When I was young, Sweet Briar had already evolved from an elite finishing school to a serious college for female children of the gentry, and especially those with horses. Skidmore used to do the same. Their goal had been to produce excellent young wives for gentry men; literate, infused with a dose of southern charm, graciousness and manners (even though at least half were from the north), prepared to help any kids with homework, to pour tea, to read a book each week, to go on fox hunts, to shoot shotguns and rifles, to throw a dinner party, to be equipped to run family affairs and to handle social relations delicately, to run Junior Leagues, church organizations, and garden clubs - and to discuss any topic intelligently with a hubby, from the sciences to art history to international issues.

Women well-equipped to create beautiful family lives for the gentry class and to raise lots of fine kids and future good citizens and future good parents.

The lovely college mostly kept to that mission until they responsibly recognized that the market was running against them. Sad. Many families over the past 100 years are grateful for their mission. Charming campus, with sweet, genteel and refined young women. It all fades into history and fond memory.

I admit I am old-fashioned. I married an extremely-bright Randolph-Macon girl. Lucky me to catch a southern gal from the horsey set. She is still ticked off about the War Between the States, but, thank God, she likes me and my friends up here in Yankeeland. Hostess of the Century, I think. I just show up, and there's a fun party with interesting folks. I pour, and enjoy the bright, interesting people she collects and who are drawn to her sparkling self.

From the Williamson piece we linked this morning:

Educational reforms filtered through the machinery of politics are generally defective, for two reasons. The first is that two different things are meant by “education.” We have education in the true, Arnoldian sense of the word, the improvement of one’s mind (and possibly even one’s soul) through the study of “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” which is the goal of a classical liberal education; we also have the Bismarckian sense of education, the conception that commands the attentions of politicians, which understands the schools as factories producing the human widgets that the state requires for its own purposes, economic competitiveness and military preparedness at the top of the list. (A deep problem with state-run systems of education is that they almost always mistake their customers for their products.)

This leads to interest-group jockeying within the ranks of educators, with those whose personal interests are attached to the humanities feeling forever shortchanged. (That is one of the reasons for opposition to the current STEM push.)

All of us in positions to employ people know that a college degree, in many or most cases, is meaningless credentialism much of the time, these days.

For life-enrichment or for the hard sciences, college can great, especially if money is no object and if the kid is a natural scholar. The latter is, at most, 5-6%.

In choosing friends, we might prefer people who know a lot about a lot of things, but for employees one applies different metrics. We train all of our own people, including our paralegals. We use a marine corps boot camp system. Many wash out, but are better for it. Some even thank us for letting them discover what level of effort and learning is expected from work in the for-profit world.

Many times, college is a negative from a business standpoint. We exist to make money honestly and nothing more. When we hire, all we ask ourselves is "Can this person make, or save, us money?" And in case they do not, can we let them go without a lawsuit? I would never say that we avoid women, older folks, or minorities, for that reason because there are laws, but we have had enough expensive troubles with that in the past. We just want the highest performance and we want you available 24 hrs/day if needed, no excuses.

Do an extraordinary job, exceed expectations, go the extra mile, make yourself attractive, and spread good cheer? We will reward you handsomely with money, benefits, love and appreciation.

When we hire new lawyers (rarely in recent years, unless they come with deep portfolios of corporate clients), of course they have degrees. We ignore their degrees, bearing in mind that legal work required degrees only recently (historically). We see people with recent law degrees working in Starbucks and living with their parents.

All real law is learned in apprenticeship, preferably under a genius mentor. All real learning is, ultimately, self-education.

Scott Walker Doesn’t Need a Degree — and Neither Do You

It’s Time to Get Rid of History, Biology, and Chemistry Classes:

We should re-think the subject boundaries in high school education so that they align with important ideas and concepts that will give our children useful analytical lenses for viewing the world.

This education theorist is obviously an idiot. He proposes to teach prepared. synthetic synthesis before those empty brains have any fundamental knowledge.  Maybe the foundational knowledge is just too hard to learn or teach. It is both.

Synthesis? Do it on your own time if you can. Got your calc? Got Avogadro's Law? Gas laws? Got the laws of thermodynamics? And the laws of electromagnetism? Got the math of cardiac physiology?  If you have these things, and more, maybe we can talk "synthesis." I would wager the author knows none of these.

New ideas about formal education can be assumed to be wrong.

Wow: How the free market solves education problems.

 From The Next Frontier in School Choice:

Most school-choice programs offer significant but not revolutionary changes to the traditional educational model. But true educational choice, and the educational market it could help foster, promise to radically improve education for many children. As Milton Friedman observed, “not all ‘schooling’ is ‘education,’ and not all ‘education’ is ‘schooling.’” Charter schools and voucher programs still conflate the two, but education savings accounts embody a more expansive understanding of education.

ESAs offer several key advantages over traditional school-choice programs. Because families can spend ESA funds at multiple providers and can save unspent funds for later, ESAs incentivize families to economize and maximize the value of each dollar spent, in a manner similar to the way they would spend their own money. ESAs also create incentives for education providers to unbundle services and products to better meet students’ individual learning needs.

It's my alma mater, so I think it's a good place. Tough but supportive sort-of: they will certainly toss you if you don't want to get with the program.  Many claim that Andover has smarter, more competition-minded kids, but a colder atmosphere. A visit to Phillips Exeter Academy.

The Exeter Harkness table. You can't hide. 

By coincidence, Jeb Bush at Andover. 

In my view, most of the elite New England prep schools are extremely demanding academically, socially, athletically, and emotionally. The stress and frequent misery and humiliation are part of their mission, like boot camp. Nobody gets As. These schools feel that if one kid gets an A, that is just proof they are not pushing the kids hard enough. I got 2 As in four years, and I worked my butt off. The mandatory 3-hour study hall every evening helped me learn, and the mandatory chapel, formal meals, lights-out, no TV or radios, and other structures helped center me. After class on Saturday mornings we had choir practice, then sports. Sundays, sleep late, then required church, formal lunch, 2 hrs study hall - then free for the rest of the day but you had better be ready to be called on, on Monday morning: "You read the essay, yes? And Madison's paper? So defend Madison's position on ... in light of the new Constitution."

Sad to say, these academies are not as structured these days but remain academically rigorous.  

Caught with tobacco, drugs, drink? Sent home for good in shame, immediately. Sports required for 3 hours every afternoon, regardless of ability. Sex? We were not coed quite yet, which helped concentration enormously. 

Are we witnessing an epidemic of PC bullying? Of course, and the contagion has spread out of academia to the real world. People have become fearful of what and how they talk, as if we were in the old East Germany. Fact is, you can pass yourself off as a victim, you can bully and intimidate all you want.

The argument is that only certain (usually academic) elites can be rational, so it is the job of our moral and intellectual superiors to protect us from bad ideas, bad words, and unhindered speech. Good, concise piece: Yes, Political Correctness Really Exists - Social media gives new muscle to German Marxist Herbert Marcuse's arguments against free discourse.

The(se) tensions in (John Stuart) Mill’s defense of intellectual freedom were recognized in the 19th century. What we now call political correctness was first articulated in the 1960s by the brilliant German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s achievement was to turn Mill’s argument for free discussion, at least in a modern Western society, against its explicit conclusion.

Marcuse undertakes this inversion, worthy a black belt in dialectical reasoning, in the 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, Marcuse argues that the marketplace of ideas can’t function as Mill expected, because the game in rigged in favor of those who are already powerful. Some ideas enjoy underserved appeal due to tradition or the prestige of their advocates. And “consumers” are not really free to chose, given the influence of advertising and the pressures of social and economic need. Thus the outcome of formally free debate is actually predetermined. The ideas that win will generally be those justify the existing order; those that lose will be those that challenge the structure.

There is truth in that notion that the biggest megaphones are loudest, but this concern  misunderestimates people - even the benighted hoi polloi like us who believe everything on NPR. As you might expect, here at Maggie's we take some amusement from a world full of loony-tunes and liberal fascists -regardless of the size of their megaphones -  because we have faith that good old American common sense and resourcefulness will endure and see through the insanity.

Indeed, I believe the Left would be happy to hinder my free speech. I have no desire to hinder theirs, even though I sometimes feel it is fundamentally malevolent. As we often claim here, the desire to control others is a form of mental illness.

CS Lewis: Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

For an amusing take on the topic, Another Progressive Self-Excommunicates Over Political Correctness Thugsquads

We all understand many of the reasons for credential inflation. Most of it is quite absurd.

Here's Another Reason for Credential Inflation:

 Employers keep ratcheting up their educational credential demands to sift out people who, on the basis of their lower credential levels are presumably less competent and trainable. It’s not just the business sector that contributes to credential inflation — so does government.

Memorize everything you can which you find worthy. Poetic verse, biblical verses, aphorisms, and song lyrics most lend themselves to it, but so does anything worthwhile.

Actors readily learn an entire play, so why not we? Memorized verse always comes in handy. Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem - Hearing art's heartbeat.

Crazy times, sad times.

All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes

The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level

It seems not to mean much, these days. What Does “College Ready” Mean?

My impression is that higher ed is an industry today, government-subsidized. They will take almost anybody regardless of IQ, character, academic achievement or curiosity, etc. and run them through their credentialing machine for big bucks.

MacDonald: The latest campus fad, which sees racism everywhere, will create a new generation of permanent victims. Her article makes me feel unsafe as it seems to trivialize the feelings of the most vulnerable, marginalized, and irritable among us, such as me.

There is a book called Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back but it's about dealing with mental illness.

International students now make up 17% of all U.S. graduate students

The schools want their money.

Not Asian-Americans, but Asians from Asia:

They’re far outpacing Americans, particularly on the quantitative section of the test. Many B-school admissions officers say that a score on the quantitative section is the best predictor of success in an MBA program.

One result of these disparities is that Americans’ percentile rankings have dropped, even though their raw scores have remained constant in recent years. With Asia-Pacific students applying to and attending American business schools in large numbers, some schools complained to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT. As the WSJ put it, schools “don’t want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.”

Critics have tagged the Common Core with the pejorative "ObamaCore." The gibe is more instructive than many realize. The Affordable Care Act and the Common Core both involve ambitious efforts to change whole swaths of American life, though the practical impact of each was intentionally shrouded in uncertainty. Both would have benefited from more scrutiny early on but are now increasingly entrenched. In health care, critics have found it a losing strategy to talk about simply repealing the ACA without talking about what should replace it. They need to offer plausible alternatives to have a shot at policy or political success. Meanwhile, the ACA has started to change American medicine. The same is true of the Common Core. Five years on, it has started to change instruction, textbooks, and curriculum.

It always seemed to me to be just plain babysitting: Research on Early Childhood Ed Still Unpersuasive

"Early childhood education" is probably really unionized government day care under a marketing name.

I know a guy who got an A+ in Physical Chemistry at an elite university, and never went to class. He needed the spare time to practice with his grunge band. He told me he spent 24 hours non-stop going through the textbook with the help of some borrowed Adderal.

I suspect he missed a lot of interesting stuff, but he got the competency.

There are plenty of reasons for "seat time" in many areas of study, but certainly not in all. For example, there really are no valid criteria (in my view) for competency in Art History, or in history for that matter.

Here's the idea: Hacking Higher Ed With Competency-Based Education

Related, competency exams may be racially-biased via disparate impact. Here's that whole story, from Bill McMorris:  How the Supreme Court Created the Student Loan Bubble - It all starts with Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

Danielle Henderson spent six years and $60,000 on college and beyond. The effects of that education? Not as advertised.

What was advertised?

Walsh:  My Fellow Americans, It’s Time to Boycott College:

 Education, in the end, should be pursued for its own sake. We learn because we want to know, and knowledge is beautiful even if it isn’t ‘used.’ Now more than ever, a person can learn anything and acquire any knowledge without spending a dime or sitting for one minute in a college classroom. This is the miraculous reality of modern times. The potential for a person to educate him or herself is limitless — but we think knowledge must be strictly confined behind the walls of an official institution or it doesn’t count.

George Leef:

 “Go to the most prestigious college you can” is revealed to be bad advice. Similarly, the obsession with increasing the numbers of “underrepresented” students at top schools in the belief that this somehow improves their upward mobility (and “social justice”) looks like folly. Our selective schools, in short, are not all they’re cracked up to be and graduating from one is no guarantee of success.

That is because, Arum and Roksa maintain, our entire higher education system has pretty much succumbed to a non-academic mentality: “Educators have increasingly ceded their authority to students, and administrators have shifted institutional emphasis from students’ academic and moral development to their personal growth and well-being. Empowering and catering to students as consumers has only exacerbated these broader and deeper changes.”

An academic resume may matter socially, but after your first job it doesn't matter much for career. We wish strongly to believe that an elite "education" provides a foundation for more life enrichment and a dream-fulfilling career, but as time goes by I have my doubts. If you really care about intellectual enrichment, the Great Courses is all anybody needs.