You should have learned in Grade 6 math class;
Now we have $1 trillion of student debt, and a lot of it can’t be repaired. Lives are being damaged, and young people who should be thinking about starting families and careers are instead being saddled with new burdens.
Now you can understand what the Quebec protests are all about.
No,no Quebecois NDP Separatiste! My daughter is in 3rd year computer science. I paid for the first year, she paid for the second year (worked full time during her gap year- I did not charge her room/board) and she had a small student loan for her first semester of 3rd year. She is currently on an 8 month co-op work program and back to university in the fall to finish 3rd year. Then another 8 month co-op work program – in which she saves money for the final year. I also did a gap year back in 1970 (not as common then as it is now). Worked during the summers, did not live an expensive lifestyle (no car, no leather jackets, no going out to the bar) – earned scholarships and graduated with $ 800 student debt – paid off in the first 6 months of my employment. And go for a degree which will actually give you a good job on graduation!
A few other considerations:
– The gradual reconfiguring of federal student aid from needs-based grants to student loan programs over the past 15 years = higher student debt.
– Cuts to state and federal funds for public universities over the past 20 years = higher tuition = higher student debt.
– The ever-increasing privatization of and application of private sector market logic to the management of the educational system writ large over the past 30 years = higher tuition = higher student debt.
I don’t feel sorry for any of them. I spent most of my university years working 1 – 2 jobs to ensure that I would have no student debt by the time I was done. I also made sure to pick a field that was in demand before sending one dollar to the institution. It’s simple common sense.
“Now you can understand what the Quebec protests are all about.”
Glad you agree; they’re about self-absorbed people wanting something for nothing.
So what part of the word “loan” is confusing the mass of edumicated that are taking out these loans? Perhaps they feel that their loan is more like a “loan loan” or as governments call them, forgivable loans, that keep on giving out taxpayer’s money.
Never had a problem paying off student loans. Do not recall knowing anyone who did.
Current crop of kids in my sphere are all working and using personal lines of credit to cover bumps in student expenses.
Except for ONE who happens to be native and is playing the system for all it is worth.
Now you can understand what the Quebec protests are all about.
Posted by: Quebecois NDP separatiste at July 20, 2012 8:40 AM
Exactly . . Greed, stupidity, ignorance and a stark inability to comprehend reality.
Because life is a series of lessons and lessons will be repeated until learned.
And the Quebec students have a lot of learning left to do.
A lot.
I went into the Canadian Forces Regular Officer Training Program and they paid for my degree in Math and I was obligated to serve 4 years as an officer after graduation. Best deal I ever had. Available still to those non lefties.
No one has posted the average salary increases of University professors over the last 10 years have they?
Canada has way to many Universities for our population. It goes like this. Each University Students position costs the taxpayer 60,000 dollars in taxes for 4 years for infastructure, Unionized Prof’s that can’t be fired and operating costs. On top of that in order to maintain the level of funding from the taxpayers, the Canadian University Puppy Mill Industry depends on another 200,000 foreign students each year, all who are heavily subsidized as well. 90% of these people don’t leave when they finish Their education at the Puppy Mill Degree Granting Institution. They all get FREE HEALTHCARE etc. The only ones abused in this scam are the stupid Canadian Taxpayers. Many of the degrees are useless. I watched a Student Leader on TV who was 45,000 dollars in debt who had been at various Puppy Mill Universities for several years in things like Philosophy, and Social Work etc. Left with huge debt and suddenly reality hit, could only get a job in a Daycare at minimum wage, but felt she was worth millions because she had an asswipe Puppy Mill Degree. Felt she was so priceless a treasure that the Taxpayer should now write off her debt for her stupidity. It is long past time to drastically cut off funding by tax dollars of the Canadian Puppy Mill Industries and let the entitled reality show b*stards fend for themselves.
quebecois – yet again, you are being naive and not thinking. THINK.
Whether you, as an individual, take out a student loan to pay your school fees and living expenses, or, insist that the government fund the university to keep all your individual fees low – the FACTS are, that the tuition costs remain the same. So how are these costs paid?
If you the individual take out the loan and repay it personally, or you the individual, and all others who don’t even go to that university, must pay higher taxes to pay the university, the result is the same. SOMEONE in the private sector must pay. Either you pay personally or you and others must pay in the taxes within your future earnings.
The salaries and benefits of the faculty have increased enormously over the past decades, as have all other costs. Why shouldn’t the student, who is purchasing this service, pay for this service? Why should others fund this student individual?
No, don’t tell me that ‘education’ is a right or a benefit or whatever. Most of the degrees in the humanities and social sciences are a waste of time – you can – and should – read the books on your own, and escape the socialist indoctrination from the faculty. You can study critical thinking, study logic and learn to think and reason on your own.
The sciences, engineering, medicine – those are valid fields for a university education.
The problem with these student loans is that they are now viewed, not as for the genuinely needy but as regular ‘rights’ for all.
One more thing, quebecois, could you justify why the Canadian taxpayer should be funding the low Quebec tuition rates not merely for Quebec students but also for international students? Why are students from France, Belgium, Algeria, etc, all ‘entitled’ to the same low tuition rate as the Quebec student, while the student from any Canadian province must pay almost double that rate? Could you explain why the Canadian taxpayer must support this policy?
“The sciences, engineering, medicine – those are valid fields for a university education.”
I’m curious, ET — what’s your degree in?
Looks like Davenport is trolling again.
btw BSc as if it matters, and the Canadian Forces.
The error you are making, davenport, is to assume that I live within a Subjective Cave, ie, ‘Do as I do’.
Do you seriously think that I am so narrow minded that I would say: ‘If I do/did such and such, then you ought to do the same’?
I repeat, the only constructive university degrees are those in the hard sciences, medicine, engineering. I’d accept study in the social sciences only if their data base was objective – ie, statistical evidence on population, economy, ecology.
I see no need to pay a faculty tenure for someone in the regular humanities and social sciences. The languages you can learn on your own, ie, Latin and Greek. The theorists in the rest of the disciplines are all based on opinions and it is up to you to develop your critical thinking skills and read and analyze these views.
The one vital course I can see in any university degree would be one on critical thinking. This would be a course that examined all modes of logic, primarily syllogistic and propositional, and a really thorough study of the so-called informal fallacies and statistical fallacies.
What ET said 9:57am.
Two thumbs up.
RFB and ET, well said.
Our children have all paid off their hard science student loans and did not take useless social engineering degrees.
Another post for the Yanks among us. Kate, why don’t you do a little research on the Canadian student loan situation? I realise, Saskatchewan, especially south Saskatchewan,
is closer to the US than it is to the Rest of Canada. My father was a Saskatchewanian so the outlook is familiar.
Nonetheless, like it or not, you are a Canadian living in Canada.
The student loan situation in Canada is probably somewhat better than in the US, although the overall post graduation results can be very unhappy.
In Canada university tuition is tightly monitored and often controlled by provincial governments, and that is a big difference with the US.
I don’t know about my Rest of Canada, but in Newfie many students work. One may sneer at McJobs but they are relatively easy to get here, and some students are creative.
At Penn State (which I know somewhat about) even McJobs are in short supply.
So much for generalities. I will offer one. The US is f***ed up, Canada less so. God save the Queen, God preserve Stephen Harper.
If a student’s goal is to acquire an employment credential, then ET’s advice is quite sound. A good university education, even in Classics or History or Theology, can be a priceless, life-changing experience. The problem, as I observe it, is the number of students who pursue the second course then act surprised when they don’t get the results of the first.
The advice I give each year to high school students who visit my university is to consider what the experience is worth to them. Can you afford to do what you want to do? What price are you willing to pay to pursue the things you love?
For me, it was History; there was a cost, but, having been very fortunate, it was for me a fraction of what many of our current students are facing.
The greatest tragedy I see being played out on our Canadian campuses is that, for a large and growing number of students, the “university experience” neither transforms them intellectually or spiritually nor does it help them earn a living that will allow them to repay their debts.
Roseberry – my concern is that at the high school age, many students have no clear focus on ‘what to do’.
The university phase simply throws this task further down the road and in the meantime, these young people accumulate masses of debt because taking out a loan is viewed as basic and normal as registering for a course.
I agree that a good education in the Classics, History, Theology, are prime foundations for a constructive perspective. But you don’t have to take out a loan to cover four years of tuition and living expenses to obtain this foundation. That’s a very expensive method for this knowledge.
I agree with your last paragraph. I think we have to look at ‘what’ and ‘why’ is a university! In many cases, they have become havens for faculty, tenured, secure – teaching about 9 hours a week, long summers off, sabbaticals, benefits and so on. The publications in the humanist and social science disciplines are, in the majority, pure postmodern opinions and can’t be acknowledged as contributing to our understanding of the world or of our species.
“The error you are making, davenport, is to assume that I live within a Subjective Cave, ie, ‘Do as I do’.”
I’ll take that to mean that your degree is in the humanities or social sciences, most of which you impugned but a single breath ago as “a waste of time.”
To clarify, I am not assuming that your position is “Do as I do.” I am claiming, however, that your argument may be directly contradicted by your own lived experience, and that your insistence otherwise is a violation of the very same principles of logic and reason that you so frequently accuse and lecture others for failing to abide by.
Beyond that, there is also the observation that only an ideologue or an idiot would draw a hard line between certain spheres of human knowledge and scholarship (“hard sciences, medicine, engineering”, “‘objective’ social sciences”) and others (“humanities and social sciences”) and claim that the former alone are “valid fields for a university education” whereas the latter are things “you can learn on your own.” And here again, the fact that you consider “statistical evidence on population, economy, ecology” to be a purely “objective” source of knowledge further illustrates your own inability or unwillingness to apply critical thinking to your own positions.
“I see no need to pay a faculty tenure for someone in the regular humanities and social sciences.”
I’m curious, ET: what’s your paid profession?
“The one vital course I can see in any university degree would be one on critical thinking. This would be a course that examined all modes of logic, primarily syllogistic and propositional, and a really thorough study of the so-called informal fallacies and statistical fallacies.”
That would be the Department of Philosophy, in the Division of Humanities.
One simple solution would be to cut off all public funding for post-secondary education, including loan guarantees. University degrees just become a certification provided by the public sector, at whatever rates the market will bear. Quality of any particular degree/institution will be determined by the quality of graduates it turns out.
This is essentially how things have shaken out in the last fifteen years in the IT sector. The MCSE/CCNA designations went from being a must-have to a joke to a serious certification, a CCIE has always been worth its weight in gold, and none of these things will substitute for an hour long technical conversation with someone when determining who to hire.
Ack. “…provided by the private sector…”
I don’t understand the bitching and complaining.
My current student debt load is $55,000. It should be higher, but, you know, I worked 20+ hours a week through both undergrad AND law school. I also worked full-time for a year following high school and paid for an entire year with savings.
Here’s how my student loan will be repaid (at least in my experience with New Brunswick and Federal policies combined)
Loan Repayment Policies and Programs:
Federal Carry-over Tuition/Education Tax Credits: $64,000 [slightly less Provincially] @ marginal tax rate (for me: @ 26%)
Federal Tax Credit for Interest Paid on Student Loan: @ 15%
New Brunswick Timely Completion Benefit: If you complete a degree within the designated time frame (i.e. bachelor’s in 4 years) any loan amount exceeding $26,000 will be forgiven: $9700 [this was claimed only on my law degree – better return]
New Brunswick Graduate Tax Refund: If you stay and work in NB, you receive a refund on your provincial tax amount up to $2000/year for 10 years (max. $20,000): $2000/year
So let’s see: My loan was immediately reduced to $45,700, my provincial taxes are slashed by $2000, I get back 15% of the interest paid in reduced taxes and I will not pay much if any Federal tax or Provincial for a few years due to accumulated tuition credits.
Result: I get a huge tax refund.
Where do you think I’m going to put that refund? On the loan principle. Won’t be long before it disappears.
Oh, foo. So many untidy strands in one thread.
Where to start? ET:
I repeat, the only constructive university degrees are those in the hard sciences, medicine, engineering And I repeat, oh foo. The value of any BA was never that you graduated able to discourse knowledgeably about Roccocco architecture or Baroque literature; the value, presumably, was that you learned to think, how to construct an argument – which necessarily means learning “all modes of logic, primarily syllogistic and propositional, and a really thorough study of the so-called informal fallacies and statistical fallacies.” – and how to create an argument (not the same thing as construct at all): doing enough reading/working/thinking about the subject, and then being able to build and support premises on which your conclusion will be drawn. That is, or at least should be, a transferable skill, just as much as anything you learn in engineering. Lord knows, when I studied software engineering almost 40 years ago, we were in an environment of keypunch machines and card readers. Many of the techniques I was taught are hopelessly outmoded, but I learned how to look at a problem as an engineer does. That’s the value of an EE degree.
If, dear ET, you are suggesting that liberal arts, as they are taught today (i.e. read and regurgitate, don’t challenge the professor’s (almost always) crypto-Marxist views, etc.) are worthless, I might tend to agree with you, but that’s NOT what you said, is it?
Quebooboisie: Virtually everything you post, in this thread and elsewhere, can be boiled down to a single word: “Gimme”. That is the intellectual level most three year olds operate upon, and I’m not quite certain that they’re not above you.
Davenport: The ever-increasing privatization of and application of private sector market logic to the management of the educational system writ large over the past 30 years
Wachoo talkin’ bout, couchboy? Over the last 30 years, private market things have either stayed the same or gone down in relative price, had their quality vastly improved, or both. Take cars: today’s $25k Grand Caravan with dual DVD’s, air conditioning, reclining seats, climate control, etc. would be a heckuva lot more comfortable (and use less gas) than my old man’s $8k Dodge Monaco with three kids sprawled across the bench seat on the 6+ hours from Toronto to our cottage. Phone call from Toronto to Vancouver? $0.68/min in 1980 (in 1980$) to virtually free today. Refrigerator? Shoes? I could go on. To suggest that universities have followed this model in ANY way is ridiculous. In fact, they have done the reverse: prices have gone up while quality has gone down. And there are only two places where that paradigm works – unionized labour and government.
Bravo to all those and their children who have worked part-time/summers/co-op to avoid dismal debt. I salute you. My wife and I realized when our elder daughter was born (she starts at UofT Victoria College this fall – Physical Sciences (phys/chem/etc.) and Business) that she would go to university, so we started socking away $2k/yr in an RESP. Add in the $400 from the feds, and 18* 2400 = $43,000 without investment income, which would easily pay most of her four years tuition. If we were strapped, she could live at home, but we’re not and she’s going into residence. (BTW, with the investment income, she’s got more than enough to cover room, board, and potentially a year or two of grad school.) So people and students who protest “I can’t afford it!” – well, we gave up a few things to put the money away. If you decided to go skiing or take a trip to Europe instead; well, go re-read the “Ant and the Grasshopper”.
“I don’t feel sorry for any of them. I spent most of my university years working 1 – 2 jobs to ensure that I would have no student debt by the time I was done.”
That’s true but many colleges have figured out the scam. They’ve figured out that they can jack tuition rates pretty freakin’ high, and that the students won’t leave. They’ll just go farther into debt – a debt that isn’t owed to the college, it’s owed to a bank or the govt. So the college can rake in the tuition fees, churn out students who have no job prospects, and suffer no consequences.
Then the banks have, of course, turned around and lobbied (read: bought hookers & blow for) the govt to disallow students being able to discharge excessive debt in bankruptcy. So the banks get their money back and the govt gets happy bankers who lobby them more (read: buy them more hookers & blow).
To summarize: college is happy, they jacked tuition and got paid. They don’t care if the student gets a job.
Bank is happy, they made stupid loans that the student has to pay back and can’t escape. They don’t care if the former student can’t ever get ahead in life and stays a debt slave to them for decades.
Govt is happy, they get favors from the banks.
Student is fucked.
Canada cuts out the bank middleman and does a lot of the student loan business at the govt level to start with.
The whole system stinks. Engineering tuition at my old university has gone up more than threefold since I entered less than 20 years ago and they tacked on a $1000 surcharge to boot. Why? Cause they can.
The colleges & banks need to have skin in the game. They need to have real risk that they won’t get paid back on this towering mountain of debt for the system to have a chance at correcting itself. Otherwise it’s just another Ponzi scheme that will eventually crash into a heaping pile of rubble down the road.
“To suggest that universities have followed this model in ANY way is ridiculous.”
The logic of neoliberalism, which is the logic of the modern free market, is what has been used to justify the reduced role of the state in funding post-secondary education, which has led to the constant call from administrators for the plugging of revenue shortfalls through tuition rate hikes, as well as to an increased reliance among universities on private financing for research and education budgets, commercialization of campus space, and use of part-time contracted educators and graduate students to teach undergraduate courses, among other consequences.
Sure, the private manufacturing of cars, fridges, and shoes has definitely become more productive (though a big part of that has to do with the neoliberal imperative to outsource jobs to the cheapest global bidder possible, but that’s another conversation). But not everything that money can buy is a widget.
Student Loans: L.A. Teacher Has Wages Seized 30 Years Later As Government Targets Individuals Who Defaulted
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/02/la-teacher-has-wages-seiz_n_1643693.html
I agree that students are been cheated & should dump(default) thier loans.
Providing worthless Crap is the exercise of handling Educational effluent, but NO
value = NO payment…
Re-organization of the Education Systems means that any employment Contract may be terminated..
WTF is neoliberalism and what does it have to do with living within your means?
davenport – are you seriously suggesting that IF a person is a member of academia, THEN, they cannot critique academia? Hmmm? How is that illogical?
So, why are you constantly asking ‘what’s my paid profession’? What does that have to do with my criticism of the university realm?
I repeat – most of the material in the humanities and social sciences is opinion and as such, can be learned on one’s own. The only course of any validity, and again I repeat, is logic and critical thinking.
And yes, statistical and empirical data on population, ecology, economics, is what is known as quantitative data (rather than qualitative) and is indeed objective.
KevinB – oh really? A BA enables you to think critically, to develop a reasoned, data based and logical argument? Since when?
And, the fact that you saved for your daughter’s university degree isn’t relevant to the argument that the costs of a university education has increased; that using loans for this is considered as necessary and normal as registering for a course, and that much of what you do (not learn) in a four year undergrad social science and humanities degree is a costly waste of time. You can get the same, and better, knowledge base on your own without that enormous debt load.
davenport, your leftist sophistry about neoliberalism is so far off economic reality that it’s swimming in a virtual realm of its own.
“are you seriously suggesting that IF a person is a member of academia, THEN, they cannot critique academia? Hmmm?”
Absolutely, members of academia can and should critique academia, just as conservatives can and should critique conservatism, or Israelis can and should critique Israeli domestic and foreign policy. But I digress…
On the other hand, IF one were to claim that, say, they saw “no need to pay a faculty tenure for someone in the regular humanities and social sciences” YET were themselves paid as faculty in the humanities and social sciences, THEN one would have to EITHER agree that their own entire professional life has been in fact a worthless sham OR acknowledge the possibility, as evidenced by their own existence, that valid and useful scholarship and education does occur within the humanities and social sciences.
“And yes, statistical and empirical data on population, ecology, economics, is what is known as quantitative data (rather than qualitative) and is indeed objective.”
Except that the generation and compilation of those quantitative data are, as with all human endeavours, deeply subjective. Don’t believe me? Post a link to any statistical and empirical data set you like, and I point out all the ways in which it’s less objective than you think.
davenport – are you serious? Do you actually believe that a statistical compilation of the population of x-city is ‘deeply subjective’? That the amount of rainfall of x-terrain is ‘deeply subjective’. That the soil composition of a particular farmland is ‘deeply subjective’? That the number of loans via x-bank is ‘deeply subjective’? That means that, according to you, there’s no such thing as science. It’s all subjective opinion. Prove it.
And no, if I critique a university education in the social sciences and humanities and say that the student can get this knowledge on their own and does not have to accumulate massive debt to do so – this criticism has no bearing on whether or not I was a member of such a faculty. The student could readily obtain my knowledge, via readings and/or, their own critical thinking.
I am certainly not going to justify a degree in the social sciences and humanities by declaring that because I was a good teacher/researcher, then, this justifies the existence of these departments.
“The value of any BA was never that you graduated able to discourse knowledgeably about Roccocco architecture or Baroque literature; the value, presumably, was that you learned to think, how to construct an argument – which necessarily means learning “all modes of logic, primarily syllogistic and propositional, and a really thorough study of the so-called informal fallacies and statistical fallacies”, saith KevinB
That’s a big “presumably” right there. Did you listen to or read any of the remarks by the various Occupy folks as they complained about their student debt. Pay any attention to the speeches of President Obama?
Person of Choler, ET:
You seem to think the current debasement of the BA is and was its natural state. May I suggest, gently, that this is a relatively new development? There are plenty of people who earned their BA’s before, say, 1964, that demonstrate my thesis.
I didn’t choose 1964 at random; that’s the year the first of the boomers started entering university. Faced with a huge number of new entrants, many of whom were not qualified for a university education by former standards (e.g. being able to read and reason properly) but had been led to believe since birth that university was their birthright (a consequence of the GI Bill, which, IMHO, did as much to ruin the quality of higher education as sub-prime did to the housing market.. but I digress), the universities had to lower their standards on both students and faculty. Datapoint: York University had 500 students in 1963; it had 7,000 in 1970. Tell me how it retained quality.
Higher education has fallen into the same pit that has absorbed so many institutions I used to respect: religions, police, courts, government, and capitalism, to name a few. (The Toronto Maple Leafs are also on the list, but are less germane.) All of these have been perverted to grotesque forms of what they once were, always at the hands of the neo-fascists, retaining only the names and inherited respect that they do not deserve. (This is not to suggest that any of these institutions were without flaw at any time, but, IMHO, the flaws now are significantly larger and distressingly more evident.)
Let’s look at capitalism. As others have said elsewhere, true free market capitalism has never existed on this planet. Nonetheless, we have approximated it in some small niches – drycleaners are an excellent example. There are at least 8 dry cleaners in a 1-mile radius of my home; I’m a price taker, since I don’t have sufficient dry cleaning volume to sway the market. The dry cleaners are also price takers – any attempt to raise prices dramatically by any one shop would result in vastly diminished volume. As you move closer to downtown Toronto from remote Richmond Hill, drycleaning prices rise to reflect the higher cost of real estate. The rise, as free market theory would predict, is gradual – the consumer’s cost to move to a cheaper shop a few minutes north is a constraint on more expensive shops to the south. But those types of markets are few and far between.
In general, in our cannelloni Canada, we end up with oligopolies. Ever since the unfortunate imposition of the Rand formula (and hey people: that name reflects the name of judge who imposed it, not the RAND corporation or Ayn Rand), we end up with near monopolies in labour in many fields. Add in marketing boards, zoning, etc., etc., and our current economy bears as little semblance to a free market as Hillary Clinton does to an attractive woman. So, Chester Field, if you’re still reading, whatever you’re designating the “modern free market” is not at all related to the real thing.
Let me return to my main point: higher education has fallen into the same pit as many other institutions. Respect? Tell someone you’re a university professor, priest, teacher, and watch their eyes glaze over. Pay? One of my fave stories is NYU’s ads for a new history prof, and a new plumber. The history prof had to have advanced degrees, publications, citations, etc.; the plumber had to fix toilets. The history prof was offered $32k; the plumber $80k. Stature in the community? Excuse me for a moment…hahahahahahahahahaha.
Does it bother me that BA’s are so easy to get, and held in such disrepute? YES. They should be a badge of honour, one that says “Yes, I’ve learned how to think”. Instead, they’re glorified high school degrees, and since I believed myself fairly ignorant coming out high school, dangerous.
kevinb – ‘neofascists’? Who? What? Where?
Sorry – but your dry cleaners example flies right past me; I have no idea what you are trying to explain.
I fully agree with you that unions are a serious problem; I consider them parasites on the worker. But I don’t think that unions, zoning boards, etc, are factors that deny the existence of a free market. They are realities that the free market acknowledges, so, a unionized shop must charge more for its goods/services than a non-unionized shop. The govt isn’t regulating supply and demand.
And a university professor doesn’t work the hours of a plumber. He’ll teach for 6 to 9 hours a week, and in many cases, has a marker for his exams. Planning and developing a course is done gradually; he can take years and, in the social sciences and humanities, his lectures are inviolate and unchallenged.
The plumber better get the job done right. Or else. There’s no such ‘tell the truth’ for the professor. The professor gets about four months off in the summer and long breaks at Christmas and Easter. Publish? Heh – in the social sciences and humanities, it’s all about your opinion. And, just following the postmodern leftist mantra. Simple.
There’s no comparison between the job security of the professor and the plumber. The former, as I said, works about 12 hours a week (I’m adding in marking); gets tenure; his work is unaccountable and answers to no-one. Benefits and pensions are far beyond any available to that 40 plus hour a week plumber. And, the professor readily coasts along until his salary is in the six figures.
Stature in the community? Which community?
“Do you actually believe that a statistical compilation of the population of x-city is ‘deeply subjective’?”
OK, let’s take your first example, a census of a city population: for starters, the number that one gets depends on many preceding decisions by the surveyor, not least his definition of a “person.” Does he count only legal citizens? What about undocumented workers? The homeless? Would the same survey conducted a few hundred years ago in a southern US city counted slaves as people or as property?
“That the amount of rainfall of x-terrain is ‘deeply subjective’.”
If the extent of your research is to record rainfall amounts, then I guess you’re right. But if your research involves even the slightest bit more complexity, then you begin to introduce the seemingly “objective” researcher’s subjective assumptions, biases, and perspectives. For example, say your research is to identify trends in rainfall amounts over time, which requires assessing whether different values are statistically significant. Yet the scientific community’s standard agreed upon thresholds for statistical significance (e.g., p = less than 0.05) are fundamentally arbitrary and indeed subjectively selected.
“That the number of loans via x-bank is ‘deeply subjective’?”
Again, are you simple counting loans for the sake of counting them (good luck getting published), or are you actually using that data as a quantitative indicator of some other extant phenomenon — say, the strength of the economy? And if it’s the latter, then what assumptions have you, the supposedly impartial researcher, made about the connection between your numerical data and the real world?
Do what the guy did in his own written obit.
Have a fake PHD. Its gotta be cheaper than the real thing. He made out fine. It will satisfy the never ending demands of the credential ism HR people as well.
davenport – have you never studied statistics, surveys, data collection, quantitative analysis? Your comments are very revealing that you haven’t done so.
In your first example of population, your descriptions, eg, legal, illegal workers, are all attributes of one variable: population. These are not subjective terms. You can either count all within one attribute or split the variable into multiple attributes, and add them up. These are not subjective descriptions but can be objectively measured.
In rainfall; there are actual measurements, averages, deviations and so on. Statistical measurements are neither arbitrary nor subjectively selected. A standard deviation is a statistical FACT and used as a universal measurement; not within someone’s subjective perception. You obviously haven’t studied statistics or quantitative methodology.
Equally, your last example of the bank loans is specious. That data exists and has zilch to do with its being published or not. Correlating it to another variable is equally valid and can be shown to be analytically valid.
Your comment was that statistics and quantitative analysis is biased and deeply subjective. I’m showing you that you haven’t a clue about statistics and quantitative analysis and that your conclusions about them are false and deeply subjective.
“In your first example of population, your descriptions, eg, legal, illegal workers, are all attributes of one variable: population. These are not subjective terms. You can either count all within one attribute or split the variable into multiple attributes, and add them up. These are not subjective descriptions but can be objectively measured.”
But the DECISION to measure each sub-group or not IS subjective, depending on the surveyor’s definition of “personhood”. If you do not believe that illegal aliens are a valid member of one’s population, then you make no effort to enumerate them. The resulting census will be an objective-seeming quanitative data set, except nowhere in the methodology will it say, “illegal aliens were not counted in this survey because they do not belong here”. It will be an implicit bias, based on an individual’s assumption and belief about who is and isn’t a “person.”
“A standard deviation is a statistical FACT and used as a universal measurement.”
Sure, SDs themselves are statistical facts. But the fact that we use stastistics to say something about the world leads inevitably to the introduction of subjectivity. Have you ever considered why it is that a statistical finding with a p value of 0.049 is publishable because it’s considered by consensus among the scientific community as “statistically significant”, but an almost identical finding with a p value of 0.051 is not? Why that CHOICE of that particular cutoff?
For heaven’s sake, Davenport – you continue to show, repeatedly, your astounding and abysmal ignorance of statistics and quantitative methods.
The fact that X-researcher made the decision not to measure a sub-group is not subjective! Don’t you know what subjective means?! It doesn’t mean, ‘a decision made by me’. It means a conclusion that I’ve arrived at without any reference to objective reality.
If I choose not to measure a subgroup, illegals, then, in my research report, since I must define the attributes of each and every variable (in this case, population), then, I must define it as ‘excluding illegal workers’. This has zilch to do with any definition of ‘personhood’ – and what the heck does that term mean anyway?
Of course the report has to define the variable (bet you don’t know what that means!) and all, I repeat, all, of its measured attributes. So if your variable excludes the attribute of illegal, then, this definition must show up in your report.
How on earth does the use of statistics ‘inevitably lead to subjectivety’? Remember, the term subjectivity means ‘without reference to objective reality.
A value of 0.05 is the valid statistic for probability, and your 0.049 and 0.051 actually fits into this range. A statistical sample of pure random chance between two attributes must fall in the half and half ratio. If it doesn’t it means that your sample size is not large enough or, there are other factors affecting the result.
The statistic of 0.05 refers to the fact that chance will produce a similar result 95% of the time. Nothing subjective. And the statistic is not a subjective arbitrary ratio. Again, you totally misunderstand the term ‘subjective’.
A correct use of the p statistic is continuous to weed out ‘noise’ or other variables that may be affecting the outcome.
I suggest you read up on quantitative methods. And the correct definition of ‘subjective’.
ET – further to your 8:28 posting, population example: in cases where the body doing the counting cannot accurately measure a population (which is what I think Davenport was alluding to) then an estimate can be used to represent that portion of the population. The estimate must be explicitly listed as such, and should have an explanation of why it was applied/it came from. In reports I do at work, I’m frequently asked to include estimates of many factors, and can include almost anything but I must note which results have been tested, which are extrapolations from other data, and which are conjecture (and upon what they’re based).
Davenport, the reason for this little explanation is to assure you that even the non-quantifiables that you pointed out that should belong in the data set (and, presumably, negate the value of the data set because it doesn’t include everything and detractors can say it’s not accurate data) can be properly included in quantitative data sets, but must be labeled as estimates. IMHO That’s a big part of ET’s point about critical thinking: how sure you can be about what you know, and how can you rank or rate the unknowns?
One of my favorite examples of faulty extrapolation is from “climate science”; drowned polar bears viewed from an aircraft after a storm were extrapolated to polar bears facing extinction due to global warming – once the logic chain was exposed and examined, it was a laughable.
KevinB @ 9:45: excellent post. I hadn’t considered the inflationary effects of the GI bill before.
“The statistic of 0.05 refers to the fact that chance will produce a similar result 95% of the time. Nothing subjective. And the statistic is not a subjective arbitrary ratio. Again, you totally misunderstand the term ‘subjective’.”
I’m aware of the what p=0.05 means in a statistical sense. But do me (and yourself) a favour and read this: springerlink.com/content/p546581236kw3g67/fulltext.pdf. It gives a bit of history on how the quantitative research community arrived at p=0.05 (or rather, a=0.05) as the current convention for determining whether one’s results are “statistically significant” (and hence apparently capturing a “meaningful” real world difference and thus being worthy of publishing) or “not significant” (and hence not meaningful and thus discarded/overlooked). The article shows just how casually and “unscientifically” it came about: “Even in the 19th century we find people such as Francis Edgeworth taking values “like” 5%—namely 1.5%, 3.25%, or 7%—as a criterion for how firm evidence should be before considering a matter seriously. Odds of about 20 to 1, then, seem to have been found a useful social compromise with the need to allow some uncertainty, a compromise between (say) .2 and .0001. That is, 5% is arbitrary (as Fisher knew well), but fulfils a general social purpose. People can accept 5% and achieve it in reasonable size sam- ples, as well as have reasonable power to detect effect-sizes that are of interest.”
“A value of 0.05 is the valid statistic for probability, and your 0.049 and 0.051 actually fits into this range.”
Except that result that has a p-value of 0.049 gets published in a scientific journal, joins what is deemed by society to be the body of “objective” evidence, and becomes available to be read by you and me. Meanwhile, a result with a p-value of 0.051 (or 0.06 or 0.07 or whatever) is considered not significant, and most often doesn’t get published and never sees the light of day.
Which would be fine (and objectively true) IF the conventional threshold of a=0.05 was grounded in objective fact, but as the linked article above shows, it most definitely isn’t.
Davenport, you still don’t understand statistics.
First, 0.049 and 0.051 reduces to 0.05. Don’t you know that? That’s basic arithmetic. There’s no comparison of 0.051 with 0.06 or 0.07!
Second, the fact that statistics selected a percentage of 95% to determine a ‘reasonable’ validity, rather than, let’s say – 93% or 97% isn’t a subjective and therefore unscientific decision! The term ‘arbitrary’ merely means that 93% or 97% would probably also give reasonably accurate results in the test and the scientific community settled on 95% as a valid average.
But ‘arbitrary’ doesn’t mean that it was a subjective choice! It merely means that another number, close to that, could also have been used. The fact that the scientific community settled on that ratio means that tests carried out by numerous research centres could be compared because they all used the same criteria to test validity and reliability.
“The fact that the scientific community settled on that ratio…”
Good, I’m glad you acknowledge that. Now we can come full circle , back to our original example of measuring rainfall.
Here’s the scenario: the research question is “Has there been a real, meaningful change in average rainfall for x-terrain over time?” Since you consider yourself an objective, hard scientist, you’ve gone and measured rainfall at a sufficient number of points in time. You’ve run statistical tests to see if the observed differences over time are statisitically significant. The resulting p-value is 0.03; your alpha is 0.05.
Go ahead, try to provide a useful, complete answer to the original research question without resorting at any point to your own subjective judgment.
ET:
I am sorry if my dry cleaner analogy was too subtly framed; let me be more explicit.
We live in a purportedly ‘free market’ economy, which in reality is as misleading as believing that many professed Christians act in a Christian manner. As I noted explicitly, in this country, we often end up with oligopoly, while the US is severely infected with ‘crony capitalism’; other countries suffer from other and usually more severe defects. Nonetheless, – and this is the nub of my point – even in our current environment, some markets which meet the classical definition of a truly ‘free’ market exist.
I argue that, despite the corruption and degradation of many current BA’s, there continue to exist, like the dry cleaners, some professors and some students who fulfill the methods and goals of a liberal arts education as I outlined them earlier. Therefore, I reject your assertion that the only valuable college degrees are engineering, medicine, & etc. I trust you do not require me to spell out in entirety the syllogism.
As to my comments re: professors v. plumbers, I commend you to the interesting precursor to the Survivor TV programs, the 1960’s anthropological study Gilligan’s Island. On that show, the richest person, Mr. Howell (portrayed so well by talented character and voice actor Jim Backus) was afforded a considerable amount of respect due to his wealth, ignoring that all that wealth was offshore, unreachable, and ineffective within the program’s confines. Meanwhile, the male who was clearly the brightest, most physically fit, and – on image anyway – the most virile (I write, of course, about the “Professor”), was clearly #4 among the male pecking order. In the early 1960’s, this made sense to me. Again, lest I be too subtle for you, let me spell this out explicitly:
“The Professor”, in return for society funding his potentially worthless (or worth very little) research, takes a position more as an observer, detached and less involved in society than the participants who make up the majority. Part of this contract is professors don’t actually try to run things (PET an unfortunate exception to the rule), hence the Professor’s deference to the Skipper and Mr. Howell and Gilligan, despite his clear intellectual and physical superiority.
In recent years, this paradigm has completely eroded. I’m not going to speculate in chicken and egg questions of what came first; I’m just going to say that, with the AGW scam is its more prominent and important example, university professors have decided to get into the fray and provide political, as opposed to dispassionate, advice. In return, they have sacrificed respect and deference. Hence, my plumber/professor analogy. Plumbers have, and have always, provided an understandable and direct service. Meanwhile, professors who used to provide dispassionate advice without political agendas have morphed into those who don’t. Which is why, among other things, professors are no longer as respected.
Please let me know when I have to expand my arguments to such detail. I sincerely expected that you, unlike Quebooboosie, et al to grasp my points. It is an unfortunate time when nothing can be assumed.
Kevin B – your analogy with Gilligan’s Island is beyond me as I’ve never seen any of it.
As for your point that SOME liberal arts professors and courses are valid intellectual exercises, this does not validate the inclusion of these programs in the general university degrees. My point was that this knowledge base could be acquired by the individual outside of a university and without an expenditure of 40,000 for such a degree.
As for the denigration of university professors, I’d say that, human nature being a constant, they behave no differently now that one or two centuries ago.
Davenport, first, you’d have to define ‘real’ and ‘meaningful’. Second, you don’t have to ‘run statistical tests to see if the results are statistically significant’. You don’t have an alpha or significance level. All you are doing in your example is measuring empirical or actual rainfall. Period.
Probability doesn’t enter the picture; you aren’t measuring the theoretical probability that something WILL happen. All you are doing is measuring observed actual rainfall! The only statistics you can come up with are empirical not probability distributions; that is, averages (mean, mode, median, range). Please understand the difference between empirical and theoretical distribution.