)
Conservatives, well aware of the intellectual deterioration of liberal institutions, have spent decades pursing supplemental education in think tanks, the speeches and writings of public intellectuals (e.g., Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson), professional organizations (e.g., the Federalist society) and classrooms of intellectually rigorous scholars (e.g., Robert P. George, Harvey Mansfield and Richard Epstein). In doing so, they sharpened their rhetorical kills, versed themselves in history and political philosophy, and prepared themselves for intellectual combat against those who had rejected the idea of objective meaning, be it in literature or the Constitution. In moments like the Supreme Court argument we see how vast is the gulf between conservative and liberal elites.
Just another example of Haidt’s thesis.