Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Wall Street Pit – The Higher Education Bubble: It’s About to Burst
Daily Targum – The report cites campaign finance data from The Huffington Post, which shows that 97 percent of faculty and staff who made donations during the 2008 presidential election donated to Democratic candidates.
All Ponzi schemes eventually collapse and it’s about time big A academia took a shitkicking for allowing the liberal arts to bastardize and degrade higher learning.
Elitists in Academia
Let then eat their own when the bubble bursts.
Hey wait a sec heh.
“…allowing the liberal arts to bastardize and degrade higher learning…”
There are a lot of more worthless degrees in kolledge than those in the School of Liberal Arts. I think you meant to say Humanities or School of Social Work or something. I would like to think that my degree in economics has some value.
so that degree in Advanced Studies in Woman’s Victimization & Grievance Mongering isn’t going to get someone a high paying on-air CBC job after all?
What is the world coming to . . . . .
I think the higher education bubble burst decades ago; not in terms of price but in terms of quality and usefulness. The decline was led primarily by an obsession with ethnicity and gender in liberal arts faculties.
It used to be the case that a science degree was more suited to the realities of the workplace, but today’s obsession with tree-hugging even has science curriculum filled with courses on “globalization” which is basically capitalism-bashing 101.
Ont. wants preschool full time. They produce twice as many teachers as they need and the old timers retire, collect pension and work under contract. So because they have to go to China to get a job they are turning them into babysitters for the government. A 60 year lease with benefits for babysitters. What could go wrong?
Must dissent on this one; the liberal arts were from the inception of universities the core and the crown of higher learning, and they still are. The liberal arts haven’t bastardized higher learning; the liberal arts have themselves been bastardized at most universities in ways that have been documented here and elsewhere. University education has been watered down, oversold, and often hijacked by ideologues in many, if not most institutions.
A liberal arts education is not vocational training in a narrow sense — whereby the only people who study history are those looking for employment in the history industry — but a good degree in history, philosophy, classics, etc., is immensely helpful in understanding the world, including the “realities of the workplace”.
The problem is finding that good degree; it can be done, but the number of people able to deliver one and the number of people actually interested in obtaining one are far smaller than the numbers being processed annually through our universities and quasi-universities. Governments and universities themselves have sold post-secondary education as a path to economic success, and statistics may have borne that out for a while, but that is not the purpose of higher education, and when the bubble bursts, it will likely be better for universities in the long run.
Just off hand I can think of half a dozen recent university grads with degrees in arts,geography,history,anthropology,who can’t find a job or are dependent on government grants for their jobs.
The Country needs more good tradesmen,in almost all trades, and none I know of that graduated from the pre-apprenticeship programs at local colleges are unemployed.
I don’t know if anyone has done any research on this,but talking to most young tradesmen,I find most of them quite conservative in their political leaning.
I wonder why that is.
“Higher education” isn’t. Hasn’t been since the ’70s.
Finally parents have got the message that their kids are not being well served by university. Spending four years and a couple hundred grand to be indoctrinated with Communist propaganda by a bunch of frickin’ ancient hippies, not a great investment.
Community college, you can learn something that you can actually make a buck doing. Or gee, maybe apprentice with some old guys that know something. Whadda concept!
“I would like to think that my degree in economics has some value.
Posted by: quiznilo at September 16, 2010 4:29 AM”
So would that be a degree with the emphasis on Keynesian and Austrian Economics being taught with equal air-time in the hallowed halls of your educational institution?
What is your position on the Stimulus Package which the governments have been shelling out for the past 4 years? and would you agree that we need more stimulus money to get us out of this financial mess?
@ Roseberry: There’s a difference between having a liberal arts degree and a liberal arts education. The eBook readers on my iPhone and iPad are loaded with the works of Poe, Plato, Plutarch, and Thucydides. All were available for free. For $6,000.00+/year in tuition I can go to the U of A where the aforementioned authors are not in the curriculum, but Margarent Atwood is. I’d rather have the education than the degree.
As Mark Twain (may have) famously said, “I have never let my schooling intefere with my education.”
Nothing pleases me more than seeing a well-duped liberal arts graduates deep in debt and jobless for the foreseeable future. Perhaps their mission in life will become warning others not to buy the bullshit.
It may not be too late to learn how to actually do something useful for money … like you know … welding, carpentry, driving a truck …. painting walls … you don’t get to be a well paid stuffed drone in an collapsing economy eh?
Phantom nailed it. Sean – awesome Twain quote.
What we have here is a pyramid of expectations: university-educated parents (whether with useful degrees or not) now expect that their kids will also go into university, instead of settling for a “lesser” education. Whether the pressure is intentional or subconscious, kids feel it and make up their minds accordingly. The more people we pump through universities, the more of a problem this will be.
I was one of these — the alternatives to university were never even on the radar for me. Now, after a few years slogging through a career path that affords me limited satisfaction, I often wonder where I would be if I’d gone into something more satisfying to me…
Modern liberal arts classes blocks students from seeing life the way it really is. The exaggerated themes of victimization, exploitation and social justice prevents students from viewing situations objectively. Modern LA is not just expensive and unmarketable, it is like voluntarily paying for a lobotomy. Those that claim that it promotes critical thinking skills and reasoning have not talked to recent graduates. Luckily, maturity and repeated exposure to the working world manages to repair most of the damage.
There is nothing wrong with a higher education (or liberal arts). It used to be a mark of great intelligence and ability. Now, it’s a ribbon snobs use to lord over everyone. They are not clever or useful but they would like everyone to believe they are useful and clever.
There is nothing wrong with a higher education as long as the debt load from the student loan doesn’t turn you into a grease spot and bring the global economy to a screeching halt.
FIFY
About 10 years back our local college started awarding degrees in Intercontinental Foriegn Studies, Under-Water-Basket-Weaving, Community Organizer and Kinesiology you pretty much knew the fix was in for the idiots who couldn’t cut the mustard, or their parents were Alumni, or they were on a EEOC Pell Grant.
PhD’s are not much better, you can get one in anything.
But, on another point, Jeez Louise, you think those Bell County City Officials in California who voted in their own pay raises were obscene you should look at the pay for Presidents of Universities. Just here in Mt. Olive, Louisiana our President back in 2004 was making $1.2 Million, and we also have at least 9 VP’s who rock in at $400,000 +. And, just think, this is just one lil University (10,000 students) in one State.
They have to pay university presidents that much so they make more than the football coach.
Maybe we could start teaching this “higher” education on Mt.Everest or K2?
As others here have noted,NEVER confuse “education” with “learning”.I know people with PHD’s(pile it higher and deeper),who I wouldn’t let near a fire pit to try to cook a hot dog or marshmallow.
All the book learning in the world does diddly-squat for you when you can’t hit a nail with a hammer to keep your roof from leaking in the rain.(Oppppsssss. Guess that would be below the elites)
The Academic Industry has followed the same formula as the Justice Industry. The one’s who benefit the most from participation are the one’s who dispense it.
A comment above states that “the liberal arts were from the inception of universities the core and the crown of higher learning, and they still are.”
But the classical liberal arts were grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Three of these are now
taught in science faculties. Don’t, by the way,
sneer at arithmetic. Few people are numerate.
Few people, in particular few Arts professors,
have a clue about compound interest, which means
that they are unfit to comment on public policy, as they have no clue about how much it costs to
borrow money. And then we come to journalists …
We, Canda, Canadians in aggregate, would be much
better off if the universities taught the trivium and the quadrivium carefully and thoroughly. The rest doesn’t matter all that much.
John Lewis…..yes….we would be much better off if the basics were taught….but as stated by others….math is hard. Learning math might lead to something useful….like force= mass squared x velocity….and then maybe not wonder why their friends died when the car hit the tree at 70MPH.The human body is not designed to withstand 120G forces of deceleration.
But again.If we went back to the three R’s….how many union teachers would be out of a job????
Oz, I was making a general comment about higher education, not useless subjects like gender studies and the like. If people truly want these hobby courses, let them pay for them themselves.
> There is nothing wrong with a
> higher education
That depends on whether there was actually any education attached to the degree denoting a person has allegedly received “higher education”. Someone with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism (!) should be able to use their, there, and they’re properly. Or it’s and its. And to see errors like this riddling sites like cbc.ca? Gaaaah!
There’s a problem with higher education when a lowly high school dropout like yours truly can’t keep up with the grammatical and spelling errors generated by the university educated Hoity Toitees working over at Mothercorp. (Spelling obviously isn’t a prerequisite for gender studies and race relations courses.)
I have personally encountered university grads who were frustrated in perfectly challenging and rewarding jobs because they were “not using their degree”. The fact that the degree had little practical application in the real world seemed to have escaped them. I had a successful career with Ontario Grade XIII and didn’t bother with a degree until I retired – and that retirement was at an earlier age than my college compatriots were destined for. And I still get to fly for a hobby…
When the bubble bursts?
The takeover of the education rolls forward to “save us” from their crisis.
Or is that saving the unions…?
Excellent interview in Macleans of Bill Gates and his opinion of American education. He thinks it is very poor and blames the unions for not firing incompetent teachers, some 10% in his view. He advocates charter schools and laments the loss of the world leading educational standards of the 1960’s.
Note that ever since then the left wing agenda slowly turned the US and our schools increasingly into the PC crap we see today.
Worth the read.
I am so tired of the confusion between these fake made-up degrees and real old-school degrees where you’re reading Aristotle in the original Greek that I could punch a sociology major.
PS Ayn Rand is not something that you should ever bother studying in a !*$&in’ philosophy degree.
Even if I got a Phd in womens studies, I still wouldn’t understand women.
oneblankspace wrote: “They have to pay university presidents that much so they make more than the football coach.”
In fact, at most major universities in the US, the Dean of Medicine earns about twice as much as the President, and the football coach earns about three times as much as the Dean of Medicine.
*cough*money laundering*cough*