The Sultan Knish points out that our ever emphasis on churning out college graduates has ultimately been self destructive. We have neglected manufacturing and private sector jobs and instead prefer to have the government do the hiring. The “geniuses” with the MBA’s from Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton are the ones who created the economic mess that we are now in. It would have been better if at least 1/2 of the MBA’s instead went to trade school and learned how to service an engine or fix a leaky pipe. “Pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves” has been manifestly wrong!
by Daniel Greenfield
Flip through enough of the 99 percent signs and you realize that the majority of that demographic aren’t complaining about the lack of financial regulation or income inequalities, so much as they’re upset that they took on loans to pay for college degrees to get jobs that don’t actually exist.
The fault here isn’t Wall Street’s, it’s a policymaking apparatus that decided the way to deal with the loss of manufacturing jobs was to get as many college graduates out there as possible to create the industries of tomorrow.
This was Clinton’s platform and it’s Obama’s “Winning the Future” platform, pump enough money into education and the jobs will create themselves. The Dot Com boom in the nineties seemed to back up that policy with entirely new companies springing to life with valuations in the hundreds of millions and twenty somethings at the helm. But a good deal of those companies were nothing more than the foam on another bubble– and more problematically the cream of the tech companies were created by college dropouts. Even more problematically, the tech companies liked to save money by importing Chinese and Pakistani employees on H1-B visas as cheap labor, while their lobbies insisted that this would protect “American” innovation.
But the real problem was that swapping manufacturing for college degree jobs solved nothing. American companies that manufacture anything become the tip of an outsourced iceberg. All the companies with the shiny logos depend on Chinese manufacturing and raw materials. They can’t create anything that the People’s Republic of China can’t take away from them when the time is right.
[......]
And yet the tech industry is the closest to a college degree success story that we have. The failures are legion.
The problem with the “college degrees for everyone” approach is that creating more college graduates does not proportionally create more jobs, it creates more unemployed college graduates and devalues the worth of a college diploma. Too many college graduates mean that employers will look for higher degree levels. High school diplomas used to be a certificate of competence, then that was devalued through promotion in a system where teachers were expected to move students up to the next class no matter what. When college became the new high school, it was devalued in the same way. There are city and state colleges with students who are barely literate, not in the “kids these days use too many abbreviations” way, but in the “functionally illiterate” way.
If the goal is to move everyone to the highest level of education possible, the result will not be a more educated population, but an educational system with lower standards and a population that is less educated than ever because actual education becomes more inaccessible as the standards are lowered.
Make sure that everyone can “afford” to take out college loans and the marketplace will compete for students with traditional universities offering a large buffet of “educational choices”, most of which are not educational or represent any kind of career path outside academia, and private colleges offering useful sounding degrees that no employer will look twice at.
For the liberal politicians it’s a triple score. Money pours into academia which they can use as their own think tanks. The educational system gets four years or more to process students through more sophisticated indoctrination mechanisms. And then the students who can’t find jobs join the ranks of the usefully disaffected because somebody must be to blame… and it can’t possibly be the people pulling the strings of the people shouting at them through megaphones.
Clinton told working class voters that the manufacturing jobs were gone, but their kids would all have college degrees. Obama went one better by telling working class voters that they would be retrained to hold down “Green Jobs”, even as they’re falling faster than the Green companies and their sweetheart government pork. Those lies are what make the class warfare rhetoric out of DC so doubly despicable.
Politicians have never honestly talked to voters about what happened to the American economy, instead they fell back on the same mantra of opening up new markets through globalization and creating new jobs through education./
None of this is new. The country with the highest degree rate in the world is Russia. The USSR ran its citizens through its educational system at a rate that Elizabeth Warren could only gasp in awe at. But what was its education actually worth? About as much as American degrees are becoming worth. If you throw enough money and manpower at the educational system, you will have a really big educational system. What you will not have is anything of worth to go with it.
[.......]
According to the OECD (another useless globalization organization wrapped around a WW2 fossil) the Israeli educational system is a hopeless failure. In its 2009 evaluation claimed that Israeli students were behind Turkey, Dubai and Russia in math and science. Yet peculiarly enough Israel keeps collecting Nobel prizes and turning out minor things like instant messaging, drones and Kinect. When reality contradicts statistics, it’s wise to go with reality. That’s a skill most politicians haven’t learned, but it’s a rather valuable one.
The universalization of education is not about remaining competitive in a global marketplace or any of that other nonsense piously repeated by politicians with their hands in more pockets than a thieving octopus– it’s about promoting the homogeneity of ideas across a population. Which is why the importance placed on universal education increases as a country becomes more culturally diverse or internally divided.
The original Department of Education was created two years after the Civil War. The Kalamazoo School Case, which set the precedent for forcing taxpayers to fund public education and created the entire system of property tax school robbery we live under today, took place during the same period. As was the National Education Association whose Committee of Ten played a key role in the standardization of the national curriculum.
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When this is understood, the failure of innovation in the system is also obvious. The educational system is not a means of empowering thinkers, but of standardizing a static consensus of ideas. It’s a great way to learn liberal dogma, but an inefficient way of learning anything else. The expansion of the system is not about remaining competitive with China, just as funding more “Green Jobs” is not about “Winning the Future”, it’s about shaping the voters of tomorrow.
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The system would rather have 10,000 subsidized jobs that it creates than 10,000,000 jobs in the free market. It would rather have a middle class of 5 million college graduates, (40 percent of them government employees), than have a free market middle class of a 100 million, (only 30 percent of them college graduates and less than 0.5 percent of them government employees.) And it would rather have an angry mob camped out near Wall Street, than have a viable economy.
The educational bubble isn’t creating a new Middle Class that will keep social security viable, it is creating dissatisfied people who feel that they are entitled to better and don’t know who to blame. Like the rest of the government, the education bubble is too big to fail, which means that by the time it fails, so will the whole country.
Read the rest - The Education Bubble
No wonder the Democrats always talk so much about “spending money on schools” – the teachers unions are in their pockets. They tend to romanticize teaching as a profession as well.
This will dwarf the housing bubble, IMHO.
Tuition has been inflated through government loan programs to a ghastly overproportionate percentage.
I couldn’t afford to get a College education at a traditional university these days. I am looking at doing a Master’s now, but I’ll do internet classes and go from there. I don’t necessarily need classmates to bounce Ideas off of. It may not be ideal, but it is something I can afford. Part of the problem has been people who think that they don’t have to be able to afford their education because they are borrowing the money. That is completely wrong. You should never buy more than you can afford of anything, and that unfortunately includes education.
I had a cab driver the other night who is a junior
at LSU in computer engineering.
He is working and has out loans to pay his tuition.
His plan is to get work in anything after graduation
with some company that will pay for his masters.
He says that there are no longer jobs in his field
for bachlor degreed graduates.
Great follow up to other posts I had on this subject.
College is NOT for everybody.
Bumr50 wrote:
Sounds like the Housing bubble?
@ Iron Fist:
Housing bubble part 2!
OT:
Re: “Golobal Warming is MIA for Halloween weekend!”
Didn’t take ‘em long …
AP Newsbreak: Panel says wild weather worsens
http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-panel-says-wild-weather-worsens-084540799.html
@ RIX:
As a computer engineer, that is not really true, though the company I work for now prefers a masters. He really means that you can’t get a cool job at Microsoft or Google without a Masters. That is probably true, but there are jobs for competant programmers whether they have an Associates or a Doctorate. They just won’t necessarily be working on the same part of the project.
@ Rodan:
No doubt, and once more financed by government interference in the market. You are quite correct that not everyone needs or wants a college education. And we need welders and construction workers and cooks and dishwashers (etc., etc.) in the economy more than we need students of Advanced Queer Theory…
Iron Fist wrote:
Government economic engineering never turns out well.
@ Iron Fist:
He just may be misinformed, because he is convinced
that he won’t work in his field without a graduate
degree.
I think that we are going to see massive defaults on
student loans.
Rodan wrote:
Only for peopl who can spel.
I hate to go OT, especially on a thread from Knish, but could someone post this link for me in hotlinks? I can never manage to log in, but I really want Coldwarrior to see it sometime today. Thanks
http://beavercountian.com/content/featured/interactive-map-of-proposed-pa-redistricting
Rodan wrote:
Economics is not a strong suit of mine, but to my mind it sounds even worse because every education is worth about as much as a house and it impacts a far, far larger percentage of Americans.
Even responsible people take these loans and grants.
You know these OWS kids do have a point.
Who could possibly know that a degreee in Ethnic
Studies with a minor in Trans-Gender Studies
doesn’t get you a six figure entery level position
with stock options & a corner office?
@ NoThreat2U:
This is called “going on offense.”
Kudos to the state GOP for having the cajones to do this while they’re in power.
The Osprey wrote:
I can’t spell and I gadiated from Gad School
Iron Fist wrote:
“Classmates” are overrated as far as learning goes. They are more of a social need.
@ Nevergiveup:
Yer theeses wuz good?
RIX wrote:
Nothing like looking for a job in The New York Times classified which can utilize that B.A. in Lesbian/Gay/Transgendered studies with a minor in Women’s Studies.
@ Bumr50:
In all honesty, I am not sure how to interpret it really. There is also another one that makes a little more sense to me if you would like to see it also.
RIX wrote:
Computer engineering has been pretty much outsourced.
@ Bumr50:
The problem is we are too College centric.
Rodan wrote:
But what would the Sociology majors at LGF do?
@ Speranza:
Auto Mechanic is a better career.
The Osprey wrote:
Hey I have a special comments at 2:00 PM. I hope everyone participates and give their views.
Bumr50 wrote:
Actually in Dental School you don’t have a Thesis. Only have to pass the tests, the practical requirements ( enough fillings etc), and then pass the boards if you actually want a State License.
Rodan wrote:
Certainly a more useful career – and it cannot be outsourced.
@ NoThreat2U:
It’s about making the districts more representative of where people actually live than of gerrymandering Dems.
This is why they’re in a tizzy.
@ Bumr50:
I kinda figured that was the idea, but I couldn’t discern who was who and from where. lol Thanks for the help.
Rodan wrote:
I’ll try…will probably be passing through one of Janet Incompetano’s testicular inspection stations at that hour.
@ Bumr50:
Here is another one. I guess I would need to do a side by side comparison of before and after to really figure it out.
Anyone want to see the list of Charles Johnsons friends?
Click the link…you know you want to.
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2011/10/31/the-99-official-list-of-ows/
@ Bumr50:
I forgot the damn second link.
http://beavercountian.com/content/op-ed/op-ed-redistricting-the-46th-curveball
Check this out. Free Republic Bans Romney supporters.
That pretty well spells it out.
NoThreat2U wrote:
Marxist’s, Nazi’s, Islamist’s and more Marxist’s. Charles of course will claim that this does not make him a Nazi even though he regularly accuses others of being Nazi’s with far less evidence.
doriangrey wrote:
If only somebody could contact Andrew Breitbart via say Twitter and staple this list to Chunkey’s forehead in one of his and Andrew’s infamous flame wars.
@ doriangrey:
Hmmmmmmm. And please keep in mind, this list will be growing daily. Zombie is asking for help from anyone who knows of other orgs. backing these folks.
@ doriangrey:
There’s several names missing from the list:
The democrat party
Debbie Wassername Schlutz
@ Bumr50:
Elections have consequences!
Gee that was easy.
@ Iron Fist:
But you cannot learn much useful in trade school if you don’t get the basics in high school, either. In today’s world, if you want to practice a trade, you need, first and foremost, to be able to read. It’s no longer a given that high school “graduates” will have this ability.
And you need to have a little basic science. Trades depend upon applied science all the time. You can understand better how to fix something if you know its elementary principles of operation. One of my pet peeves is auto “mechanics” who cannot even penetrate the application of Ohm’s Law to a simple DC circuit. Show them a simple electrical problem, say a tail lamp that flashes on the left side, when a right turn is signalled, and they are hopelessly lost. And everything on automobiles has an electrical component to it now.
huckfunn wrote:
He “looks” Presidential.
Why are you guys so picky?
RIX wrote:
ROFLMAO… There are many of those in my school. Dumb as boxes of hammers, can’t speak properly, can’t spell, are horrified of even the most basic Math, yet they are getting degrees– in utter nonsense! WTF are their parents thinking?! If I had a kid and said kid asked me to pay for him or her to get some garbage degree like that, I’d slap the stupid right out of them.
@ doriangrey:
I read that link, and contained within it is another really good one. Check it out.
Speranza wrote:
We need many more advanced degrees to pull out of this slumping boom.
Bumr50 wrote:
Yes, exactly, every dollar of aid = a dollar tuition increase.
@ Prebanned:
So if anyone is pro choice they will be banned from Freep? That is absurd and very Charles Johnson.
huckfunn wrote:
Very totalitarian of them.
I pretty much agree with this guy
@ Alberta Oil Peon:
That reminds me. A kid named Casey worked for me several years ago. He had a masters in electrical engineering. Bill, another colleague, had an old tube-type Marantz receiver that didn’t work and asked Casey to take a look at it. Casey agreed and Bill brought in the Marantz and the schematic. Casey looked at the schematic, pointed to several tubes and said “what are those?” Bill said “those are tubes”. Casey said “what’s a tube?”
@ Alberta Oil Peon:
Yes, but those are failures of the Public Education system. A person shouldn’t need 18 months to 2 years of remedial education in college if they graduate high school, but that is what you are seeing when the public school fiasco meets the real world. Even my high school education, which was college prep all the way, didn’t adequately prepare me for college, though I didn’t need remedial work. There is no way an honest evaluation of public education doesn’t find it an abject failure. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Public Education is also one of the most Left-wing dominated parts of modern American life while being such a collossal failiure, either.
Speranza wrote:
I agree with you on that, I don’t trust Romney though.
huckfunn wrote:
You can get a degree in computer science that some places call a BSEE.
@ Prebanned:
What Freep did is despicable. People like that are what made conservatism “uncool” as opposed to the Reagan days.
Pelosi: South Carolina Boeing Plant Should Unionize or Shut Down
I really cannot believe the nerve of this carbon based lifeform.
video and transcript at the link. For people who keep spewing about the “jobs bill” and getting Americans back to work, they sure do their damndest to shut business down.
http://blog.heritage.org/2011/10/31/pelosi-south-carolina-boeing-plant-should-unionize-or-shut-down/
ROTFLMAO… OH DEAR…. This is really going to leave a bruise on the Ronulians…
New footage to kill the conspiracies: WTC 7 in flames on 9/11
@ huckfunn:
Heh. Just the guy to have working on a valuable classic hunk of audio gear, not.
Every school that purports to teach engineering should have a required course (at least one) on the history of technology. Kind of hard to figure out where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from. I’m not saying that every electrical engineer should become as whiz at vacuum-tube circuit design, but they ought to be able to recognize the damn things and have at least an inkling of how they work. Solid-state amplifiers would never have been invented if vacuum-tube technology had not shown us that amplifiers could be made at all.
And even high-school history should cover some of the history of technology and of business, not just wars and proclamations. Because the everyday stuff like, “how did we light our homes” has a lot of bearing on what took place in the political realm.
Speranza wrote:
I agree with Freep’s analysis of Mittens. It is rotten to be banning people. They tend to be somewhat narrow-minded over there.
@ Iron Fist:
Well, one of the reasons we get some many bullshit college degrees like Transgendered Eskimo Poetry, or Underwater Basket Weaving, is that the kids coming out of high school are too damn ignorant to do math and science.
huckfunn wrote:
They are hard core ideologues and every one here knows how I feel about rigid, hardcore ideologues.
Speranza wrote:
Right but they made thier choice it is thier blog. At least they aren’t trying to hide it I don’t read them much so it doesn’t get me that worked up. I would not ban anyone for who they support, if I had a blog, as long as they attempted to blog peaceably.
Prebanned wrote:
He really had the Masters. Just about the smartest kid I ever met. Somebody simply forgot to tell him about tubes.
NoThreat2U wrote:
Boeing should just move thier production to China.
@ Alberta Oil Peon:
THye should fail them. What we have seen is a devaluing of degrees, to the point that a high school degree is just about worthless, and a BA isn’t much more. You haven’t learned how to learn until you have a BA. they don’t teach the basic tools of learning (like reasoning and critical thinking) in high school anymore.
Speranza wrote:
Let me guess. You have hardcore, rigid feelings about that?
@ huckfunn:
@ Prebanned:
huckfunn wrote:
Let’s face reality here, tubes are archaic technology, compared to mosfet amplifier’s they are expensive, inefficient and bulky.
@ doriangrey:
The only thing I know about tubes is that they made my radios, TVs and stereos work for about half my life. I still have 2 old Marantz’s. I agree with Oil Peon’s view that anyone who is getting a degree in electrical engineering should know the history of what was a very important piece of tech.
@ doriangrey:
And tube gear won’t be wiped out by the dread EMP attack. Tubes can briefly sustain overloads of several hundred percent.
And some gear just won’t work without them. Like microwave ovens. And look how many musicians insist on tube amps for their instruments.
@ Prebanned:
She probably wishes they would. Then they can blame it on “obstructionist republicans” as to why there are no jobs in SC. These people are sneaky.
Speranza wrote:
Yeah, no doubt. I’m not a Romney supporter but damn.
Dang- did I just do the walk of shame coming in with last night’s costume on?
LOL!
huckfunn wrote:
I despise that characteristic in anyone. I cannot stand extremists.
I’m no fan of Mittens, but Free Republic can be a sordid, disgusting group.
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
ROTFLMAO… Archaic technology never becomes archaic technology because it doesn’t work. Abacus’s and Slide-rules still function every bit as well as the day they were first invented. Generally speaking archaic technology becomes archaic technology because the profit margin on newer technology is higher.
There is usually a trade off with newer technology as well, usually that trade-off is that it’s cheaper to produce and does a specialized task better or faster, but like with vacuum tubes looses some of the wider spectrum uses.
huckfunn wrote:
Sure there is something to be said for knowing the history of technology, for one thing it helps prevent the reinvention of technology that already exists.
Speranza wrote:
Something…Queer?
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
Not to mention Electromagnetic Pulse….
@ PrincessNatasha:
When I went to College there was a lot of utter
nonsense spewed by the profs, but it seems worse now.
I have a niece who majored in “Peace Studies” at
Notre Dame!
Kids crawl on glass to get accepted there & she majors
in Peace Studies!
@ RIX:
A safe rule to follow: any course at college named “_____ studies” is bullshit, and there is zero real-world market for graduates.
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
But the counselors,who have a vested interest in kids
taking that crap encourage them.
Knowledge is sacred, but our system of higher education
is a racket.
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
That is a good rule to follow.
@ RIX:
@ Speranza:
@ Alberta Oil Peon:
‘Peace Studies’ ‘Women/Gay/Minority’ studies degrees are a waste of time & space. I’m glad my college days were slightly before all these BS courses became part of the core curriculum. I’d have a very hard time spouting crap like that back on a test or in a paper and acting like it mattered.