Look at it this way: the more people that DO think this way, the more demand there will be, thereby softening the price fall for the sellers. So instead of losing their shirt, they only lose a sleeve.Originally Posted by Bio
We're ACTUALLY doing a public service and helping protect the economy.
I did not see it in the thread, but I would argue pretty aggressively in support of a position that could be over-simplified to something very similar to that.
The fine print would have lots of caveats but at a fundamental level my motivation is that I don't like being around dumb people. The best way to avoid being around dumb people is to invest heavily in education. I also like being in a country with smart people - it has a number of real world impacts that include a massive boost to maintaining our technological base, national defense superiority, and maintaining economic growth. The best way to have a lot of smart people is to ensure everyone has the opportunity to be less dumb, and as a society enjoy being able to reap the advantages of some of the not-dumb people becoming smart. I'm willing to pay a lot in taxes on this exact issue. (I'm not willing to throw endless dollars at universities so they can continue to hire more administration while growing class sizes and killing the instructor to student ratio - while also simultaneously not providing marketable degrees, but again, that's the fine print)
I'm in favor of your idea of "not being around dumb people", but I don't think the way to that goal is greater access to college. Rather, returning academic rigor to high school instead of using higher education as a band-aid to fix what K-12 should have accomplished. We don't need higher education to teach what needs to be taught in order to achieve our goal of Not Being Around Dumb PeopleTM, and using higher education to solve that is a massive waste of national resources.
tl;dr: Ditch diggers don't need degrees. There's a reason that even higher developed nations than the US which have centrally controlled workforce development/educational systems still only have a minority percentage of people go to college as opposed to vocational programs.
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I absolutely agree with regard to education through high school. My feelings about public funding for higher education are an extension of my feelings about the k-12 school system.
That said, a high school degree no longer cuts it. It has not for a long time, and it will be useful even less in the future. I do agree that the current higher ed model is broken, and that more practical trade based degrees do need to be emphasized and not thought of as a second best option. I also believe that a broad based education that builds on a foundation from high school is what we need for the future. The ability to take information from multiple different disciplines, evaluate it critically, and apply it to real world problems is only going to get more important. It's easy to see the overlaps between various STEM fields, but it is equally true in across the broader squishier social sciences. I work primarily with non-engineers... Something as simple as being the person who can work a spreadsheet well used to be enough to set you apart. It's now something I pretty much expect to be the default for the youngest generation of digital natives coming on now.
We have all heard the various sayings about education does not equal intelligence, but I have yet to deal with a single "uneducated" highly successful person who doesn't apply the material behind high school level fundamentals of math and science in their daily life. It may not be a conscious utilization, but it's there. This is me just harping on your earlier point that we need to fix k-12, but the extension is that you learn a lot of rules in HS, college is where I got the tools to really understand where those rules, formulas, and concepts came from. In the future, we are going to need more folks who know or can figure out the why because the work that the generations we have coming are going to be doing is going to be a lot more problem solving of why, and a lot less of the stuff where you can just use the "why"s that someone else put together.
Also TLDR: I'm not paying for my backhoe to go to college; but odds are good that ditch digging is going to involve a lot fewer folks leaning on shovels, a few sharp operators to drive during the tricky parts, and probably a few tecs who can look at the project and jam code that runs the simple dumb part of the dig without anyone in the driver seat.
The problem with financial aid and loans isn’t financial aid and loans. It’s entitled little shits thinking that they should be Vice President in two years with a degree in underwater basket weaving and the fact that the institutions handing out the degrees are ivory-tower self-licking-ice-cream-cones of waste and Mis-management.
Universities wonder how they are going to keep the lights on and then hire 3 secretaries for every department head and create a system (tenure) by which it’s nigh impossible to remove even the most incompetent.
Not to mention, as someone upthread mentioned, the lack of rigor in the k-12 system is downright criminal.
I keep saying that kids entering college should be choosing degrees and fields of study that will benefit their career and be marketable, but nobody has really prepared them to do so. The construction management program at my Alma mater has been (so far as I know) under-enrolled for the last decade. At the last career fair I heard there were 60 companies and 40 graduates. Yet all the kids entering school are going “liberal arts” and “poetry” and shit, then mad they can’t get a job.
Too much “find your passion” and not enough “bring your passion with you”.
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Man, I agree with this so much. I have a 2 year degree, and am just shy of my 4 year in applied psych. Also known as underwater basket weaving. A degree thats applicable to very few feilds, one of which I'm hoping to start working in soon. But that's taking me another 10 months of night class to get certified before I can hope to get started.
I lay alot of this issue at the feet of morals. Sorta. I think if people picked the person they want to have kids with a bit mofe carefully we would have less divorce, then we would have more cohesive families, then kids could get taught properly by parents who are a team, then we could help children with a clearer picture of what career they want until retirment. I don't think it's a linear thing like that but I feel like it's a factor. Nobody is talking to 19 year olds about retirment or that you need to have a career, or how to get there. Parents should be. My parents have been together forever, but never talked about careers. Our family wasn't rich, and they has jobs. Not careers. Kids dont know what they want to do and as a result they start down the road of underwater basket weaving, but by the time they have an idea of what they might excell at they're to far into the process to switch degrees and waste money. That was my experience anyway.
I don't disagree.
But for the sake of argument...
In times past (he retired three years ago) my father was a director of logistics for a hardware company, earning six figures with a theater degree with a box full of awards within his field.
Granted he started as a warehouse monkey as a young man and worked his way up, but is a college degree really even necessary for every six figure corporate America? Especially if you have relevant experience?
If you can do the job, why should I give a shit what you studied?
Obviously some jobs require technical knowledge like engineering or many types of medical work, but even then I think BSN requirements for Magnet hospital status is ridiculous and looks past some excellent, experienced nurses.
Maybe your company is short of candidates with relevant education...or maybe like many companies, your hiring managers just aren't good at looking people in the eyes and interviewing effectively.
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I don't really care if the person has a degree or not, or what the degree is in. I have a guy working for me, in a commercial general contracting firm, that has a hospitality degree.
but I'm tired of hearing grown-ass people complain that they can't get a job with the degree that they got and how they owe a ton of money for a useless degree.
IMO the degree is only as useless as the person holding it.
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This has been my experience as well...but I'd say the degree is only as useful as the person holding it because you do actually need a nursing degree to work at my job.
As an interviewer, I've seen and interviewed a LOT of useless people with allegedly useful degrees.
There is an art and a science to recruiting and if you interview well, it's usually a sign that you communicate well. And that's important.
I learned interviewing skills and communication skills in school and particularly in speech class, which may sound like a bit of a silly liberal arts class, but it was invaluable to me.
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Furthering this tangent…
When I was in architecture school (I’m not an architect) I learned that most architecture forms fail due to a lack of business sense, not a lack of business. Turns out the same is true of law firms, doctors offices, dentists… even accountants, funnily enough.
So I started the process of getting a minor in business. At the time, this was terribly difficult (the architecture curriculum was 15-18 credits a semester). and basically resulted in my staying at school every summer to take accounting and the like. Now the board of regents has mandated no course of study may require more than 12 credits per semester. Where did that other 1-2 courses per semester go? Granted, design was 4-6 credits but it was also 3 hours a day, 3 days per week, and most students pulled several all-nighters per week. Maybe with the number of credits/semester dropped there’s time in their schedules to take electives outside their major? But who, if anyone, is suggesting they do so?
Tying this all back to the economy and recession… I took loans and grants and prepaid tuition from my parents to get though undergrad and grad school. In the nearly-30-years since I started college, I still haven’t paid off the loans. Why? The rates are so stupid low that I’m making more by investing that money, and I kind of always assumed that the dems would eventually get around to forgiving them somehow. And now here we sit with that very thing being discussed.
How much you want to bet that they’ll make an income cutoff for the forgiveness? So basically, a stupid ass that got a stupid ass degree and took out loans to take too long doing it and then was still too stupid (in this job market?) to get a decent paying job… gets the debt forgiven?
And what about all those private loans? Is the government going to take money out of the coffers to pay them off too? That’s the best use of those funds? How about we just write off those dumbasses and take that same money and inject it into the k-12 system to try and prevent the next ten generations being such a waste?
So much of what happens in these economic cycles is just stupid people doing stupid people shit (look at all those people that were laying double for houses in 2007, then crying come 2009…). If we can’t fix, stupid… meanwhile the super rich are just playing games with the rest of us. We are fueling their lifestyle with our churn. Talk about the Matrix…
I still maintain that the only reason we aren’t already in recession (or haven’t admitted it) is that the rich folks have just kind of agreed not to have one yet.
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