College
11/21/10 (By Travis)
9/1/2008 AEI
4/21/10
"The Federal Takeover of Higher Education
Financing: Why Obama’s Boost Could Bust Taxpayers"
Townhall.com ^ | April 17, 2010 | Carl Horowitz
Another question, why should taxpayer be subsidizing anything, much less higher education, an institution of dubious value to many students?
Posted 3/10/08 ( by Travis)
3/10/08 Rushlimbaugh.com
Rush pens, or should I say, orates, a touching tribute to a giant in the conservative movement. A highlight:
I
went through one year of college and I was having trouble, flunked speech, should have called the
course Outline 101. Flunked speech, did every speech, showed up at every class and still
flunked it. I said, "This is not for me." And one morning I was sitting in the
house at 20 years old and I said, "I'm quitting." I told my dad, "I'm quitting.
I can't handle this. I'm leaving. I've got a job offer in Pittsburgh, and I'm going to go
there." And, of course, he came from the Great Depression, and that was the worst news he
could hear. The formative years of his life were the Great Depression and World War II.
You go through the Great Depression, and if you didn't have a college degree you had no chance of
getting a job.
He had great fears. I'm the only member of my family I think that doesn't
have a college degree. He was very concerned he was a failure as a father, and I remember
telling him, "Well, I want to be like Bill Buckley." He said, "What do you
mean?" "Well, I want to be able to sit around and write and think and speak,"
and so forth, and my dad blew up at me. "What are you talking about?" He gave
me a two-hour lecture on, "Where do you think Bill Buckley went to become what he is? Do
you think Bill Buckley just sits around and writes and thinks and speaks, and people like you have
this reaction to him?" I got a serious lecture on how hard and time-consuming achievement
is. When you see the output of someone's work but you don't see what goes into it, you can
make the mistake of assuming it comes easy to them, especially those who are great at what they do.
They make it look so easy that you think you could do it, too. And you form impressions of how
they do it, and you see these people on television and so forth, you really don't see any of the
prep or any of the hard work that goes into the final product, and my dad was right about that.
So it wasn't until I left the formal academic setting at age 20, that I got serious about education above and beyond what I'd learned at home. I was reading omnivorously and voluminously, meaning anything I could get my hands on that was of interest to me.
Isn't it interesting? Rush Limbaugh flunking speech in college? Rush's Dad was right about what it takes to succeed and the humility necessary to achieve accomplishment, but wrong about the importance of college.
Posted 10/23/07 (By Travis)
10/23/07 Thomas Sowell
You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.
Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006, only four had Ivy League degrees. Some -- including Michael Dell of Dell computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft -- had no degree at all.
Apparently getting into Prestige U. is not the life or death thing that some students or their parents think it is.
My only clarification would be that having a 'Ph.D' is not necessarily reflective of 'education' either. :)
Posted 9/16/07 (By Travis)
Keep 'Em Out / Higher education has been oversold
9/13/07 National Review Online
When
we hear that more and more jobs “require” a college degree, that isn’t because most of them
are so technically demanding that an intelligent high school graduate couldn’t learn to do the
work. Rather, what it means is that more employers are using educational credentials as a screening
mechanism. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield write in their book Saving Higher Education
in the Age of Money, “the United States has become the most rigidly credentialized society in
the world. A B.A. is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time
training, let alone four.”
<.>
Sadly, college education is now generally sold as a stepping stone to good employment rather than as an intellectually broadening experience. Sometimes it manages to do both, but often it does neither.
9/15/07 Bob Circus
An interesting take on the effect of Public compulsory education on family cohesion and values.
The only book by Laura Ingalls Wilder I've read is Farmer Boy, her biography of the life of her husband, Almanzo Wilder, when he was ten years old and growing up on a farm. I was surprised by his life, which wasn't all that long ago--in the 1860's.
Almanzo had a place and a purpose in the family, and an important one. The functioning of the farm was very much dependent on him, and Almanzo didn't mind at all. He enjoyed it a great deal. How many teenagers today can say the same? How many today just live with their families, but don't truly feel part of them? As for school--ugh.
There was something very interesting about Almanzo's life. He hated school passionately and apparently only attended a few months at the most in his entire life. Yet he grew up intelligent and well-read.
So, school, too, is a major part of the problem with teenagers today. Many have little purpose or meaning in their families, and even less in school. Unfortunately, to borrow a phrase from John Taylor Gatto, the purpose of government factory schools is indoctrination. That's why it puzzled me at first why family and school didn't mean that much to me. I especially had no place, or meaning, or purpose, in school. Indoctrination is not education, and it's always boring and never has any meaning.
Almanzo had an important place in the family, but no place in school. That's why he hated it. School meant nothing to him, and it bored him. It isn't any different today. <.>
I've come to the conclusion there is no hope for the public schools. They bore kids, they destroy their imaginations, they give them no meaning or purpose. I'd shut them down on the spot if I could. How many kids like school? Almost none. Doesn't that tell people something? <.>
As for families, I do know one thing; the State is the cause of most of their problems. Interference by public schools, interference in the economy, destruction of neighborhoods and communities...all of these things are created and exacerbated by the State. Interference by the State takes away the meaning and purpose of people's lives, and tries to replace it with its meaning, which is generally bureaucracy, militarization, war and empire.
The State does a lot of bad things to people. Taking away a true meaning to their lives and replacing it with false one is one of the worst.
"Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."
- 6th Court of Appeals Justice Janice Rogers Brown
Posted 10/11/06 (By Travis)
10/10/06 campusreportonline.net
Some interesting facts that clash with the political rhetoric about 'drying up student loans' and 'soaring costs' of college and the so-called cutting of 'vital' programs'.
“Twenty-nine to thirty-one percent of high income students take out loans to go to college.”
There is no mystery why this is. Government steals taxpayer money and gives it to these students at interest rates below what can be made in the stock market or any other investments. It is puzzling that 100% of students don't take out the subsidized loans and invest the money in index funds...
• 52% of students max out on Stafford student loans.
• 47% of students either don’t max out or do not take out the loans.
• 37% of private borrowers work.
• 63% don’t.
Several of the speakers at the event noted that only one-third of students are working their way through college in addition to borrowing, a puzzle when the stated reason for the loan is need. In days of old, students borrowed and worked their way through college.
In fact, Mazzeo, who has worked as a professor at Baruch College, noted that “A surprisingly large number of low-income students do not max out on Stafford loans.” At the other end of the transaction is a multi-billion dollar industry, mostly fueled by tax dollars.
So, just like 'poverty statistics' the reasons for the existence of the 'welfare state' once again prove exaggerated...
Posted 7/26/06 (By Travis)
A Modest Proposal to Abolish Universities 'Required Reading'
7/2/506 Fred Reed Wow, a hawkish, strongly worded attack on Universities, but there is a great deal of truth to it:
To the extent that universities actually try to teach anything, which is to say to a very limited extent, they do little more than inhibit intelligent students of inquiring mind. And they are unnecessary: The professor’s role is purely disciplinary: By threats of issuing failing grades, he ensures that the student comes to class and reads certain things. But a student who has to be forced to learn should not be in school in the first place. By making a chore of what would otherwise be a pleasure, the professor instills a lifelong loathing of study. <.>
The truth is that universities positively discourage learning. Think about it. Suppose you wanted to learn Twain. A fruitful approach might be to read Twain. The man wrote to be read, not analyzed tediously and inaccurately by begowned twits. It might help to read a life of Twain. All of this the student could do, happily, even joyously, sitting under a tree of an afternoon. This, I promise, is what Twain had in mind.
But no. The student must go to a class in American Literatue, and be asked by some pompous drone, “Now, what is Twain trying to tell us in paragraph four?” This presumes that Twain knew less well than the professor what he was trying to say, and that he couldn’t say it by himself. Not being much of a writer, the poor man needs the help of a semiliterate drab who couldn’t sell a pancake recipe to Boy’s Life. As bad, the approach suggests that the student is too dim to see the obvious or think for himself. He can’t read a book without a middleman. He probably ends by hating Twain. <.>
You learn that structure trumps performance, that existence is supposed to be dull. It prepares you to spend years on lawsuits over somebody else’s trademarks or simply going buzzbuzzbuzz in a wretched federal office. Only two weeks a year do you get to do what you want to do. This we pay for?
Posted 5/11/06
The College Rejection Bonanza: Ivy League Schools are Over-rated Compared to Less Selective Colleges
3/7/06 The American Thinker
2. Having a son or daughter accepted at a selective college has become one more badge of honor and prestige for the very large group of Americans who can buy pretty much everything else they desire.
Posted 4/3/06
Heaven's Gate / Will gaining admission to one of the nation's elite colleges guarantee a prosperous future -- or just a mountain of debt?
4/2/06 Washington Post
If you have read 'College' (12/5/05 post BELOW), which you could not have because I just realized I hadn't created it!, you would recall I expressed my reservations regarding the hype around the value of a college education. If one subscribes to this line of thinking, it would also follow that the type of college one attends does not particularly matter. In other words, and in my opinion, the rankings of various higher education institutions as 'good' or 'bad' colleges are fairly worthless, because it is the individual, not the college, which make all the difference. I think this is a rather optimistic viewpoint. :)
And far from being crazy, although it certainly flies against the grain of public opinion, this perspective is backed up by information contained in this WP article, which, in fact, is why I posted it. :)
In the late 1990s, two
academics decided to measure whether those elite private schools really delivered on what they
promised. Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, and Stacy Dale, a researcher with the Andrew
Mellon Foundation, compared 1976 freshmen at 34 colleges -- from Yale, Stanford and Wellesley to
Penn State and Miami University of Ohio. They separated out a subgroup of those freshmen who had
applied to the same pool of elite colleges. They then took that subgroup, now full of elite and
public school grads, and compared their wages in 1995.
The findings? The income
levels of these graduates were essentially the same, though very poor students seemed to get a
slight benefit from an elite private education. For most students, there was no real post-college
earning benefit gained from an elite undergraduate degree. The better predictor was where the
students had applied.
"Essentially, what we
found was the fact that you apply to those kinds of elite places means that you are ambitious, and
you'll do well in life wherever you go to school," Dale says.
Other research has largely
concurred with the findings of Krueger and Dale.
"What does it really take to get into Harvard?" Sklarow asks. "Who knows?" People need to stop worrying about finding the magic formula to get into Harvard or Yale, he says. "There is enough research to show how you do in life has nothing to do with where you went to college, but it is just very hard to convince the parents."
I find the part about ambition interesting and I must say I rather like this quote from a Yale graduate:
"I ended up learning a lot more from my classmates than I did from my professors."
Posted 12/5/05
Disappearing Act / Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good
12/4/05 Washington Post A lamentation of the shrinking number of men, as compared to women, going to college. I posted this in order to address the background premises and worldview of this author. His line of thinking is, in my opinion, both fallacious and prevalent. First, the author mistakes college with education. Certainly one can be educated and not go to college. If one uses wealth as a barometer of success, many of the greatest entrepreneurs in this country either dropped out or never went to college. According to some statistics, (and I've seen ones that reach an opposite conclusion of this one but can't find them), every dollar invested in education yields a 21% return in lifetime earning, as those with higher degrees tend to earn more, even counting the years spent in college not earning and the cost of tuition. Now, this analysis is flawed for two reasons:
1. Because many of the most highly motivated people go to college and
2. Because there is societal bias towards folks who don't attend college as a result of cultural conditioning.
In other words, certain high paying fields are restricted to those without a college degree simply because they don't have a college degree, not because of any lack of 'education' or 'motivation' or 'character'.
And, if the highly motivated people that tend to go to college did not, would they earn a similar or greater amount of money over their lifetimes?
Now, am I suggesting that one should not go to college? Well, it depends. With some exception, I wouldn't think that going to a small liberal arts college like the one the author taught at is necessarily all that valuable, but certain programs and fields in college might be valuable for some and worth the return.
Let me ask some of my college educated readers, did you use what you learned in college throughout your career? Perhaps a better question is - do you even remember what you learned in college?!? My intuition and (limited) experience has been that most people start a new job from nearly square one and that hardly anything they learned in college was relevant. Sure, you gain social experience, grow as a person etc.., but this would happen to varying degrees even if you were not in college. In fact, much of the practical knowledge/savvy you gain in college, was probably not a result of what you learned in class, but what you learned from peers or in pursuit of your own interests.
In fact, when you get right down to it, what did you learn in college that you couldn't have learned yourself? One of the positives of college is that it might act as a self-disciplining program in that it motivates you to rapidly learn a great deal about a given subject due to test pressures. This might indeed be helpful, but so would addressing the underlying motivational issues and, besides, the same stresses would occur in a job-training program.
So, if at least the general gist of what I am saying is true, why do companies not hire directly out of high school and begin job training? The first reason is that they don't know who they are getting. Someone who has strait A's in 4 years of college may not know anything particularly useful, but they have shown they are able to excel. The second reason is the aforementioned cultural bias and socially created 'prestige' of having a slip of paper called a college degree. Not to mention mindless tradition. If a company has always hired college graduates and they have always had good success with these folks, then why rock the boat? Another example of risk aversion.
It seems clear that in at least some cases, companies could pay workers less (initially) and start them earlier, benefiting both the company and the worker in the long term. The fact that this isn't a widespread occurrence might lead some to refer to this as a 'market failure', as the most efficient way of doing things is apparently not being done. Whether I agree depends on how 'market failure' is defined. Certainly, the vast amounts of money our government forcibly confiscates from us to throw at higher education contribute to our belief that the degrees these institutions produce are quite valuable, as does their high charge of tuition. Admittedly, there are psychology and culture forces that distort market forces, which may make these influenced markets more inefficient. But in reality there is no such thing as a 'perfect market'; there will always be unequal information between seller and buyer, skewered supply and demand, inelasticity, and culture/psychological aspects to markets. However, I would disagree if the term 'market failure' is used to advocate expanding the power of government to 'rectify' the market failure, as frequently occurs. This will only make things worse.
Following past logic, since males are apparently not going to college as much as this author would prefer, perhaps we should institute affirmative action type programs to encourage more men to attend college. It would done in the name of the 'common good'.
Of course, this sort of thinking is ridiculous, and in fact, at least some of these young men might know something this author does not.
An interesting argument against affirmative action and discrimination legislation is that if otherwise equivalent women and minorities were paid less than their equivalent white male counterparts, companies consisting of only women and minorities would be immensely profitable as they could all pay their employees less for the same results. Why this has never occurred, in my opinion, is quite a complex issue that I'll try to return to at a later date. Suffice it to say that, currently, discrimination against women is quite rare, and the reasons it exists is not because anyone is 'anti-women' or sexist, but rather that employers are simply assessing the economic realities/possibilities of child-rearing. Retroactive analysis of the past yields a more nuanced view.
Affirmative action regarding minorities is also an interesting subject to ponder. After all, as demonstrated throughout this website, the bumbling actions of government seem to produce nearly the exact opposite effect of their desired intentions in nearly every endeavor government pursues. Regulations designed to improve a gasoline situation actually make it worse, FDA regulations intending to protect the population, harm the population, minimum wage laws hurt the poorest of the poor in the name of helping them, government schemes to improve children's vaccinations backfire, aid given to developing countries to fight poverty actually increases it, welfare and anti-poverty programs in this country create more poverty than they ever solve, and I could go on and on. So, knowing all this we might, ideologically, intuitively believe that affirmative action hurts minorities more than it helps.
For Blacks in Law School, Can Less Be More?
2/13/05 New York Times Magazine A recent study published in The Stanford Law Review by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found a new way to inflame the debate. In fact, the study has ignited what may be the fiercest dispute over affirmative action since 2003, when the Supreme Court found some forms of it to be constitutional.
Professor Sander's study tests a simple, but startling, thesis: Affirmative action actually depresses the number of black lawyers, because many black students end up attending law schools that are too difficult for them, and perform badly.
If black law students were accepted to lesser law schools under race-blind admissions, Professor Sander writes, they would receive better grades and pass the bar in greater numbers. Even accounting for the many black students who could not attend any law school without affirmative action, the ultimate number of black lawyers would still increase, he concludes.
Professor Sander concedes that 14 percent fewer black students would enter law school without preferences. But because more of those who do get in would get good grades at schools that are better suited to them, more would graduate, he said, yielding 8 percent more black lawyers.
That assertion, which is based on a great deal of data, along with inference and speculation, has provoked an outpouring of written critiques from law professors, economists and social scientists. Several will be published in The Stanford Law Review's May issue.
Well, the 'out pouring of critiques' from academia is no surprise, again perpetuating a culture of groupthink and risk aversion. I haven't read professor Sander's studies or the critiques, so take this with a grain of salt. I am posting this just as a possible mechanism that at least can be logically constructed to fit the aforementioned ideologically derived pattern. Of course, ideally, it would be best not to work from a conclusion backwards... :)
See also, 'Academic Bias'
See also, 'A Charter School Tale'