They are still operating under the delusion that college is for learning. I went to college and work in a field related to my degree. Sure I may have learned a few things in college but I'm more likely to use something I learned working in the campus machine shop than in any class I ever took. If you go to college, it's for the piece of paper saying you finished at best. I'm not sure I could stomach a modern college though.
I too work in a field for which I went to college to study. The entire experience was disappointing at first, then infuriating, then I finally resigned to finish (after taking a 3-year break) to make my parents happy.
The disappointment came in the first year of material in classes that were 10th grade high school at best. I managed to skip algebra and go straight to calculus to the extreme surprise of my advisors who said, "everyone says they'll do that, but no-one actually does." The bookstore echoed this when I returned my algebra text I'd been forced to buy as a part of orientation. They claimed I was the first person in any staff's memory who had actually returned it. There was no set "way" to skip algebra, because it was so irregular, so they just gave me a Final with no changes. Three hours allocated to take a test that took me ~40 minutes and I scored a 98.
I am not saying all this to brag. I'm saying this to illustrate just how below my personal standards college was. I'd been training hard for 3 years in high school to "make it" and here I was, sleepwalking my way to victory. The bar wasn't low, it was below the ground.
To get money out of me, the school had 'administrative' courses with no educational value at all that were things like "how to survive your freshman year" and "learning, how do?" that I was required to take and waste time on. I attended one class each of these and took the F just to ignore them.
I managed to squeeze my way into a course that was actually in my major by leveraging the "skipped algebra" thing with faculty around the college and getting signatures to drop requirements for a junior course so I could get started. They wanted to make me wait 1.5 years before I saw the first topical classroom, but I would have actually left if they stuck to that.
Shortly, I figured out the game the school was playing. Freshman attrition was close to 60% in just the first semester and was easily 85% after the second. All of this nonsense was to get loans signed for hopeful dunces with no qualifications who would wash out immediately because they had no business being there. Technical fees, administrative fees, technology fees, 'temporary' fund to expand the football program facilities. Every charge was front-loaded on freshman with literally nothing of value given to them. Every course in the first year was bullshit taught by non-professors. The campus comfortably supported 16,000 students, and they were recruiting 12,000 freshman every year. That math don't straight. But they got their money up front. Loans were signed, payments made, kids with less than zero future were now indebted to the tune of 15-20k for that small bit of dalliance.
This post is getting crazy long so I'll stop, but, I'll simply say: I have utter distain for Universities and higher education. They should all be defunded. Their tax take keeps them in green when their service is beyond predatory. I'm glad attendance is down across the board. Kids today are catching on to the sham, I hope.
I actually did my first year at a community college and transferred to skip a lot of that Freshman BS. Even continued to take classes there occasionally and transfer them. The school did not like this, but the state had set out rules for transfer credit and since both were state public schools they couldn't do anything about it. Community college didn't care what I signed up for, if there was a requirement they would just waive it because I asked in an e-mail. I bought all my books on eBay mostly. After my first year I'd wait until two weeks in to buy a book at all to make sure they were going to use it. I worked full time the entire 6 years it took me to finish and paid as I went in cash (well, checks), and every dollar was mine to scrutinize.
Spent a lot of time fighting with them, but I knew the rules and abused them and since it was a small state school they didn't fight as much as a big name place. I had one professor tell me he'd never seen anyone play the "college game" like I did, and it was more in a way of respect as he was a pretty good guy.
Skipped Algebra too, I was always good at math anyway and I'd taken Calculus in high school. I wish I'd have tested out of English as well. That was a total joke class. I used to write my papers like midnight the night before, almost always got goot grades on them. I remember a few times they made us review each other's paper and I saw why. There was so much just technically (i.e. grammar) wrong with the paper I reviewed that just doing that was enough.
Honestly, I have disdain for most of the traditional education system in general. The core of that disdain isn't the woke-ness or CRT either. It's the way they teach and expect learning of things. It's even more confusing now it seems. I helped one of my cousins with their Algebra last year and I couldn't tell what the hell they were trying to get them to do. Some weird new method they keep making up to try to make math easy or whatever and it's convoluted. I was always the family math guru I guess and I get along really well with my cousins, so they get me to help. After like an hour I had her understanding it pretty well. Then I find out later she missed some points on a test for "doing it the wrong way." Good thing I don't live in town I might have wanted to go light that stupid math teacher up. We are talking about middle school Algebra. Simple stuff.
You can't teach math to low IQs, but you can mess up the teaching order and make the subject convoluted to reduce the understanding of the higher IQs. It's the only way equity will be reached, and it's the what they're going for.
I remember a study linked to reddit a couple of years back that bgragged about how their method is more equitable, and digging into the data it became obvious the stronger kids were doing worse.
One of my first red pills, it was around then I understood the ideology is evil, not just misguided.
As someone whose secondary and post-secondary schooling was all done in the 21st century, I can tell you the low bars and wasted freshman year wasn't status quo even 15 years ago (the fees were. University has always been a racket in that regard).
That it could change so much, so quickly should terrify everyone.
It is so terrible, I cannot even put it into words.
FWIW, “colleges” know this, and they don’t fucking care…
I even got to ask my vice chancellor, in a Zoom conference, about this, and she basically said “Too bad. If you don’t like it, perhaps you shouldn’t be here.”
And yet this is after two years of IN PERSON study, and being made to pay the exact same fees, despite it being “moved online”…
So yeah, trust me, if you thought it was bad before, it’s so much worse, since Covid…
You are absolutely correct in your comment regarding the loan/tuition scam and first-year attrition. I say this as a retired non-tenured college English teacher with 20 years experience.
On top of this, you have continually declining standards (as you also allude to) in order to accommodate . . . uh . . . less-than-bright "minority" students who mainly constitute the attrition/loan/tuition gravy train.
If I was really cynical I would argue that the dumbing-down of college curricula and the desperate attempt to have minorities enroll for the sake of "equity" is a ploy to attract more minority students who will flunk out and keep the $ pipeline flowing.
Unless it's for STEM, undergrad is pointless. The best thing you can do is to network and make connections to land a job. When I'm interviewing candidates for my staff, I give no fucks where your degree was from. I care about your work experience and if you can answer basic interview questions with actual answers.
Pretty much. Mine was engineering and even then it bought me a checkbox on a resume. My first interview way back was much more about my work experience concurrent to college than about my degree.
Just from my own observations, I feel like I'm starting to see less interest in college from people around that age. The bad thing is it's just replaced with laziness. They've been so brainwashed that they are supposed to follow their passions and dreams that when they realize it doesn't make sense they just become leeches.
A lot of students have ideas of what they want to do, but no reality.
My sister got a psych degree because she thought she wanted to be a therapist. She never volunteered at a mental health clinic or as a counselor. Unsurprisingly, she realized she didn't actually want this career, but managed to segue into a grad degree in I/O psychology and got into high level HR and is making good money now.
My cousin was the opposite. He loved mechanical stuff as a kid, always tinkering and building stuff. He ran the robotics team, got into drones and R/C. Loves flight sims. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and got a degree in aerospace engineering. Landed an internship at Lockheed and converted it to a full time position.
Most people going to college should be like my cousin, but are like my sister, except instead of finding a productive option, they become leeches, like you said. Although, it's worse than leeches since they start acting out of spite to overthrow society. Instead of burning down a Starbucks that provides jobs for low-skilled individuals, they should be beating up the teachers that failed them. Very few of our teachers are setting up kids for a realistic path in life with realistic expectations. One of my friends is a high school teacher and he's trying to set kids on the right path. He always suggests skilled trades for kids that he sees clearly can't compete in our modern "academic" environment.
Right, I was trying to convey that an undergrad degree isn't really a stopping point anymore beyond STEM. Those professions don't flaunt an undergrad degree since it's just a prerequisite unless you are doing very low-level work in that field (paralegal, tax prep, etc).
The purpose of college is to funnel money from the public to progressive activist administrators. The purpose of student loan forgiveness is to grease up the money chute.
Undergrads were for many years required to take some sort of Western Civilization / Great Books class. I don't think that's the case anymore.
I've some experience with history professors at UChicago, and I found all of the professors I dealt with fair, demanding, and high-quality. I rarely agreed with any professors politically, but they were always fair.
My guess, and my hope, is that this cancer is limited to English departments, Literature department, Cultural Anthropology, etc. They've been filled with degenerates for years.
This is the truth. Especially English. Tenured English professors constitute the main body of leftist asshats responsible for critical social justice metastasizing and escaping the ivory tower into bureaucracies everywhere. It was their careerist forays into other disciplines ("interdisciplinary studies") that led to the current situation by popularizing "critical studies."
Critical social justice is a mind virus that has infected and ruined virtually all college disciplines, with a few resistant exceptions that are on the ropes but still accommodate free thinkers (mainly history, the "hard sciences" and mathematics). However, these resistant groups are under constant assault from Diversity Departments and their Deans to comply, and the hiring process for both faculty and staff has effectively weeded out anybody who might object to seeing everything through the twisted perspective of CSJ.
Imagine taking a loan to study that shit and then pose as a doctor to write letters against Joe Rogan.
I have a bachelor in political science, had to learn the entire UN charter for one course and read like 4000 pages of Marxist theory for another, no it did not cover anarchism or black tradition. Even if you take those joke subjects seriously lubing all those topics together in a semester is retarded.
They are still operating under the delusion that college is for learning. I went to college and work in a field related to my degree. Sure I may have learned a few things in college but I'm more likely to use something I learned working in the campus machine shop than in any class I ever took. If you go to college, it's for the piece of paper saying you finished at best. I'm not sure I could stomach a modern college though.
I too work in a field for which I went to college to study. The entire experience was disappointing at first, then infuriating, then I finally resigned to finish (after taking a 3-year break) to make my parents happy.
The disappointment came in the first year of material in classes that were 10th grade high school at best. I managed to skip algebra and go straight to calculus to the extreme surprise of my advisors who said, "everyone says they'll do that, but no-one actually does." The bookstore echoed this when I returned my algebra text I'd been forced to buy as a part of orientation. They claimed I was the first person in any staff's memory who had actually returned it. There was no set "way" to skip algebra, because it was so irregular, so they just gave me a Final with no changes. Three hours allocated to take a test that took me ~40 minutes and I scored a 98.
I am not saying all this to brag. I'm saying this to illustrate just how below my personal standards college was. I'd been training hard for 3 years in high school to "make it" and here I was, sleepwalking my way to victory. The bar wasn't low, it was below the ground.
To get money out of me, the school had 'administrative' courses with no educational value at all that were things like "how to survive your freshman year" and "learning, how do?" that I was required to take and waste time on. I attended one class each of these and took the F just to ignore them.
I managed to squeeze my way into a course that was actually in my major by leveraging the "skipped algebra" thing with faculty around the college and getting signatures to drop requirements for a junior course so I could get started. They wanted to make me wait 1.5 years before I saw the first topical classroom, but I would have actually left if they stuck to that.
Shortly, I figured out the game the school was playing. Freshman attrition was close to 60% in just the first semester and was easily 85% after the second. All of this nonsense was to get loans signed for hopeful dunces with no qualifications who would wash out immediately because they had no business being there. Technical fees, administrative fees, technology fees, 'temporary' fund to expand the football program facilities. Every charge was front-loaded on freshman with literally nothing of value given to them. Every course in the first year was bullshit taught by non-professors. The campus comfortably supported 16,000 students, and they were recruiting 12,000 freshman every year. That math don't straight. But they got their money up front. Loans were signed, payments made, kids with less than zero future were now indebted to the tune of 15-20k for that small bit of dalliance.
This post is getting crazy long so I'll stop, but, I'll simply say: I have utter distain for Universities and higher education. They should all be defunded. Their tax take keeps them in green when their service is beyond predatory. I'm glad attendance is down across the board. Kids today are catching on to the sham, I hope.
I could have completely skipped my chemistry 101 and 102 classes after taking "advanced" chemistry in high school.
Yet I still had to pay for those 8 credits.
I actually did my first year at a community college and transferred to skip a lot of that Freshman BS. Even continued to take classes there occasionally and transfer them. The school did not like this, but the state had set out rules for transfer credit and since both were state public schools they couldn't do anything about it. Community college didn't care what I signed up for, if there was a requirement they would just waive it because I asked in an e-mail. I bought all my books on eBay mostly. After my first year I'd wait until two weeks in to buy a book at all to make sure they were going to use it. I worked full time the entire 6 years it took me to finish and paid as I went in cash (well, checks), and every dollar was mine to scrutinize.
Spent a lot of time fighting with them, but I knew the rules and abused them and since it was a small state school they didn't fight as much as a big name place. I had one professor tell me he'd never seen anyone play the "college game" like I did, and it was more in a way of respect as he was a pretty good guy.
Skipped Algebra too, I was always good at math anyway and I'd taken Calculus in high school. I wish I'd have tested out of English as well. That was a total joke class. I used to write my papers like midnight the night before, almost always got goot grades on them. I remember a few times they made us review each other's paper and I saw why. There was so much just technically (i.e. grammar) wrong with the paper I reviewed that just doing that was enough.
Honestly, I have disdain for most of the traditional education system in general. The core of that disdain isn't the woke-ness or CRT either. It's the way they teach and expect learning of things. It's even more confusing now it seems. I helped one of my cousins with their Algebra last year and I couldn't tell what the hell they were trying to get them to do. Some weird new method they keep making up to try to make math easy or whatever and it's convoluted. I was always the family math guru I guess and I get along really well with my cousins, so they get me to help. After like an hour I had her understanding it pretty well. Then I find out later she missed some points on a test for "doing it the wrong way." Good thing I don't live in town I might have wanted to go light that stupid math teacher up. We are talking about middle school Algebra. Simple stuff.
You can't teach math to low IQs, but you can mess up the teaching order and make the subject convoluted to reduce the understanding of the higher IQs. It's the only way equity will be reached, and it's the what they're going for.
I remember a study linked to reddit a couple of years back that bgragged about how their method is more equitable, and digging into the data it became obvious the stronger kids were doing worse.
One of my first red pills, it was around then I understood the ideology is evil, not just misguided.
Yeah, very much comes off as that. I guess equity has really always meant drag everyone down to a lower level.
As someone whose secondary and post-secondary schooling was all done in the 21st century, I can tell you the low bars and wasted freshman year wasn't status quo even 15 years ago (the fees were. University has always been a racket in that regard).
That it could change so much, so quickly should terrify everyone.
Online study is the worst thing ever…
It is so terrible, I cannot even put it into words.
FWIW, “colleges” know this, and they don’t fucking care…
I even got to ask my vice chancellor, in a Zoom conference, about this, and she basically said “Too bad. If you don’t like it, perhaps you shouldn’t be here.”
And yet this is after two years of IN PERSON study, and being made to pay the exact same fees, despite it being “moved online”…
So yeah, trust me, if you thought it was bad before, it’s so much worse, since Covid…
To clarify, this is for STEM.
Doing STEM pracs online is the fucking worst…
You were just at a college that hadn't caught up yet.
A good, solid lesson to learn: get your money up-front. And your blowjobs.
You are absolutely correct in your comment regarding the loan/tuition scam and first-year attrition. I say this as a retired non-tenured college English teacher with 20 years experience.
On top of this, you have continually declining standards (as you also allude to) in order to accommodate . . . uh . . . less-than-bright "minority" students who mainly constitute the attrition/loan/tuition gravy train.
If I was really cynical I would argue that the dumbing-down of college curricula and the desperate attempt to have minorities enroll for the sake of "equity" is a ploy to attract more minority students who will flunk out and keep the $ pipeline flowing.
College was 75% a waste of time for me. While 25% of it taught me critical thinking, otherwise I did not get much in the way of job skills.
Unless it's for STEM, undergrad is pointless. The best thing you can do is to network and make connections to land a job. When I'm interviewing candidates for my staff, I give no fucks where your degree was from. I care about your work experience and if you can answer basic interview questions with actual answers.
Pretty much. Mine was engineering and even then it bought me a checkbox on a resume. My first interview way back was much more about my work experience concurrent to college than about my degree.
Just from my own observations, I feel like I'm starting to see less interest in college from people around that age. The bad thing is it's just replaced with laziness. They've been so brainwashed that they are supposed to follow their passions and dreams that when they realize it doesn't make sense they just become leeches.
A lot of students have ideas of what they want to do, but no reality.
My sister got a psych degree because she thought she wanted to be a therapist. She never volunteered at a mental health clinic or as a counselor. Unsurprisingly, she realized she didn't actually want this career, but managed to segue into a grad degree in I/O psychology and got into high level HR and is making good money now.
My cousin was the opposite. He loved mechanical stuff as a kid, always tinkering and building stuff. He ran the robotics team, got into drones and R/C. Loves flight sims. He knew exactly what he wanted to do and got a degree in aerospace engineering. Landed an internship at Lockheed and converted it to a full time position.
Most people going to college should be like my cousin, but are like my sister, except instead of finding a productive option, they become leeches, like you said. Although, it's worse than leeches since they start acting out of spite to overthrow society. Instead of burning down a Starbucks that provides jobs for low-skilled individuals, they should be beating up the teachers that failed them. Very few of our teachers are setting up kids for a realistic path in life with realistic expectations. One of my friends is a high school teacher and he's trying to set kids on the right path. He always suggests skilled trades for kids that he sees clearly can't compete in our modern "academic" environment.
Right, I was trying to convey that an undergrad degree isn't really a stopping point anymore beyond STEM. Those professions don't flaunt an undergrad degree since it's just a prerequisite unless you are doing very low-level work in that field (paralegal, tax prep, etc).
For me It was somewhat useful but it was peanuts to the amount of things I had to learn after I got in to the workforce.
The purpose of college is to funnel money from the public to progressive activist administrators. The purpose of student loan forgiveness is to grease up the money chute.
Sad. UChicago has, for many years, been a beacon for Western thought and philosophy. See, e.g., the Great Books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
Undergrads were for many years required to take some sort of Western Civilization / Great Books class. I don't think that's the case anymore.
I've some experience with history professors at UChicago, and I found all of the professors I dealt with fair, demanding, and high-quality. I rarely agreed with any professors politically, but they were always fair.
My guess, and my hope, is that this cancer is limited to English departments, Literature department, Cultural Anthropology, etc. They've been filled with degenerates for years.
This is the truth. Especially English. Tenured English professors constitute the main body of leftist asshats responsible for critical social justice metastasizing and escaping the ivory tower into bureaucracies everywhere. It was their careerist forays into other disciplines ("interdisciplinary studies") that led to the current situation by popularizing "critical studies."
Critical social justice is a mind virus that has infected and ruined virtually all college disciplines, with a few resistant exceptions that are on the ropes but still accommodate free thinkers (mainly history, the "hard sciences" and mathematics). However, these resistant groups are under constant assault from Diversity Departments and their Deans to comply, and the hiring process for both faculty and staff has effectively weeded out anybody who might object to seeing everything through the twisted perspective of CSJ.
Imagine taking a loan to study that shit and then pose as a doctor to write letters against Joe Rogan.
I have a bachelor in political science, had to learn the entire UN charter for one course and read like 4000 pages of Marxist theory for another, no it did not cover anarchism or black tradition. Even if you take those joke subjects seriously lubing all those topics together in a semester is retarded.