Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Bullshit! My Upline IBO is a Q-12 and told me that I should have no problem unloading these Nutriline Supplements. By the way, can I interest you in these Nutriline Supplements?

The comment thread over there is a real horror show.

One of the better points raised is the effect of class on the outcome. 3rd basers tend to conveniently miss those effects.

Low income students
- often have to work part-time during the year in order to afford a half-decent living standard, even after loans and/or scholarships & grants
- cannot game the system by dropping tons of courses where they do badly and avoiding the hit to their GPA
- cannot game the GPA by doing 5 years of school or summer school so that they have lower workloads
- do not have professor/helicopter parents who will proofread their essays and intervene on their behalf
- cannot afford tutors
- cannot afford to pay people to write their essays for them
- lack the social know-how/class signalling resources to get in their prof's good books
- cannot afford to take unpaid internships in the summer/after graduation
- cannot afford to sit around after graduation and wait for the right job opening

For upper class students, college is just studying vs. partying, with all those pesky real-life problems being handled by the parents. They have a tendency to think that that everyone in college was in the same situation. If you didn't study enough, then obviously you must have partied too much, right? Work? Living costs? Debt? Not part of the equation for them, so they continue to believe that credentialing is always a great idea.

The system is undoubtedly in very big trouble. The main trend right now is not only rising enrollments, but also down-shifting into the state schools by the second basers.

My own formerly working-class commuter "university," erstwhile flunk-out locale for Courtney Love, just jacked its in-state tuition by 13% to nearly $7,000. Job prospects at the other end? Worse than ever. Nonetheless, enrollment is at a record high.

Faculty attitudes toward the approaching implosion make Chamberlain's trip to Munich look hardcore. Of course.

If the society had enough real wealth left, it might all just be another advance in the process of warehousing the structurally unemployed, as predicted by Harry Braverman circa 1974. But the K-12 part of that phenomenon is free to the warehousees, not financed through banks and Sallie Mae.

Y'know, in principle, I have to agree with Smiff on the current status of this country's colleges and universities as credentialing factories. Still, there's something vaguely alarming and depressing about the fact that so many jobs requiring a modicum of higher education have been lost and those remaining won't require a degree, and that high-school kids who want to do something with their lives more important than shit-shoveling for a living are being priced out of any opportunity for a decent college education.

Granted, I was largely self-taught and already had a fair amount of talent and inspiration before I went off to art school; and, yes, I wouldn't have been alone had I chosen to be a self-taught artist, but, still -- it would've been far more difficult, and taken much longer to become as good as I am at what I do had I not been able to obtain a college-level education in art and design.

Oh, and for the record, I spent my first year after finishing art school working in an electronic components plant, assembling keyboards for computerized cash registers and IBM PC Jr's (back when this country manufactured something besides terrorist threats, war news and the consent of the governed). That's right, nearly a full year before I actually scored my first graphic design job. That's where I think the Inside Higher Education article gets a bit whiny -- they obviously seem to be reporting on all those kids with a ridiculously inflated sense of entitlement who thought they were going to walk straight out of their MBA program or law school and into the cushy gig, the spiffy condo and the BMW.

"back when this country manufactured something besides terrorist threats, war news and the consent of the governed"

hitting way way above your weight
with that phrase lugnock
but comparing art school to liberal arts college is like comparing cooking to eating
obviously you aquired a marketable skill
and yet i suspect art programs over produce
credentials too
just like all the rest of the hoprses
in mr higher eds stable

merit challenged in the halls of merit

i guess that and the local tavern
are both safe places
to strip off the robes
for a moment
god forbid a politician try spouting this stuff on the hustings

close state u its a scam turn it into
a casino/prison

Mike F -- There's a useful distinction between learning and schooling. Not to mention credentialling.

Like you, I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had to learn stuff. There's been lots of it over the years, and I've been fortunate enough to enjoy most of it -- at least, after I escaped from high school; that's when I no longer had to study anything I didn't want to study.

Some of my learning was in school, some of it wasn't. Some of it was remunerative, some of it probably made me less employable than I was before.

It's not hard to imagine ways of making it possible for people to learn about stuff they like, or learn about stuff that will be useful to them, without all this bloated top-heavy apparatus of grading and selecting and testing and degree-ing.

And we certainly don't think the problem starts in college, do we? K-12 is just as fucked up, though for mostly different mid-level reasons.

The overarching big reason, though, and the one that makes me less than enthusiastic about the Illichian school-bashing tradition on the left, is that our overclass hates and fears and labors tirelessly to stymie true education. Have schools been given a full and fair chance to show what they could do? I think not.

Personally speaking, I think the entire school system ought to be radically re-launched, and that farming, building, and ecology ought to be right at the core of it all.

farming, building, and ecology ought to be right at the core of it all.

Wackford Squeers applauds this suggestion.

Thus MD:

Have schools been given a full and fair chance to show what they could do?

our overclass hates and fears and labors tirelessly to stymie true education.

I know you've spent a lot of time and effort trying to stem that tide, and I honor you for it, and I agree that if they could be re-founded on some altogether different basis, then....

But as matters stand it sounds to me like a project to reform the CIA. Our actually existing educational institutions have at their core an unshakable commitment to a deeply destructive project, and if I had to sum that project up in one word, it would be "meritocracy."

As a mid70's suburban grad of a public high school I found out in the Army that I had not a clue about the world and the people inhabiting it. My three years of military service, no war time duty, taught much more than my k-12 or subsequent college and law school experience.

Seems to me that the last few decades have increased the number of jobs that somehow cannot be done without paying out the bucks for college; that the endless mantra of back to school, back to school for youuuuu... is just a not-very-sophisticated scam in which employers can readily thin their pool of applicants with minimal effort while placing as much of the burden for actual job training squarely on the shoulders of employees themselves.

I especially love that there are college courses in medical billing. Great. Learn to aid and abet insurance companies while they relentlessly treating people of one's own class like shit and pocket billions in the process-- between their gigs of buying yachts and Congresscritters. (I met a sister temp not long ago who was trying to pay off her college debt from one of these job mills. According to her, the nice White ladies at StarMedBillingBucks, LTD didn't like her funny skin color and funny accent and made it their business to undermine her constantly until she got canned. Hey, I wouldn't be surprised if that were at least partially true. I knew some pretty nasty characters in my bureaucrat days. To be fair, they did come in a rainbow of colors.)

I think I'd sooner work in a fucking slaughterhouse mopping blood off the floor, but these days you probably need at least a two-year degree for that shit, too.

haunch hacking 101

mop the glop 202
---blood and guts--

if only the ivy league taught
such useful stuff

Schiff gets it about right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DteBlI2eihA

Schiff?! He's pitching a crude hack's understanding of Austrian economics. He's a moron, if he's sincere, and a charlatan whether he's sincere or not. To say he get it about right on education is like saying Mussolini brought a good understanding of labor issues to his work as Il Duce.

That said, I hope he wins the election. I feel more comfortable when liberals are in a constant state of panic.