At this point, Ashley motioned that she was wanted to talk to me, but unrecorded.
Jill Biden-Jacobs, STUDENT RETENTION AT THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE: MEETING STUDENTS’ NEEDS (2006)-Page 64
News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
WILMINGTON, DE—As Dr. Jill Biden and her husband went out to eat over the weekend, a man began choking on his Denver omelet. But lucky for him, Dr. Jill Biden was there, and she is a doctor.
“We need a doctor here!” cried a waiter. “Is there a doctor in the house?”
Dr. Jill Biden sprang into action. “I’m a doctor!” she said, rushing over. “I’m going to need a podium and a microphone, stat!” After a busboy hurried over with the life-saving tools she would need, Dr. Jill Biden thanked him and then began delivering a speech on meeting students’ needs at the community college level.
“Thank you for having me here today,” Dr. Jill Biden said as the bewildered choking man tried to call for a “real doctor,” since he was obviously a misogynistic bigot. “Webster’s Dictionary defines education as the action or process of educating.” As she continued her intro, the man’s face started to turn purple.
“There are three reasons community college being accessible for all is a net gain to society,” Dr. Jill Biden said as the man started to lose consciousness. “First, good classes are good for people. We must increase positive educational outcomes by offering good classes for low or no cost. Good classes may include everything from tennis courses and physical education to math and even science.”
“In conclusion, community college is good,” Dr. Jill Biden said fifteen minutes later, after the man had died. “Thank you.”
Go here to read the rest. We live in a society where increasingly worthless credentials are confused with wisdom. Doctor Biden symbolizes that. Go here to read her 137 page magnum opus. It demonstrates why phony doc dissertations, almost all of them in any case, are usually not read by people who aren’t being paid to read them. It is a paint by numbers effort, filled with filler, written in a plodding, and dumbed down, variant of educratese. Even by the very low standards of an Ed.D this is a dismal waste of paper which would have gotten a red F in any of the education courses I took long ago at the University of Illinois.
Two of the sharpest people I have encountered in this Vale of Tears, my parents, had one high school diploma between them. If they were still among us, I would match either of them against Doctor Jill any day of the week in a battle of wits. As Carlson said in the video above, our caste system in this country is based on academic credentials which too often today tell us little about the actual abilities of the person with the credentials. We are heading for a Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin moment where our society will be weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the corruption, and degradation, of our education system will not be the least of the factors leading to that debacle.
Agree 100% with this statement, Donald: ” We are heading for a Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin moment where our society will be weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the corruption and degradation of our education system will not be the least of the factors leading to that debacle.”
Good post, Donald.
My AA sponsor would always say to those of his pigeons educated into imbecility that a thermometer has degrees and you know where you stick that.
My father – a devout Pentecostal who died at a Sunday night church meeting where he wanted to die – went through only the 8th grade of school. Living on a farm in the early 20th cnetury required all the boys to work. His wisdom exceeded anything I have ever heard from a snowflake with a PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper). And unlike today’s millennial nit wits, he could balance a checkbook, do arithmetic in his head and read & understand the Elizabethan English of the King James Bible (which he read every night no matter how tired).
I myself have no college degree, just Naval Nuclear Training. That gave me a successful 40+ year career (that is perhaps soon to end with Joe Biden’s anti-nuclear pick for DOE Secretary). I have written the software engineering program on digital instrumentation and controls for now four different companies, and those programs have all received approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (an almost thousand page submission for my last employer, all full of technobabble no wants to read but everyone wants written to satisfy the regulations). Being a certified nuclear training instructor, I also have developed and taught plant systems training for both boiling and pressurized water reactors, as well as (of course) digital instrumentation and controls, and cyber security. People with doctorates have been among my students. Maybe I am arrogant (Lord forgive me), but yes, I continuously thank God that I did not have to put up with liberal progressive self-righteous, preening, posturing Pharisaical professors who never got their hands dirty cleaning the bilge beneath the feedwater regulating valves in Engine Room Forward on a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic in November.
You don’t need a college degree to be successful, but you do need to do hard work, obey orders, and be thankful to God for all His mercies. Yes, there are those people who have worked hard to get a college degree, and have gained much knowledge and ability from their BS, MS or PhD. God bless them. Some will be among my students this February as I again give another round of training courses. But others are flaming idiots, and those are usually of the liberal progressive persuasion. Jill Biden, the topic of this post, typifies such people, and sadly we got a small handful at Neutrons ‘R Us.
LQC
I have noticed that Navy Nuclear Power trained sailors do very well in college engineering programs and some say that the Navy technical ability and experience is advantageous after college.
I have seen many young people go to college after high school planning to figure out what they want to do while collecting grants and borrowing with student loans. When the grants are exhausted they often drop out or finish with easy but poorly marketable degrees. It will probably get worse with more outsourcing white collar jobs.
I think many would have been better served by learning a skilled trade while figuring out how they want to earn a living. Waiting to start college often has advantages. Older students often do better in college because they are more focused upon what they need to learn in college, they study harder finish sooner, have less debt and more likely to graduate with a more marketable degree.
@Patrick59 – you are 100% correct.
We are heading for a Mene, Mene, Tekel, and Parsin moment where our society will be weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the corruption, and degradation, of our education system will not be the least of the factors leading to that debacle.
So what you’re saying then, is that it’s a race to reset the system before the system, such as it is, collapses of it’s own weight and resets itself.
cleaning the bilge beneath the feedwater regulating valves in Engine Room Forward on a Los Angeles class nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic in November.
That sounds c…co…cold
It’s been going on for a long time. I recall that when I was in undergraduate school in the 1960’s, the last shot for those flunking out was to transfer to the School of Education. I believe it safe to assume, based on performance, many became administrators. Obviously, this does not apply to everyone, but the education curriculum has been corrupted for a long time.
Being uncharitable here. Read her dissertation. Dr. Jill’s Ed.D. [hahahahahaha] is from U Delaware, a.k.a. The 13th Grade.
Being charitable. The poor woman truly has many crosses to bear; not the least being the drooling moron to whom she is married.
Fraudulent Biden Didn’t Win. We Were Robbed.
It demonstrates why phony doc dissertations, almost all of them in any case, are usually not read by people who aren’t being paid to read them.
Disagree. A serious dissertation will also be read by almost no one but the committee. Occasionally, one will be turned into a university press monographs, but never in the most rigorous disciplines. The research done by the student may be an introduction to or fodder for a developing research programme.
Biden’s EdD is a manifestation of a number of pathologies in higher education. (1) the corruption and ruin of the teachers’ colleges, (2) the hypertrophy of higher education generally, and (3) the refusal of Congress, the state legislatures, boards of regents, college trustees, and faculty in serious disciplines to impose any kind of order over the fraud faculty and institutional marketing departments. There is no such thing as a defined body of skill and knowledge in school administration which would justify a lengthy training program manifest in professional doctorates and there is no body of knowledge in ‘education’ to explore to justify a research degree. You can study the psychology of learning, you can study child development, you can study organizational sociology, you can study local political institutions, you can study the history of such institutions, you can study the economics of training and service delivery. All of these subjects are covered by extant departments in the arts and sciences faculty. Except for the first two, they aren’t going to be of much help to a working teacher. The remainder might be of aid to an administrator, but seven years of class work, research, and writing in one of these fields is rather bloated to train a public manager (and still doesn’t map very well to what the manager does all day).
Dr. Jill’s Ed.D. [hahahahahaha] is from U Delaware, a.k.a. The 13th Grade.
Even by the standards of the average state, the sum of enrollments at their public campuses is bloated. A 20% cut in the enrollment at 4-year institutions (achieved by closing Delaware State) would bring them down to average. NB, that would leave you with a single institution for the whole state, for which your freshman admission screen would have to be set to permit about 1/3 of each cohort of 18 year olds in the state to enroll.
When I was in college (I was believe it or not!) the Engineering school was the bear. Freshman engineering students had to take simultaneously physics and chemistry – that separated the men for the boys., At that school many failing engineers went into Accounting equally as empirical but not rocket science.
Re: PhDs in everything. The first go-around – I went back after the military – in school the AC profs were older partners in bigger CPA firms. When I got out and went back to night school, we had an AC PhD – I couldn’t see that – from India who we (all night students with day jobs) couldn’t understand. I was mildly surprised when next class our teacher was a CPA partner, someone must have complained. I still cannot ‘see’ a PhD for Accounting, public or otherwise.
T. Shaw wrote: “Freshman engineering students had to take simultaneously physics and chemistry.” Sounds like Naval Nuclear Power School where Reactor Physics and Plant Water Chemistry were simultaneous courses.
T. Shaw, I agree with you. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what in the world you would do with a PhD in Accounting. The first time I tried taking a Tax Accounting class from a PhD professor was a miserable failure – no idea what he was talking about, not helpful in answering questions, made it way harder than it needed to be; I dropped the class like a hot potato. Second time around was with a tax attorney and I aced the class. He didn’t have a PhD but had practical experience. I think of him every time I do my taxes 36+ years later.
LQC: My grandfather made it to the 8th grade then went off to work – farming, carpenter and coal mining. He was smarter than most about what counted. My other grandfather graduated from high school, which was a very big deal “back in the day” almost 100 years ago, and then off to work as a brick mason. Even my dad (now 87) said most of the boys in his high school class quit school at 16 to go to work.
My dad went in the Navy in part to get out from under my grandfather’s thumb and partly to avoid getting drafted to Korea (with two older brothers already in the military) What Dad learned in the Navy helped him get a job in as an engineer without a college degree at IBM (back in the days when you could still do that). The work ethic he learned at home and from the Navy stood him in good stead.
My husband had a friend who maybe had a 2 year college degree but did better and smarter work than most engineers that they worked with.
Something to be said for the School of Life and the lessons you learn in it. Plus having a good work ethic and willingness to learn.
Maybe this is a dissenting note and maybe not. I took my Ph.D. in the 50’s at Harvard in Chemical Physics.. Suggested my own thesis topic, bought (from my own funds) a Radio Shack transformer I needed for an electric discharge device (before huge grants), planned my own research (not all that well), and wrote my own thesis. At latest report part of my thesis (published) is still being cited accorded to Citation Reports. Things deteriorated as time went by, and I did not–could not if I was to climb along the academic lader–hold the graduate students in my research group to the same standards I had to follow. Only two suggested their own thesis topic; they all got published, but only had four of the 14 done more than carry out suggestions for what should be done in their research.
Here’s how to make the Ph.D. a meaningful degree. Eliminate government grants so the we return to the 19th and early 20th century practice of doing research that is pure scholarship in the sciences and other fields. If that’s done, then grant entreneurship and the university superstructure of sucking on the public teat may be diminished, if not eliminated. We’ll diminish if not eliminate such fraudelent scientific endeavors as those that have been put forth to promote the cause of anthropic global warming, gaia worship, etc.
Eliminate government grants so the we return to the 19th and early 20th century practice of doing research that is pure scholarship in the sciences and other fields. If that’s done, then grant entreneurship and the university superstructure of sucking on the public teat may be diminished, if not eliminated. We’ll diminish if not eliminate such fraudelent scientific endeavors as those that have been put forth to promote the cause of anthropic global warming, gaia worship, etc.
Sounds to me like a sound idea Bob!
The big problem is that everyone who hires an employee knows he might have to defend his decision empirically in court. That leads to unnecessary credentialism, which leads to a diminishment in educational standards.
A small business might be able to hire someone based on the cut of their jib. Maybe not. Any bigger institution has to worry about being dragged into a courtroom and sued for bias. If 15 people interview for a position, I need some way to scratch 12 of them off the list, and the easiest way to do that is some certification requirement. Every potential employee knows that, so he’s got to pick up a degree. But people aren’t getting that much smarter, so the intellectual demands of a degree have to be artificially dropped. And the easiest way to break the cycle is – oh, heh heh. There’s no way. Because if I were hiring, I wouldn’t want to trust someone who only had a high school diploma, given how low that bar is now.
@ Dr. Kurland – yours is NOT a dissenting note but rather the truth. I suspect what I was taught in Naval Nuclear Power School was once taught in institutions of higher learning, not today’s women studies, racist studies, basket weaving excrementum.
“[P]eople aren’t getting that much smarter, so the intellectual demands of a degree have to be artificially dropped. And the easiest way to break the cycle is – oh, heh heh. There’s no way. Because if I were hiring, I wouldn’t want to trust someone who only had a high school diploma, given how low that bar is now.
You asked for a miracle? I give you the M. B. A.
–Dean Hans Gruber, College of Business Administration University School of Universal College University, B.S., Ph. D., Ed.D.
Now I have a doctorate. Ho ho ho.
Comment of the week Pinky! Take ‘er away Sam!
Pinky:
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There is an article that covers what you said in your comment. It is titled “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” The URL is:
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https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/busting-the-college-industrial-complex
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The article generally characterizes colleges as playing the role of de facto employment gatekeeper employer-sanctioned cartels. It is the employers who are requiring a college degree on the job applicant’s resume. The article also points out how their employment gateway status helps to fuel the college campus culture wars.
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According to the article a Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Company was the first major Supreme Court ruling to address Title VII of the Civil Rights Act employment-testing restrictions. This led eventually to the current use of college degrees in employment hiring.