Mike Rowe:I Don’t Want To Pay For Your Useless College Degree
34 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”
A good find. If you want good behavior or outcomes, promote them. If you don’t want bad behavior or outcomes, stop promoting them.
If you want cheapened higher education with sub-standard outcomes, then keep subsidizing it and having those wronged the most (the now unemployable graduates with degrees that are useless to society at large) pay no price for buying into it.
But how else can you achieve socialism if you don’t punish the people making smart decisions and reward the people making dumb choices?
He’ll get some blowback, but good on Mike Rowe.
ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) is an invaluable resource for determining where the money goes in higher education. To quote from their website:
“Between 1993 and 2007, administrative costs increased an outrageous 61.2%, while instructional costs increased 39.3%. According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, noninstructional spending at colleges and universities from 2016 to 2017 exceeded the gross domestic product of 134 countries. We have seen the explosion of vice presidents, counselors, diversity coaches, and all kinds of administrative staff. Someone must supervise the addition of climbing walls, spectacular gyms, and the now-ubiquitous “safe spaces.” Some administrators now see their mission to be more political than educational, and the student ends up funding their ideological initiatives.”
So, if someone who goes seriously into hock to get a fancy piece of wallpaper, which is what a useless degree really is, and gets bailed out, will something similar be done for somebody who loses a fortune by buying dodgy penny stock (“It’ll rise 600% by the end of the year! I guarantee it!”)? Someone whose business goes belly up because of a phony-baloney plague? A buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge?
What makes a university student who made a lousy career decision get special treatment? And, no, they should have known what they were getting into when they enrolled. Caveat emptor, kiddies. Welcome to the real world.
You’ll often get blowback from those that have gotten those useless degrees(sometimes as they are asking if you would like a refill) that a liberal arts degree enhances society as a whole. Perhaps so. However, I think the easiest response to this would be; imagine a world where all those with a sociology, women’s study, fine arts etc. degree suddenly disappeared from the earth. What would be the result? Now, imagine it is January in Winnipeg and all of the HVAC technicians in the world dissapeared. What would be the result?
Who’d blather on endlessly about feminism or Jane Austen novels if it wasn’t for them?
The world needs less useless lesbians, but I repeat myself…
BADR….Jane Austin is so 18 th century. How about Maya Angelou or some such enlightened and diverse poet, or whatever….you know, someone who can’t write a complete sentence, which would be too Strunk and White correct and thus, perforce, patriarchal, and all that cancel trigger shite….
The lesbians likely now disavow the quaint likes of Jane Austin, who could think circles around their narrow ideological heads, and do so with a fucking quill pen by candle light!
I rest my fucking case…eh?
I was required to read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in my freshman undergrad year English course. I hated it and I’ve loathed anything by her ever since.
(I’m surprised that lesbians disparage her. There were some scholarly rumours a number of years ago suggesting that she was part of their club.)
Jules Verne, however, is another matter…. I read lots of his books while I was in junior high school.
As Mark Twain pointed out, it’s easier to con someone than it is to convince them they’ve been conned. Imagine having ploughed four years of your life and untold amounts of your and/or your parents’ treasure into a boondoggle that leaves you with virtually nothing to show for it. You have two choices: persist in telling yourself and everyone around you that you made a brilliant choice and that you and the world are better for your endeavour; or: you’ve been had. Most people will choose the former.
You have two choices: persist in telling yourself and everyone around you that you made a brilliant choice and that you and the world are better for your endeavour
A few days ago, John Batchelor interviewed Victor Davis Hanson about Antifa and the type of people it attracts. VDH suggested that many of its members have degrees in, say, grievance studies. Those graduates see journeymen making much more than them, even though those tradesmen don’t need a degree to do their jobs. Those same GS graduates conclude that the system is unjust and biased because they believe it is they who should be earning more because they see themselves as the elite.
What better way to establish true justice than to destroy the system that allows blue collar workers to be more prosperous than someone with a degree in an “important” discipline?
+++ Chris.
My brother-in-law is an hvac guy and earns between $60-90k depending on overtime. Not a glamorous job but definitely specialized and one that we would be fucked without.
Thank heavens we have guys like him. Next time the furnace goes out, I’ll call him and not the gal who has the degree in interpretive dance to express our frustration at the patriarchy while we shiver.
This is how the cesspool works. Trump showed that he was one of them by signing their latest slop. The US is doomed the rest of us are f;/ked.
Why not just allow normal personal bankruptcy rules to apply to student loans again?
I think the fear is that there’s so much student debt that you’d have a collapse that would make 2008 look like a pin drop. There may also be some ex post facto involved; lenders who set the terms did so on the assumption that the debt was non-dischargeable; had it been, they would have set different terms or not lent at all.
Does anyone other than the federal government provide student loans in the US any more?
Sounds like a racket to me, in that case. If the only ones who actually benefitted from this scheme were the colleges and universities, then they should swallow the whole enchilada.
“We get screwed…”
Remember this? Elisabeth Warren is confronted by an angry Dad…
“The College experience” is what universities are really selling anyway, a five minute conversation with recent Bachelor of Arts grads makes that obvious.
MOOC, massive open online courses, are free and you could take all the courses required from Harvard for a degree, the only thing you don’t get is the actual degree. Arts and some computer sciences, whatever doesn’t require labs I suppose.
If anyone says they’re going to a college for the sake of an Arts education itself, they should be told they’re obviously too dumb to benefit.
“The College experience”
Yup. Gotta attend all those endless keg parties or else one would grow up emotionally and socially deprived.
Sometimes one of Kate’s sayings, about how we “need a famine”, really strikes home. None of us want a famine or a disaster or a civilization-ending catastrophe of any kind. But if/when it happens, the mincing, frivolous, absolutely STUPID obsessions that are taking over the youth and the once-sane people of Western society in general will all just … disappear. When it comes down to survival, hand-to-mouth hunting, growing crops, wearing stinking furs, no soap to get rid of the bugs and diseases in our hair and on our skin, rotting teeth, dying of old age at 45, raw violence with blunt weapons to protect one’s home and family and tribe, no electricity, etc … when it comes down to that, there will be no nonsense at all like what we’re seeing in this fall-of-Babylon, fall-of-Rome, Weimar-Republic decadence. Sheer survival instinct drives out the crazy in us humans. Many of us know of the saying that summarizes where we are right now in history in the West: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create …” We are in the “Good times create weak men” phase. My poor kids.
Graduates unhappy with the useless degree and the big debt incurred in getting it should sue their universities and professors/counselors for malpractice. They’re the ones that sold them the unmarketable skills training. Enough lawsuits like that would put a stop to it real quick and bankrupt those treasonous parasites.
That’s a good place to start.
When I was at Armpit College, part of my job was to work at the institution’s annual open house. I often spoke not just with prospective students but their parents as well as I wanted to make sure that AC was what they were looking for and had no problem in recommending that they go elsewhere if it wasn’t. After all, it was going to be their time and their money that would be spent and I would have rather had someone in my courses who wanted to be there.
Unfortunately, my approach might not have been viewed favourably. If, say, someone had enrolled in our department and it wasn’t to their liking, we were supposed to encourage them to get their diploma in our discipline and then study what they wanted later on. That way, the institution could squeeze more money out of that student.
I thought I was imagining it until I had an interview with another post-secondary institution after I quit my job at AC. Sure enough, that “encouragement” was exactly what I was supposed to do, even though the student(s) in question had other aspirations.
Yeah, it’s all about the revenue. Who cares if the student is intellectually or occupationally short-changed?
Wow. To hell with ensuring young adults (who don’t know any better) het the education that’s best for them.
Sleazy and slimy.
I remember one young lady who enrolled in our department many years ago.
She came to us from a university, having dropped out of engineering, though I’m not sure if it was by choice or if she had been given what we called a “dean’s vacation”. She signed up with us and dropped out mid-way during the second term of her first year, though I think that was voluntary. A few months later, she was back again, only to repeat her previous performance but this time she was gone for good.
A few years later, I crossed paths with her in the main building on campus and she mentioned that she was enrolled in some sort of maintenance program. I never found out whether she finished or what became of her.
In her case, she was clearly immature. She was the sort of kid who would rather have been spending time in some shopping centre food court with her friends than sit through a lecture on, say, strength of materials.
Yet, she gave me the impression of being fairly clever as she was in one of my courses. I think in her case, she simply lacked the self-discipline to apply herself to her studies.
What student loan forgiveness represents is a ‘market correction’ where degrees like those conferred in Social Justice Studies and/or Critical Race Theory and/or Feminism Studies and/or Gender, Sexuality, Intersectionality Studies is re-valued based on its worth in the real world.
History constantly sweeps large numbers of people aside, like dust, these heavily indebted students are fulfilling their function in life, which is being a good example of a bad example. I know it’s cold, but life is cold, their function is to serve as an example to future generations – don’t do what they did. The debt is real, they have to pay it.
Rowe is absolutely correct by saying most of the student debt is held by upper middle class kids. Nobody gets a FEDERAL student loan without completing the FAFSA Application. The amount of every FEDERAL student loan is completely dependent upon your parents income (unless you are self supporting). And if you and your parents are POOR … you will receive a BEOG (Basic Educational Opportunity Grant) among other FREE Financial Aid. The more $$ your parents make and have in the bank … the larger the Loans as part of your student loans.
But … just like the parents who supported Obamakkare … because they were too cheap to pay for their own medical care … want the government (the people of the US) to pay for their kids education. Stupid, selfish, greedy punks.
In a Zoom Christmas visit with my 37 year old niece, I learned that she is going back to school to learn “office administration”, which involves training in computer systems and other valuable skills. The first course she has to take is – get this – “pronouns”. Chilling.
The easier that tuition money is to get, the greater the likelihood of the student dropping out.
Let’s not even get into vanity degrees, those the taxpayer lavishly underwrites for female students who don’t intend to do a damn thing with the education they receive, but do get a decent shot at meeting a professional husband and having a cushy life.
While I taught at Armpit College, one of my students saw her loan as free money. When she got the cash, she skedaddled, loafed about at home and, apparently, became a mother.
I have no idea what happened after that or if the money was ever recovered.
Mike Rowe, proving that there are no jobs Americans don’t want to do. You pay’em, they’ll do’em.
People put so much emphasis on a degree (even a truly worthless one) and the name of a university than they do actually demonstrating that one can do something of value.
It isn’t just the money-grubbing universities and politicians. It’s the parents and their snowflakes, too.
A good find. If you want good behavior or outcomes, promote them. If you don’t want bad behavior or outcomes, stop promoting them.
If you want cheapened higher education with sub-standard outcomes, then keep subsidizing it and having those wronged the most (the now unemployable graduates with degrees that are useless to society at large) pay no price for buying into it.
But how else can you achieve socialism if you don’t punish the people making smart decisions and reward the people making dumb choices?
He’ll get some blowback, but good on Mike Rowe.
ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) is an invaluable resource for determining where the money goes in higher education. To quote from their website:
“Between 1993 and 2007, administrative costs increased an outrageous 61.2%, while instructional costs increased 39.3%. According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, noninstructional spending at colleges and universities from 2016 to 2017 exceeded the gross domestic product of 134 countries. We have seen the explosion of vice presidents, counselors, diversity coaches, and all kinds of administrative staff. Someone must supervise the addition of climbing walls, spectacular gyms, and the now-ubiquitous “safe spaces.” Some administrators now see their mission to be more political than educational, and the student ends up funding their ideological initiatives.”
So, if someone who goes seriously into hock to get a fancy piece of wallpaper, which is what a useless degree really is, and gets bailed out, will something similar be done for somebody who loses a fortune by buying dodgy penny stock (“It’ll rise 600% by the end of the year! I guarantee it!”)? Someone whose business goes belly up because of a phony-baloney plague? A buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge?
What makes a university student who made a lousy career decision get special treatment? And, no, they should have known what they were getting into when they enrolled. Caveat emptor, kiddies. Welcome to the real world.
You’ll often get blowback from those that have gotten those useless degrees(sometimes as they are asking if you would like a refill) that a liberal arts degree enhances society as a whole. Perhaps so. However, I think the easiest response to this would be; imagine a world where all those with a sociology, women’s study, fine arts etc. degree suddenly disappeared from the earth. What would be the result? Now, imagine it is January in Winnipeg and all of the HVAC technicians in the world dissapeared. What would be the result?
Who’d blather on endlessly about feminism or Jane Austen novels if it wasn’t for them?
The world needs less useless lesbians, but I repeat myself…
BADR….Jane Austin is so 18 th century. How about Maya Angelou or some such enlightened and diverse poet, or whatever….you know, someone who can’t write a complete sentence, which would be too Strunk and White correct and thus, perforce, patriarchal, and all that cancel trigger shite….
The lesbians likely now disavow the quaint likes of Jane Austin, who could think circles around their narrow ideological heads, and do so with a fucking quill pen by candle light!
I rest my fucking case…eh?
I was required to read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in my freshman undergrad year English course. I hated it and I’ve loathed anything by her ever since.
(I’m surprised that lesbians disparage her. There were some scholarly rumours a number of years ago suggesting that she was part of their club.)
Jules Verne, however, is another matter…. I read lots of his books while I was in junior high school.
As Mark Twain pointed out, it’s easier to con someone than it is to convince them they’ve been conned. Imagine having ploughed four years of your life and untold amounts of your and/or your parents’ treasure into a boondoggle that leaves you with virtually nothing to show for it. You have two choices: persist in telling yourself and everyone around you that you made a brilliant choice and that you and the world are better for your endeavour; or: you’ve been had. Most people will choose the former.
You have two choices: persist in telling yourself and everyone around you that you made a brilliant choice and that you and the world are better for your endeavour
A few days ago, John Batchelor interviewed Victor Davis Hanson about Antifa and the type of people it attracts. VDH suggested that many of its members have degrees in, say, grievance studies. Those graduates see journeymen making much more than them, even though those tradesmen don’t need a degree to do their jobs. Those same GS graduates conclude that the system is unjust and biased because they believe it is they who should be earning more because they see themselves as the elite.
What better way to establish true justice than to destroy the system that allows blue collar workers to be more prosperous than someone with a degree in an “important” discipline?
+++ Chris.
My brother-in-law is an hvac guy and earns between $60-90k depending on overtime. Not a glamorous job but definitely specialized and one that we would be fucked without.
Thank heavens we have guys like him. Next time the furnace goes out, I’ll call him and not the gal who has the degree in interpretive dance to express our frustration at the patriarchy while we shiver.
This is how the cesspool works. Trump showed that he was one of them by signing their latest slop. The US is doomed the rest of us are f;/ked.
Why not just allow normal personal bankruptcy rules to apply to student loans again?
I think the fear is that there’s so much student debt that you’d have a collapse that would make 2008 look like a pin drop. There may also be some ex post facto involved; lenders who set the terms did so on the assumption that the debt was non-dischargeable; had it been, they would have set different terms or not lent at all.
Does anyone other than the federal government provide student loans in the US any more?
Sounds like a racket to me, in that case. If the only ones who actually benefitted from this scheme were the colleges and universities, then they should swallow the whole enchilada.
“We get screwed…”
Remember this? Elisabeth Warren is confronted by an angry Dad…
https://youtu.be/62i2feu9fxk
Enrolment is down, young people are learning.
“The College experience” is what universities are really selling anyway, a five minute conversation with recent Bachelor of Arts grads makes that obvious.
MOOC, massive open online courses, are free and you could take all the courses required from Harvard for a degree, the only thing you don’t get is the actual degree. Arts and some computer sciences, whatever doesn’t require labs I suppose.
If anyone says they’re going to a college for the sake of an Arts education itself, they should be told they’re obviously too dumb to benefit.
“The College experience”
Yup. Gotta attend all those endless keg parties or else one would grow up emotionally and socially deprived.
Sometimes one of Kate’s sayings, about how we “need a famine”, really strikes home. None of us want a famine or a disaster or a civilization-ending catastrophe of any kind. But if/when it happens, the mincing, frivolous, absolutely STUPID obsessions that are taking over the youth and the once-sane people of Western society in general will all just … disappear. When it comes down to survival, hand-to-mouth hunting, growing crops, wearing stinking furs, no soap to get rid of the bugs and diseases in our hair and on our skin, rotting teeth, dying of old age at 45, raw violence with blunt weapons to protect one’s home and family and tribe, no electricity, etc … when it comes down to that, there will be no nonsense at all like what we’re seeing in this fall-of-Babylon, fall-of-Rome, Weimar-Republic decadence. Sheer survival instinct drives out the crazy in us humans. Many of us know of the saying that summarizes where we are right now in history in the West: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create …” We are in the “Good times create weak men” phase. My poor kids.
Graduates unhappy with the useless degree and the big debt incurred in getting it should sue their universities and professors/counselors for malpractice. They’re the ones that sold them the unmarketable skills training. Enough lawsuits like that would put a stop to it real quick and bankrupt those treasonous parasites.
That’s a good place to start.
When I was at Armpit College, part of my job was to work at the institution’s annual open house. I often spoke not just with prospective students but their parents as well as I wanted to make sure that AC was what they were looking for and had no problem in recommending that they go elsewhere if it wasn’t. After all, it was going to be their time and their money that would be spent and I would have rather had someone in my courses who wanted to be there.
Unfortunately, my approach might not have been viewed favourably. If, say, someone had enrolled in our department and it wasn’t to their liking, we were supposed to encourage them to get their diploma in our discipline and then study what they wanted later on. That way, the institution could squeeze more money out of that student.
I thought I was imagining it until I had an interview with another post-secondary institution after I quit my job at AC. Sure enough, that “encouragement” was exactly what I was supposed to do, even though the student(s) in question had other aspirations.
Yeah, it’s all about the revenue. Who cares if the student is intellectually or occupationally short-changed?
Wow. To hell with ensuring young adults (who don’t know any better) het the education that’s best for them.
Sleazy and slimy.
I remember one young lady who enrolled in our department many years ago.
She came to us from a university, having dropped out of engineering, though I’m not sure if it was by choice or if she had been given what we called a “dean’s vacation”. She signed up with us and dropped out mid-way during the second term of her first year, though I think that was voluntary. A few months later, she was back again, only to repeat her previous performance but this time she was gone for good.
A few years later, I crossed paths with her in the main building on campus and she mentioned that she was enrolled in some sort of maintenance program. I never found out whether she finished or what became of her.
In her case, she was clearly immature. She was the sort of kid who would rather have been spending time in some shopping centre food court with her friends than sit through a lecture on, say, strength of materials.
Yet, she gave me the impression of being fairly clever as she was in one of my courses. I think in her case, she simply lacked the self-discipline to apply herself to her studies.
What student loan forgiveness represents is a ‘market correction’ where degrees like those conferred in Social Justice Studies and/or Critical Race Theory and/or Feminism Studies and/or Gender, Sexuality, Intersectionality Studies is re-valued based on its worth in the real world.
History constantly sweeps large numbers of people aside, like dust, these heavily indebted students are fulfilling their function in life, which is being a good example of a bad example. I know it’s cold, but life is cold, their function is to serve as an example to future generations – don’t do what they did. The debt is real, they have to pay it.
Rowe is absolutely correct by saying most of the student debt is held by upper middle class kids. Nobody gets a FEDERAL student loan without completing the FAFSA Application. The amount of every FEDERAL student loan is completely dependent upon your parents income (unless you are self supporting). And if you and your parents are POOR … you will receive a BEOG (Basic Educational Opportunity Grant) among other FREE Financial Aid. The more $$ your parents make and have in the bank … the larger the Loans as part of your student loans.
But … just like the parents who supported Obamakkare … because they were too cheap to pay for their own medical care … want the government (the people of the US) to pay for their kids education. Stupid, selfish, greedy punks.
In a Zoom Christmas visit with my 37 year old niece, I learned that she is going back to school to learn “office administration”, which involves training in computer systems and other valuable skills. The first course she has to take is – get this – “pronouns”. Chilling.
The easier that tuition money is to get, the greater the likelihood of the student dropping out.
Let’s not even get into vanity degrees, those the taxpayer lavishly underwrites for female students who don’t intend to do a damn thing with the education they receive, but do get a decent shot at meeting a professional husband and having a cushy life.
While I taught at Armpit College, one of my students saw her loan as free money. When she got the cash, she skedaddled, loafed about at home and, apparently, became a mother.
I have no idea what happened after that or if the money was ever recovered.
Mike Rowe, proving that there are no jobs Americans don’t want to do. You pay’em, they’ll do’em.
People put so much emphasis on a degree (even a truly worthless one) and the name of a university than they do actually demonstrating that one can do something of value.
It isn’t just the money-grubbing universities and politicians. It’s the parents and their snowflakes, too.
One could say that it’s systemic.