Language advisory as to the above video:
News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:
Have you gone into massive debt to earn a college degree? Congratulations! You now have a piece of paper that says you’re smart! The whole world is wide open to you now. There’s nothing you can’t do!
To help you pick from the endless jobs now available to you, we compiled a list of the top 10 jobs available to people who have paid at least $100,000 for their education:
1) Garbage man’s assistant: Waste disposal professionals hire special assistants for important tasks– like standing inside the trash compacter to spray Febreeze on the garbage so it doesn’t smell so bad. A rewarding career!
Pay: Minimum wage plus all the garbage you can keep!
2) Debt collector for other in-debt college students: Make sure you have some experience breaking knees.
Pay: 10% of what you collect minus brass knuckle costs
3) Mary Kay double diamond assistant to the regional sales boss babe: We’re not sure what this is because none of us graduated college, but it sounds prestigious! Double diamond! Wow! We are told this position will bring you untold wealth within a year with little effort. You go, girl!
Pay: Estimated $12 billion trillion per month
4) The guy who touches the wire for the electrician to see if it’s still live: Well, someone’s gotta make sure, and it isn’t gonna be him! Electricians are hiring college grads to do this important job in increasing numbers!
Pay: A polite “thank you” from the skilled tradesman and as much copper wire as you can steal
5) Games journalist: Be an intellectual thought-leader in the game industry! Only the most elite college grads will qualify for this universally respected gig.
Pay: Whatever CD Projekt Red will pay you to say Cyberpunk was good
6) Amazon warehouse pee bottle cleaner: Amazon workers don’t have time for the restroom, and that’s where you come in college grad! Keep those bottles empty and clean so workers can meet their quota.
Pay: You can take the extra bottles to a recycling center and turn them in for cold hard cash!
7) Biden’s official food chewer: So you want to work in politics, huh? Well with a $100K degree, you should be qualified to chew Biden’s food for him! If you at least have your Master’s degree, you are also qualified to regurgitate it directly into his mouth like a mother bird!
Pay: Unlimited hair sniffs
8) Citizen of Portland: These fine specimens of humanity basically get paid to do nothing except be weird! It’s the American dream! With hard work, you may be promoted to a professional rubber bullet catcher or tear gas tester.
Pay: Whatever the government gives you
9) Youth pastor: As far as we know, these guys don’t really do anything. Winning!
Pay: Free pizza, and you get to use the church card at Forever 21
10) Babylon Bee writer: The most prestigious and sought-after writing career in human history. As long as you can make fun of AOC at a 3rd-grade level, you’re in!
Go here to read the rest. When I attended the University of Illinois as an undergrad from 1975-1979, I graduated with no debt and my parents didn’t have to pay a penny, which was fortunate as my family had a lot of love and little money. Law school from 1979-1982 left me with debt of $7K. When my son attended the University of Illinois I paid on average 21K a year. He got a tuition and fees scholarship to law school, something his old man did not attain, and graduated with 60K of debt in 2017, which he paid in full by January of 2020 from his earnings at the law mines. (I work him, as I warned him I would, like a rented mule.) As I have told him, facing the type of debt college students now routinely have to face, if I had encountered such a situation four decades ago, the world would have one less attorney. College has morphed from a vehicle for personal betterment and a place for serious scholars, to places where people take on the shackles of huge debt to have Leftist indoctrination preached at them. There are still good colleges out there, like Hillsdale, and some of the young students I have met have the passion for learning of true scholars, but I do not find it at all surprising that more and more young people are giving a thumbs down to immediate college and pursuing other avenues to start their careers. (The growth of online cheaper college, often pursued while students work full time, is stunning and a hopeful morning star for the future.) College has been over sold, and become a dead end trap for too many young men and women. I am optimistic for the future in this area because I think we will find better and cheaper ways to have advanced education, but we are definitely in a time of transition, and such periods are rough for the people going through them.
Part of it is demand. Many companies today demand a college degree for no other reason than demanding a college degree. It could be a degree in basket weaving for all they care. But you have to have one to be hired or, if not that, to get ahead. That has created an industry with endless demand. In the meantime, salaries for college educators and administrators have skyrocketed beyond what they were when I was in high school and learned what the average professor made.
College degrees are used the same way as high school degrees used to be: as evidence that someone was basically literate and could handle simple math. Unfortunately many employers are discovering that a college degree is no longer a guarantee of these basic level requirements.
My wife and I have helped our four children through college. Difficult but not impossible, one needs to be shrewd about it:
1. Each worked for a third, took loans for a third, and we helped with a third. They’re all ending up with about $20K in loans. That I think is not that bad, it’s equal to a car loan these days. It helped having four children two years apart, colleges due give you a break and they all had some scholarships.
2. Each went to different state college within driving distance that had a good curriculum for their chosen profession. There’s bad here but Massachusetts colleges are everywhere. We leveraged that.
3. They all had different methods depending on circumstances: one commuted not to have the expense of living on campus, one went to a community college in year one paying his own while working, one was an RA for free room and board, the last pulled the rip cord and joined the Army two years into college, his education is free now. Good timing because being the last, our break of having two in at the same time had ended.
4. They all had/have a profession in mind, none went in blindly, all were serious and they all have an entrepreneur spirit.
It all worked out. Now to redo the kitchen. It needs it badly.
That’s a sensible way to do it. Good for the children (earning whilst learning) and good for parents (helping out kids if they are able to)….But agree I think the key is having a profession in mind. Otherwise a University degree is a pointless, time consuming and an expensive exercise.
I give a little more credit to a University degree than just a piece of paper- yes courses these days are filled with a lot of mumbo jumbo but this is nothing new and we have known the left bias in University teaching for decades now. It’s universal. Although a University degree doesn’t really prepare you for the workforce it prepares your thinking in the profession you will end up working in. I didn’t enjoy my Uni course but I loved the profession.
Otherwise what we call Tech Colleges where you earn a trade is the other way to go- the courses are far less costly, you work whilst you learn and where I’m from there is great demand for trades and skilled jobs for men (or women just to tick the PC box) (carpenters, electricians, plumbers etc..). The earning potential can be far far greater than professions which require a University degree. Probably because nobody wants to do the dirty work because it’s considered low brow but society will always need tradies. That’s why they can charge what they charge… I would have no problem if my son wanted to learn a trade rather than go to Uni if that’s what he wanted.
In the early 20th c., core curricula were replaced with distribution requirements or with a basket or synthetic courses while the 4 year baccalaureate was retained. Just unloading the distribution requirements and the synthetic courses could cut 25% of the time you spend on a baccalaureate degree. Note, it’s now common for schools to allow marks to declare a ‘major’ with as few as 9 courses. Students are awarded ‘master’s degrees’ even though the underlying baccalaureate might be in a completely unrelated subject. It’s time to end the scams incorporated into the current degree architecture and to insist by statute that schools re-organize. Successor institutions to the current might be as follows:
2d chance high schools. You could establish these on the campuses of extant community colleges. They’d offer up to a dozen academic subjects and vocational courses of a sort you commonly see in voTech high schools. The clients would be people looking to get some adult education or finish off uncompleted secondary credentials past the age of 18. Spots would be rationed.
General occupational institutes: these would be federations of occupational schools which in turn would have school-specific admissions criteria. Students would attend for two academic years or one calendar year. Business, teacher-training, nursing, technology, &c.
Preparatory institutes: these would be places students would attend to fill in gaps in their background or to complete stereotyped certificates for admission to occupational schools of one sort or another, with the longest program maybe 70 credits.
Eccentric programs: these would have the aims or structure of the general occupational institute, but not fit within it for one reason or another. These could include service academies (high overhead, particularized training, encouragement of esprit de corps), arts academies (impractical subject matter), institutional diploma programs (necessary presence of an institution with an ongoing function apart from the training program), agricultural colleges (rural locus, occasional presence of a research institute) &c.
Professional institutes: these would come in several varieties and serve to train the demanding fancy professions. Engineering, medical arts, law, veterinary medicine, perhaps professional psychology. The presence of affiliated research centers would be common but not universal.
General research centers: these would provide research degrees in occupational subjects not covered by the professional institutes (e.g. business or public policy).
Academic research centers: these would provide research degrees in the academic arts and sciences, music, and perhaps theology.
Colleges: these would provide 1, 2, and 3 year degrees in academic subjects, music, theology.
Stand alones, e.g conservatories or seminaries.
The term ‘university’ could be used as an umbrella term to describe a federation including some segment of 5-8, provided that at least a college and an academic research center be included.
Private institutions would receive no public subsidies and be financed through household resources, bank loans, donation and endowment income, and grants from private foundations.
Public institutions might receive some fee-for-service income provided to households from welfare programs (e.g. university hospitals treating Medicare and Medicaid patients); they might also see their research endowment expanded through irregular bond issues approved by voter referenda. Otherwise, they’d be financed by voucher redemptions. The state funds from which the redemptions were made would be financed by a set of dedicated income taxes, so the public money devoted to financing higher education would be a fixed % of the state’s total personal income flow. The vouchers would be available to students admitted via the payment of a fee to the state treasury; the fees would be a revenue source for general state operations and the schools would never see a dime of it. The fees would be contingent on the number of discounted vouchers you’d received in the past and the number of years your mother, your father, and you have filed these special income tax returns with the state treasury. Your income tax liability would be calculated as a flat rate on what income you have over and above a certain exemption. The exemption would contingent on the dimensions of your household in a given year.
/ yammer off.
There is an interesting article about colleges and their role in employment. 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. “Woke” capitalists and left wing college campuses appear to have a symbiotic relationship. Wikipedia has a article about adjunct professors. The article says that they make up a majority of instructors, get paid less, and do not receive employee benefits. Student loans look like high-toned advanced payday loans.
Well the interest rate is much better than any payday loans, and income based repayment should prevent most students from going into default, but unlike payday loans it is basically impossible to bankrupt on student loans. Whenever you have government money flooding an industry, and that is what student loans have become, all price constraints fly out the window. We see a similar situation in health care.
This 40-year veteran teacher of Catholic high school and middle school in California has no desire to put a damper on the suggestions above, but the driving force of the over-selling of college has been the insistance of the American people that their kids be prepared for a profession – a set of pressures Dr. Ravitch claimed could be found among large-scale surveys back to WWI. Any teacher or counsellor suggesting otherwise for a given student faces a fire-storm. Colleagues have left jobs in frustration trying to argue for kids who aren’t qualified (and often don’t have the dreams for) college because “the parent is always right”. Does anyone see those pressures changing?
The article generally characterizes colleges as playing the role of de facto employment gatekeeper employer-sanctioned cartels.
Yep, and it’s a role of which they should be stripped. One problem is that ’employment discrimination’ chewed through our asinine judiciary has made occupational testing nearly impossible. This provides a market for other credentials. It’s awful.
but the driving force of the over-selling of college has been the insistance of the American people that their kids be prepared for a profession – a set of pressures Dr. Ravitch claimed could be found among large-scale surveys back to WWI.
You don’t need five years of tertiary schooling for vocational preparation and enrollment at baccalaureate granting institutions in the 1920s was quite unusual. You had voTech high schools, hospital nursing schools, two year normal schools, junior colleges. About 6% of each cohort could be found in four year colleges and universities. Another increment (about 2% of each cohort) could be found in the teachers’ colleges which had only recently expanded their program from two years to four years. You could commonly enter professional schools without a baccalaureate degree.
The article says that they make up a majority of instructors, get paid less, and do not receive employee benefits. Student loans look like high-toned advanced payday loans.
About 51% of all instructors are f/t and they provide 70% of the teaching manpower. Occupational schools benefit from having instructors who work in those professions and teach on the side. As for the academic faculties, limit continuous tenure to faculty over 55; institute mandatory retirement; and put the younger faculty on renewable multi-year contracts. You’ll cut down on the hiring inhibition. You can work on the oversupply of newly minted PhD’s by requiring institutions to disclose the known employment history of every person to whom they’ve awarded such a degree in the previous 35 years.
Having been a player in the academic game for 32 years (Carnegie-Mellon, SUNY/AB, Penn State, Bucknell), I can testify that most (not all) of the players are motivated by self-interest rather than a selfless desire to educate the young. One quick solution: cut off all Federal and State funding to “higher education” institutions. Let financing be done, as in the early 20th century and before, totally by private sources.
nobody’s addressed what function “higher education” should fill:
1) pre-professional training: medicine, law, science, engineering, business admin, teaching
2) learning as per St.John’s College, Hillsdale, St. Thomas Aquinas, ;
3) trade schools …and that should be carried out as apprenticeships (would this work, as in olden days, for the law?)
4) And utilize online resources more.
@ Tom,
Regarding: “This 40-year veteran teacher of Catholic high school and middle school in California has no desire to put a damper on the suggestions above, but the driving force of the over-selling of college has been the insistence of the American people that their kids be prepared for a profession.”
I have no desire of putting a damper on either, however….
My experience in the NE has been that it’s that catholic schools that primarily do this. The catholic high school nearby to me is $15K per year, and it’s expected that not just some but all must attend college, and these must attend the “be$t” colleges. The most expensive – a mindset is that if you’re not paying top dollar, it’s not the be$t.
For me, white middle class that would receive no help.. to send all four to catholic high school would have meant ($15K per HS year + at least $10K more per year of college) x 4years x 4children … or $400K. That was not feasible, plus there would be no guarantee our children would remain catholic.
Catholic schools have become the playground of the upper middle class 1 or 2 children. The schools push the kids to go on to top universitie$ where they amass major debt, and in return the schools get to market to the incoming class based on where the last class was accepted to. Sports teams and high faculty to student ratios continually drive up the cost. And the schools count success based school acceptance and football games won from drawing from 40 communities…. not by marriages, families and children.
Let financing be done, as in the early 20th century and before, totally by private sources.
Don’t believe that was the case in re state schools. However, schools enrolled a much smaller share of each birth cohort.
nobody’s addressed what function “higher education” should fill:
I addressed that in my post, dull as it was.
sorry Art, I didn’t read the previous comments….right you are, and a good job of parceling out different functions. By stopping federal funding, I meant stopping grants to professors and institutions. That would mean that the amount of money a faculty person took in would no longer be one of his/her credentials for promotion. Federal grants to students as scholarships, fine.
meant stopping grants to professors and institutions. That would mean that the amount of money a faculty person took in would no longer be one of his/her credentials for promotion. Federal grants to students as scholarships, fine.
Disagree. States are of sufficient dimension to finance tertiary schooling. The following are appropriate clientele for federal financing.
Students in ROTC
Students in miscellaneous small recruitment pools for federal civilian employment.
Federal employees (military and civilian) as part of staff development.
Families of certain federal employees (military and also civilians in itinerant positions where posting abroad is common)
Residents of the former Pacific Trust Territory
Residents of the smaller insular dependencies
Reservation Indians
Miscellaneous persons in itinerant occupations
Veterans who’ve served long enough to earn the benefit.
Spouses of disabled veterans who cannot take advantage of the benefit.
Pretty sure the outer boundary of those eligible would be a single-digit share of each cohort.
As for federal research, have it done in-house or through contracting. If you want to pick the brains of faculty, you can offer temporary fellowships which pay well and include an indemnity to your home institution to compensate them for loss of services.
State governments can incorporate a general research endowment for each of their institutions (which would finance that institution’s faculty). Grants would be awarded from the income by committees of outside auditors. Now and again, voter initiatives could be undertaken posing the question as to whether the state or groups of counties should offer a special bond issue to be deposited in the endowments of the institutions within their ambo. The value of the bond issue would be cut up among the institutions according to a fixed formula. There would be no ongoing appropriations from state or county treasuries. Rather, you’s have these episodic, voter-approved bond issues and that would be it. (The public institutions get the issue; private institutions would rely on fundraising campaigns).