Maggie's Farm

Our friend Roger asks:

Is four years at Yale (or Harvard, Princeton, or any other “competitive”  college) worth $53,000 x 4 plus annual tuition increases for a grand total (assuming you are entering right now) of roughly a quarter of a million dollars?

This is a question that, to the consternation of academic administrators, more and more parents — not to mention responsible teenagers — are asking themselves.

Yes, it is a bubble, a scam, and a rip-off. And the government subsidizes it too, adding to the problem. As it always does.

Related: Retired Prof VDH has an amusing yet penetrating rant about academics: We Are Ruled by Professors. He concludes:

So why again the above rant about academics?

We are presently governed by academics. In an era in which university people proliferate in this administration and seem to make things far worse for the rest of us, we need to be reminded why we should not look to the university for answers. What I hear coming out of Washington reminds me a lot of what I once heard coming out of the philosophy or English department. And that is a scary thing indeed.

You see, that tribe is more likely to embody the illness rather than the cure, and this time 300 million are paying the price.

Related, from Barone: The Higher Education Bubble: Ready to Burst? Quote:

Government-subsidized loans have injected money into higher education, as they did into housing, causing prices to balloon. But at some point people figure out they're not getting their money's worth, and the bubble bursts.Some think this would be a good thing. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray has called for the abolition of college for almost all students. Save it for genuine scholars, he says, and let others qualify for jobs by standardized national tests, as accountants already do.

"Is our students learning?" George W. Bush once asked, and the evidence for colleges points to no. The National Center for Education Statistics found that most college graduates are below proficiency in verbal and quantitative literacy. University of California scholars Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report that students these days study an average of 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours in 1961.

The American Council of Alumni and Trustees concluded, after a survey of 714 colleges and universities, "by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum."

They aren't taught the basics of literature, history or science. ACTA reports that most schools don't require a foreign language, hardly any require economics, American history and government "are badly neglected," and schools "have much to do" on math and science.

ACTA's whatwilltheylearn.com Website provides the grisly details for each school, together with the amount of tuition. Students and parents can see if they will get their money's worth.

The daughter of a friend, who I spoke with in August, will be a college Freshman about now. She complained to me about being required to take Algebra in college. "I don't do math," she said.

"I don't do windows." Guess what? I do windows whenever She Who Must Be Obeyed asks me to.

Cornell today?

One student is quoted as saying, "I wish my classes were more supportive instead of being so difficult."

Houston, we have a problem. Somehow along the way the kids got the idea that higher edumacation was a Montessori nursery school.

Students Who Don't Study - Evidence shows that college students put in less and less time on coursework but receive higher grades.

Allitt begins:

American discussions of education often veer over into utopian fantasy, and one of the commonest delusions is that nearly every young person wants to be educated. The reality is quite different. 

Nearly every young person wants the qualifications that offer access to well paid work, and will do as much as it takes to get them.  But most youngsters do not care deeply about education for its own sake, especially if getting it requires long hours of solitary, disciplined study.  Learning is hard, often joyless, and for centuries was understood to be so alien to youngsters’ inclinations that it had to be reinforced with frequent beatings. 

Now we indulge the idea that not just basic literacy but a high level of formal education is for everyone, and that they will appreciate it.

This is sort of brilliant, at Phi Beta Cons. Want to learn Math? Hire a Math teacher. 

A review of E.D. Hirsch's new book, The Making of an Educational Conservative, at Claremont. Hirsch is politically liberal, but he believes that people should know things. One quote from the review:

Hirsch holds out too much hope of converting the Left while not welcoming his natural supporters on the Right. He underestimates the education establishment's fear and hostility towards knowledge and rigor, presenting the past "sixty years without a curriculum" as a well-meaning and forgivable misunderstanding. But Progressive education must be understood as an anti-teaching movement as much as an anti-curriculum movement. Anyone who suggests American education should be different from what it is now is subject to merciless attack by those who claim they would teach children even if they didn't get paid, while their unions push one demand: higher salaries for less work.

It is happening. A good thing, indeed. Monopolies are bad policy, especially government monopolies. Monopolies do not respond to market demand.

However, I am an extremist. I do not believe in government education in any form. We did better before we had any of that. See John Adams and Abe Lincoln...

As I repeat ad nauseum, education cannot be "delivered." It can only be grabbed by those who wish to grab it. I also believe Harvard or Yale (your choice) diplomas should be an entitlement for all American kids on reaching age 21. Like the Wizard of Oz did.

Let's face it: How many Ivy grads know Fermat's last theorem, today? Or can translate Caesar or Plutarch? The education industry today is a giant rip-off and nothing more than a credential sales scam.

Would you, as an employer, hire a grad who majored in "Women's Studies"?

I interview for our firm, and I certainly never would do so. For Members Only: Feminism on Campus Today

Marginally, maybe. Maybe, from being around curious, achievement-oriented, high IQ peers. From that, one might become competitive, inspired, and humbled - if one were not lucky enough to have those qualities in the first place.

Truth is, as I say here ad nauseum, that we don't know what "education" means beyond readin, ritin and rithmatic. A college degree can mean anything and nothing because becoming aware of the world and the world of the past, and the stories and the ideas of the past, cannot be fed. It must be taken. All edumacation is self-edumacation.

I think America would be better off if you could buy an Ivy League diploma online for $39.99 after answering a few questions about calculus, Julius Caesar, and Leonardo.

The Egalitarian Craze.

From a discussion about the current education of men in America at Chicago Boyz:

Boy/men seem not to be dropping out to “do” something but dropping out to do even less. The number of young marriages in which not only is the wife the breadwinner but the husband isn’t even taking care of children is increasing. These often dissolve – perhaps because women are too conventional to respect a mate who plays video games all day while they work or perhaps because women want children of their own rather than merely a needy husband. (No, I’m not going to diss a stay-at-home dad – I’m sure it is a useful choice; but many are childless marriages. Few women are at home for the years pre-baby.) And we should at least recognize that a woman does offer something in terms of child-bearing and child-nursing a man doesn’t. Besides, I don’t see choices – I see drift.

Like I always say, most men were made just for fishin, huntin, and lovin.

Addendum, from a post by AVI:

I started opining 20 years ago that feminist resentment was largely driven by women who had followed the directions and played by the rules, excelling in school - which was considered the automatic qualifier to success. We were all told To get a good job, get a good education, not just the girls. Then they left school and found that there were other, less-familiar laws of the marketplace which had seldom been mentioned. Heck, I felt the same way. Those boys and young men they had beaten, beaten fair and square at school, were finding all these other routes to success.

From the Pope Center (h/t, Doug Ross):

Our study of the University of Michigan, for example, found that in 2005 an in-state male with no parent ties to the school, a 1240 cumulative SAT, and 3.2 high-school grade-point average had a 92 percent chance of admission if black and an 88 percent chance if Latino – but only a 14 percent chance if white and a mere 10 percent chance if Asian.  Our study of six North Carolina schools – North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina campuses at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington – found the same pattern. 

We have been promoting the documentary The Lottery. I see that the WSJ covers it: Storming the School Barricades - A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.

Another one on the same topic coming out in the fall, Waiting for Superman.

It's a movement! People want choice, not government monopolies.

Weissberg: How Universities Breed Dependency.

Modern universities are providing a failure-free existence that eliminates an important component of a free society: self-reliance.

Charter School vs. Teachers Union School.

Imagine what might happen if we just had vouchers to go anywhere for primary education, as they have in Sweden.

I have attempted to make the case for that fact many times here. Among other data, a post with the above title offers this:

“of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree.”

"...four-year institutions of higher education (IHEs) graduate less than 60 percent of their students in six years..."

So what? Given how lax American higher ed has become in requirements and expectations, I am surprised it's below 60%. Apparently, historically, American graduation rates have never been very high.

Quickest way to increase grad rates would be to simply sell degrees, or to hand them out for free like the Wizard of Oz.

Now I do realize that a "college degree" no longer necessarily means a Liberal Arts degree as proof that one has mastered a language or two, calculus, sciences, masterworks of philosophy, theology, and literature, etc: many colleges today entail various combinations of remedial education, high-school level coursework, and job training. Flunking out is a thing of the past, so lots of folks must just figure it's not worth the trouble. They could be right.

Genius Stanford educational experts started a charter school. Their ideas didn't work.

But will they learn anything from their experience?

I continue to believe that the average schoolkid learned more in the US in 1830 in one-room schoolhouses with hornbooks and the teacher armed with a good paddle, with the teacher supported by donations either in kind (eg firewood, or housing a teacher or providing him or her food) or in cash, by the parents of the kids who ran, and paid for, their school. 

And don't tell me "it's a more complicated world" now. It is not. Try training a horse, building a barn, making a living on a farm, making a winter coat from a couple of sheep, or smithing every iron item a family might need. Life is easier now. We don't even need to make our own beer, and 99.9% of us do not even understand how computers work. Including me.

Readin', writin', and 'rithmetic haven't changed one bit since then.

Is school supposed to be therapy?

Is therapy supposed to be a propagandizing school?

Crazy world.

"In the year 2000, American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA, was one of the worst-performing middle schools in the state."

So what happened?

At Am Thinker. Readers know how I feel: I want the Feds out of education. Should be a local thing, in the hands of the local taxpayers. 

Teaching should be a calling, not a government-unionized sinecure. What sorts of preachers would you get if you had unionized, government-employed preachers?

Or, for that matter, doctors?