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<p>The less intelligent someone is, the less able he is to study at the college level, as Charles Murray discusses in</p>
<p>[Are</a> Too Many People Going to College?
The American Magazine
September 8, 2008](<a href=“http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college]Are”>http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college)
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<p>Bad example. NOBODY responds to Milton, as amply explained by Donald Sutherland in “Animal House.”</p>
<p>[AnimalHouseTeacher</a> - YouTube](<a href=“AnimalHouseTeacher - YouTube”>AnimalHouseTeacher - YouTube)</p>
<p>Less able, but not unable. Why do you not believe in individuals?</p>
<p>Good one, someoldguy! (It’s called humor, Beliavsky)</p>
<p>Re #344: You don’t get off scot-free either. The conservative critique of higher education, as advanced by Murray, Richard Vedder, et al, has some merit. And it really does seem to be the case that employers now use a bachelor’s as a proxy for their legal incapacity to test for aptitude directly or to trust our secondary education system to the extent they used to. Here, I’m reminded of George Will’s column taking note of the number of help wanted ads for retail store management jobs that require “a bachelor’s degree and the ability to lift fifty pounds.” Since none of us parents is going to fix the secondary system any time soon, we have to take the current playing field as a given. </p>
<p>Longer term, it seems to me that policymakers are going to have to recognize that we really have TWO higher education systems in this country – one that runs on the traditional model and another that de facto serves as grades 13-16 of secondary education but can prepare students for meaningful and productive adult lives. In the former system, people seem to be willing to pay whatever the colleges want to charge and – more or less – can earn enough afterwards to pay it back. In the latter system, we’ve got a real cost issue and need to think long and hard about delivery models so that students can get the skills/validation they need without being behind the eight-ball financially for twenty years afterward.</p>
<p>I subscribe to Seth Godin’s blog and this morning’s entry reminded me of Beliavsky.</p>
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<p>Those people</p>
<p>At a recent seminar, a woman who helps run a community college stood up to ask a question.</p>
<p>“Well, the bad news,” she said, “is that we have to let everyone in. And the truth is, many of these kids just can’t be the leaders you’re describing, can’t make art. We need people to do manual work, and it’s those people.”</p>
<p>I couldn’t believe it. I was speechless, then heartbroken. All I could think of was these young adults, trusting this woman to lead them, teach them, inspire them and push them, and instead being turned into ‘those people.’</p>
<p>You know, the people who will flip burgers or sweep streets or fill out forms all day. The ones who will be brainwashed into going into debt, into buying more than they can afford, to living lives that quietly move from one assigned task or one debt payment to another. If they’re lucky.</p>
<p>No, I said to her, trying to control my voice, no these are not those people. Not if you don’t want them to be.</p>
<p>Everyone is capable of being generous, at least once. Everyone is capable of being original, inspiring and connected, at least once. And everyone is capable of leading, yes, even more than once.</p>
<p>When those that we’ve chosen to teach and lead write off people because of what they look like or where they live or who their parents are, it’s a tragedy. Worse, we often write people off merely because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking that they have no ability to do more than they’ve been assigned. Well, if we brainwashed them into setting limits, I know we can teach them to ignore those limits.</p>
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<p>Can you imagine being one of Beliavsky’s kids and being written off as not college worthy because your IQ was “only” 110? Do hard work, kindness, drive, humanity, grace, goodwill, character not count for anything? If the odds aren’t 100% that you’ll succeed, why even bother?</p>
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<p>But so what? Being a surgeon requires a certain level of manual dexterity. It’s interesting that the ability to do certain things physically is vaunted when it’s making a surgical knot with precision, or wielding a paintbrush skilfully, but derided when its about, say, lifting a child into a Hoyer lift or arranging flowers skilfully.</p>
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<p>And when that fails, we come up with merit in motion to keep the riff-raff in their place. </p>
<p>I always know that people will do what is in their best interest to do, and believe what is in their best interest to believe. What I did not know is that people actually first decide what group they have the closest affinity with, and then align their thinking according to the norm of that group. That was quite a revelation to me.</p>
<p>Collins is right; we are tribal that way.</p>
<p>The point is that fifty years ago, no one would have required you to have a bachelor’s degree to manage the day shift at a retail store. The degree has become a proxy for competency that either used to be assumed of high school graduates or for which employers could test in other ways. I’m not arguing that we simply should go back to the way things used to be. (Frankly, I doubt we can.) But I am pointing out that a large swath of American colleges serve a different training/validation purpose than they did back then, but our rhetoric and our policies haven’t caught up with that.</p>
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<p>The community college administrator probably has a better idea of the capabilities of her students than Seth Godin. How do you know he is right and she is wrong?</p>
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<p>Actually, some IT jobs used to require the ability to lift up to 75 pounds. This was because large old-style [CRT</a> monitors](<a href=“What Is a CRT Monitor? History & Fun Facts (with pictures)”>What Is a CRT Monitor? History & Fun Facts (with pictures)) could weigh that much.</p>
<p>I think more useful information would be how many people who graduate get jobs in their field and how many go onto graduate school. I spoke with a college advisor recently and he told me before the days of the internet that data was fairly easy to come by as most students got their first professional job through the university. Today, many if not most get their jobs via the internet and outside of the university setting. If I am a Political Science major it would interest me to know what kind of jobs Political Science majors are getting and what their salaries are rather than some kind of a university average. I would also want to know how many are getting jobs related to political science, how many are going on to graduate degrees. The same with the engineering school, the music school, nursing, education etc. If 50% percent of graduating engineering majors are getting jobs in engineering and 30% are going to graduate school that means that 20% are either underemployed, unemployed or have chosen a different field. If school B percentages are 70/25/5 school B might be worth more. Knowing how much money might be satisfying at a glance but it might say little about the quality of education and the quality of life they may have after graduating.</p>
<p>The more detailed of the <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys-4.html#post15425078[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys-4.html#post15425078</a> (Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, Virginia Tech, etc.) do give placement rates into jobs and graduate school, as well as pay levels.</p>
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<p>I don’t; though again, neither do you. Then again, I believe in human potential. You believe that only certain select people are worthy of being invested in. I prefer to be inspirational and expansive in my thinking; you don’t. Do you seriously never want to inspire people? </p>
<p>In my personal life, I have done some amazing things over the past year because I believed in myself. I ran two 5K’s that I never thought I could ever do. I did some other things that are not relevant for board discussion. Using your “logic,” I should never have bothered, since I don’t have the genetics necessary to be a really fast runner.</p>
<p>Blossom,</p>
<p>Your wildly successful VP with the soc undergrad and no grad degree is also probably in a different, earlier cohort that is not very typical of today’s graduating college kids. Also, of course there are outliers in any field or discipline!</p>
<p>But as for trying to make the case that studying sociology makes you more analytical (aka, smarter) and therefore destined to be a cracker jack surgeon is really preposterous. Sociology is not that tough of a concentration in terms of grade inflation. It’s less quantitative than math, engineering, stats or economics. It’s an excellent choice for the premed kid who is looking to boost his gpa by choosing a softer concentration while taking the premed reqs. It’s a good way to make the premed years easier but not really a good way to make your brain that much smarter!</p>
<p>There really are a lot of naive people who really do think by sending their kid to an expensive but not selective school to major in theater production that their kid will work on theater productions and live a wonderful, nicely paid life in a cool profession. I know people doing just that in their parenting! I know parents whose kids did marine biology and now that kid is working at Victoria’s Secret for minimum wage and cannot understand why no one will hire her to work on a Jacques Cousteau documentary!</p>
<p>It is true that there are tons of folks with PhDs in fields like literature and anthro and history who have managed to get into all sorts of fields and eventually rise to positions with some authority and good pay. But it’s a risky journey and getting riskier.</p>
<p>I don’t think every kid should do engineering, nursing or accounting. That would be awful. But I do think every kid doing a history degree should not assume they are going to be in Big Law pulling down seven figures by age 30.</p>
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<p>Sociology, like almost any academic subject studied in college, can be studied in a rigorous manner in a way that fosters intellectual development and/or pushes the boundaries of knowledge in the subject.</p>
<p>Of course, at some or many colleges, it is possible to slide through that major (or other majors) in a less rigorous and/or more grade-inflated way.</p>
<p>“Your wildly successful VP with the soc undergrad and no grad degree is also probably in a different, earlier cohort that is not very typical of today’s graduating college kids. Also, of course there are outliers in any field or discipline!”</p>
<p>Lol - I just spent several days working with a 25 yo Princeton sociology grad who has a great job leading innovation workshops for our Fortune 50 client.</p>
<p>^ Yeah – you’ve mentioned her before on here Pizza. We know. And she went to Princeton and you can major in anything at Princeton and then go be employable if you have half a mind. That really isn’t what this proposed reportage is about.</p>
<p>Oh, and does this Princeton grad leading workshops have a permanent full time job with benefits? It sounds pretty good but you never know these days.</p>
<p>“Innovation workshops”</p>
<p>Right. Kind of sounds like sales . . .</p>
<p>Not trying to put down soc. It’s a fine topic to study. It is not particularly great preparation for the job market. If you do it and want a job upon graduation you better have (1) connections, (2) academic pedigree, (3) tremendous networking ability.</p>
<p>The better answer, in my opinion, is to change bankruptcy law back to what it was before 2005, and to go back to allowing private student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. I am tired of banks not being held accountable. The answer should not be to put it all on parents and students.</p>