A friend in the U.S. Midwest recently told me that she is strongly considering financing her nephew’s 4 year education at an out of state university. This would likely cost at least $50,000 per year. While she’s doing quite well professionally, this would still be a major burden on her.
I’ve long believed that prospective students and their parents should carefully look at the likely ROI of a university education before blindly shelling out the incredible amount of money it costs to attend most American post secondary institutions. Otherwise, to paraphrase Mark Steyn, one’s educational pursuits are more of a hobby.
Rex Murphy chimes in on the sad state of “higher education” in both Canada and America these days:
Some universities — and, in particularly, some humanities departments — have, over the last few decades, wandered far from the primary purpose of what these institutions were designed for: to teach what is worth knowing; to train the intellect; to acquaint students with, and help them appreciate, the glories of the human mind and its finest achievements.
Concomitantly, they have descended into pseudo-studies, become infatuated with low pop culture, become obsessed with faddish social justice issues, turned hypervigilant on their students’ “comfort levels” and are pruriently concerned with sexism narratives, cause politics and “identity” zealotry. They bear almost no resemblance to the institutions of higher learning — higher in its full applications — that they, at least ideally, have always aspired to be.
Junk in, junk out, is a variation on the computer axiom. Any institution that puts Madonna and hegemony in the same sentence, never mind in the title of a thesis, has cut the cords on the balloon and is floating off on some vague, directionless journey to nowhere in particular.
Believe me folks it is no longer just humanities. Programs such as engineering are now undergoing a similar transformation. Many Canadian universities now force feed the global warming, anti-oil, anti-progress agenda to engineering students.
Topics like sustainability are really just code words for a left-wing agenda.
Competition is being purged from engineering. While learning to work in a team is important, the idea of outstanding individual contribution is increasingly frowned upon in engineering programs.
Less and less real math is being taught, and important subjects are being watered down in the never-ending attempt to get more women into engineering.
Engineering programs are also handing over their autonomy to professional engineering societies whose only objective is to grow their bureaucracies though increased membership.
It is really very sad.
Collages and universities nothing more then indocterination centers the same with the schools showing this Go Green crap in the students head all for the benifit of Big Brother and the NWO
Yeah “teamwork” in engineering means the smart ones do the dumb one’s work as well as their own. At least in my experience. I’d rather just fire the bastards.
A number of years ago I decided that motorsports wasn’t a good way to try to save for ‘retirement’ and that I should learn some new tricks. To that end I enrolled in one of the big vocational colleges in the US to study IT networking systems and their management. Nearly all the students were folks in the same boat as me, heading back to try to earn a better paycheck after spending many years doing something that was no longer viable. Many military folks, truckers etc. Long story short, it was a giant joke. Everything seemed at least a year out of date, and there wasn’t so much as a blip about ‘the cloud’ or anything so relevant as that. Man, it was expensivo! I shudder to think of the debts accrued by all those poor people in my classes. If I had kids, I’d be in debtors prison…
Don’t forget that the people “graduating” from these post-secondary institutions – now I know why they call them “institutions” – are working their way into the media, governments, and financial institutions.
That is what has happened since the 1960s – free love was always sustainable – and we have a financial institution in British Columbia that will not ever use the word “prosper” or “growth”. I am sure that the word “profit” is banned.
Notice that even businesses, especially the larger ones, use such terminology as “EBITDA” instead of “profit”.
You think it’s bad now? Wait a few more years.
Good for Rex, and good for you, Mr. D.
Down here on the Rock, we just had an effusion when a “student” at the beginning of a class without warning asked his prof, one of the better in the University, to don some kind of transmitter. He had not gone through channels – the university has quite a good unit to handle disabilities of various kinds – immediately jumped the media, and the student activists had a field day. At last an incident where they could be racist and misogynist and still feel virtuous!
Dark mills of Academia?
Cranking out impoverished holders of proof of their guilliblity.
Being graduates of the special ed, awarded participation trophies for being sometimes present these poor fools are then gifted with proof of their indentured status(student loan debt) and thrown into the University of Hard Knocks.
Of course they huddle together in government and human resource bureaucracies, the real world is frightening when you have no useful skills to market and you have a collection agency demanding you pay up for your past idiocy.
There is a reason these refugees from reality hate and fear skilled workers, they exact their petty revenge by hiring the real mutts while dismissing the truly skilled as “Troublesome”,by hiring only the inept who will never challenge their “Authority” and by “Networking” .
Safety committees are all one needs to know.
Why do so many congregate in management ? When most of them can’t?
The explosive growth of credentialism is more evidence of the mindless revenge of these fools.
Ever noticed that govt insists private contractors have all the licenses and credentialled employees, when none of their own employees are?
Rules are for the Little People.
The leftist educational establishment is very aware that
if most “real subjects” are well taught minus the usual
deliberate confusion, it can tend to awaken the interest
of average students. This is not helpful because marxist
indoctrination works best as the only light in a really
dark and drab environment.
The prospect of law suits for malpractice tends to keep Engineering, like Medicine, honest. That said, I gather that a lot of engineering graduates never do engineering work, but rather engage in generation of the massive amount of paper necessary to satisfy the regulatory environment.
So to speak, in bureaucratic-speak. They spend their time filling out and submitting forms.
Ahem *COUGH COUGH*
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1467978302
” …’teamwork’ in engineering means the smart ones do the dumb one’s work as well as their own.”
My 36 years at a major aerospace corporation confirms that absolutely. And I would add that many of us could see the results of decades of social and educational changes. As years passed the younger hires showed less mathematical and technical ability along with a reduced work ethic, the upshot being that the ‘smart’ ones had to perform an ever-increasing percentage of the work.