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Too Many College Graduates?
The AP reports on a growing sense among policy wonks that too many Americans are going to four-year colleges, to the detriment of society as a whole: "The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows." "The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts, and academics. They say more Americans should consider other options, such as technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades. As evidence, experts cite rising student debt, stagnant graduation rates, and a struggling job market flooded with overqualified degree-holders. ... The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200 — a nearly $5,000 increase over five years. Two-thirds of students graduating from four-year schools owe money on student loans. ... [A university economist said,] 'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.'"
Using his example, you don't need to know anything about math, science, literature, etc, to cut down trees.
You need to know what they train you to do on the job. Therefore, an elementary student graduate could do the job, short of the physical requirements. So make him a dish washer until he's big enough to work a chain saw.
Nope, this isn't a slippery slope...
This guy is forgetting that we live in a (sort of) democracy. How would a democracy where the people aren't educated work?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The problem isn't that there are too many college graduates. The problem is that too much manufacturing that was formerly done in America is now done elsewhere, in third-world nations like China, Mexico and India.
In the past, domestic manufacturing provided the solid foundation upon which the strong American economy was built. People made good wages working in these factories, engineers made good wages designing these factories and the equipment within them, builders made good wages constructing the factories, skilled-trades made good wages making the equipment within these factories, and all of these people provided jobs to many others in the community.
Thanks mainly to Nixon in the 1970s and NAFTA in the 1990s, those jobs are gone. The foundation they provided is gone. They probably won't come back unless the federal government does the right thing and impose trade barriers against nations that have an oversupply of labor, and unsafe working conditions, and unsuitable wages.
Not everything needs a 4 year degree.
If you are going into a science based field you will need a degree.
Entrepreneur business school might help but it is not necessary.
Blue Collar, tech school can give you a head start.
CS/IT I have see excellent folks with nothing and really crappy folks with a PHD.
Ultimately it is what you make of your life experience.
... more uneducated people. Because this country is just too damn smart. We need to dumb it down a little...
Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive. Harvard is about thirty thousand dollars for an undergraduate degree whereas Cambridge is about three thousand Stirling.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
Public university is flooded with students who don't care at all about the subjects they are studying; they are in school either because it is expected of them by society or because they want to socialize with people their age for years.
From an economic standpoint, it is absolutely wasteful for these kids to fudge their way through to a BA in Communication or whatever. I've known too many of them. It makes a mockery of academia.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades."
Telling Americans to do something because Europe's been doing it is a lot like telling a 5-year-old not to go near the cookie jar.
Education and money are very much alike in one aspect: if everyone has at least the same amount, then that amount becomes the baseline, below which it is worthless.
College degrees being required for plumbing jobs and the like are only the symptom of this problem.
Whereas before education was made mandatory in most countries of the world, the baseline was no education at all, now the United States have college as a baseline. And it's rather difficult to get out of this, because you ask someone in college why they're in college and they'll say, "I must, because I can't afford to not keep up with my peers." So people go to college because people go to college, and it's a recursive clusterfuck.
Where are these technical schools that the economists refer to?
The simple fact of the matter is that after decades of short sighted budget cuts, the US education system is geared for college prep, whether you want to go or not. The vocational classes have been slowly cut out of the system, usually perceived as expendable programs. School administrators realized long ago that they can't improve the ranking of their school by having the best automotive class - the only thing that counts is English & Math scores, so why bother fund anything else?
In other countries, you make a choice on whether you choose to learn a trade or go to college, and then spend your high school years towards that goal. The repercussion for the US system is that students who are interested in a trade aren't being educated towards their dreams, and spend their time in school either frustrated or years behind.
The whole concept of "No Child Left Behind" only works when there is an unlimited budget, and it presses everyone to a standardized education that may not actually help serve them towards what they really want to do in life. Instead of trying to get every child the same cookie cutter education, we'd be far better off giving more specialized education (whether it's vocational or college prep) by the high school level, help them take advantage of the skills they have, remove the blue collar stigma of trade work, and stop trying to make every kid be a perfect college graduate that the state wants them to be.
Are these the same economists that didn't see the tech or housing bubble? The same ones who thought sub-primes were contained and wouldn't spread to the rest of the economy. Perhaps they are the ones that have America's debt rated AAA.
What happened to the new deal from shit for brains?
Exactly.
And with limits on education, you get limits on job opportunities. Fine, as long as it it the person who chooses such.
If it is someone else who is already making decent money at a decent job arguing that too many people are advancing their educations ... fuck you. With a chainsaw.
I got a job as a software developer at a large Fortune 500 company about a year ago. It's more or less a financial institution, but the need for software developers is high. In this company, developers are treated more like business partners rather than IT grunts, and that's mostly due to the fact that we are so influential in determining how the business is run. Even though we primarily develop software, we have to know the business in and out in order to function.
With that said, I have a 4-year degree in Computer Science. Having the degree was definitely key to getting a job in my case, since I was a raw graduate when they hired me. However, I've learned that experience in the field is by far the preferred rating factor. There are guys on my team working along side me who have 4-year degrees in Business Management and even English, but they happened to gain some (5+ years) programming experience somewhere along the way. There's also a new guy who got his 2-year degree from a local community college. That's okay, but his real selling point was the amount of experience he had, which he gained while I was finishing up the other half of my education.
In a way, this annoys me, because I'd really like to think that my degree choice sets me apart from people who made different choices. I guess if I chose to work for an actual software business or found a job that utilized more advanced CS techniques, I might have the upper hand. However, in the real world where software usually plays a support role, I have to come to terms with my place in the business world. In another respect, the possibility of gaining experience in another field and being able to potentially change career paths without getting a new degree (within reason) is a rather freeing thought.
The vast majority of college attending individuals are there because they have been told that the only way to successful employment is to become a college graduate. The fatal flaw in the logic is that when everyone has a degree, the degree no longer holds any prestige over any other job candidates. You are, again, competing against everyone else.
People need to stop equating education with employment. If you are honestly interested in a subject and feel academia is the only route to fulfil your desires, by all means, please do peruse further education in that area of study. If getting a great job is your goal, however, college is not the place to achieve that. The time would be better spent learning what it takes to get the job you desire.
College is the new high school. So much so that colleges are bending over backwards to allow entry to the dumbest among us. My University's Math department had a Math 001 course for preparation to take Algebra courses (001 taught basic math like fractions). But apparently 001 was too hard for some high school graduates; a Math010 course was developed to teach things like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In &$#%#%*ing college!
Combine that with some HR mandates that college degrees are required for anything above minimum wage, and you've got a perfect storm for devaluing a B.S. or B.A. An Associates degree is already worthless; it says "I went to college, but dropped out after it got too hard."
Telling Americans to do something because Europe's been doing it is a lot like telling a 5-year-old not to go near the cookie jar.
I think you meant something more like:
Telling Americans to do something because Europe's been doing it is a lot like saying "But mom! All the cool kids ARE jumping off the bridge!"
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Employers started raising the bar on a living wage a long time ago. From "high school diploma" to "some college" and now "four year degree" are bare minimums just to get the resume past HR into the manager's hands. Hell, we just hired people with four year degrees into operator apprentice slots. I know a professional welder working on a BA on the side just so that he can't be fired for NOT having a degree.
And all that debt, gee employers really LOVE them some college debt. They know their new hires won't be striking out on their own to compete with them anytime soon. Same logic for why Silicon Valley corps love them their H1-Bs.
You want two-year schools to come back, find some freaking employers willing to hire the graduates.
I always felt that education was the goal of a society, not a mean to achieve a good economy. I always felt Universities should teach you what a field is, not train you to get a job. Optimizing the economy IS NOT what a society wants. If it was the primary goal, we would never have abolish slavery.
I also strongly disagree with his point and I'll explain why: If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things. It seems to me that after starting off with a promising few centuries, the USA has suddenly decided that the guiding principle of its society should be maintenance of the status quo, rather than progress.
Of course maintaining the status quo doesn't work when the rest of the world is forging ahead. In practice it translates into falling behind. If basic needs are being met (which they are), then surplus capacity should be directed. This guy's argument is that capacity should be reduced for the sake of preserving the existing wealth distribution as it is.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I'm a big proponent of not forcing people through college. The problem is the lack of economic diversity now.
Think about this from a historical perspective:
And oh yeah, every job above service-level requires a bachelors' degree now. So the office receptionist needs a degree in communications, and the HVAC guy needs a degree in engineering.
This really is the dirty little secret of globalization. Some people just are NOT built for further study. There is a normal distribution of IQ. These people can often do a great job as a general contractor, skilled tradesman, etc. Instead, we force-feed everyone into the white collar world. It makes no sense. And for those who really do want the life experience, and are built for further study, they either have to deal with lower-skilled peers holding up college classes, or go to a private school and rack up mountains of debt for no guaranteed payoff.
I really think our leaders need to take a step back and see that a country that can do nothing but manage projects and do other white collar tasks isn't healthy. I'm in the IT field, and I'm decent at what I do. But I also realized as I was getting my degree that I wasn't sailing through the material like my peers. Every grade I got, I worked hard for. Maybe 50 years ago, I would have been better off taking on an electrician's apprenticeship or something similar. Bottom line is that the lopsided economy we have is not good for society, and everyone's addicted to cheap labor, so there's not much to do about it.
Like you state, too many don't care about what they are studying, they are there because that is "what" they are supposed to do.
However, far too many colleges are there to make money, and scads of it. Hence the push for new lending programs because this allows the to inflate their fees. Whether to build new facilities named after people they like or too keep themselves fat and happy in retirement. I would go so far to say that many colleges don't care what the students study either, just as long as they are there paying the fees. Hell, look at the racket that is course books.
Too many degrees cost more than they can reasonably pay off in short order, by short I mean, less than five years. Sure medical professions if take to their furthest points pay off, but its not like TV, go to school four to six years and be the hero. Marketing drives more to college than need.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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We don't need any lumberjacks, sanitation workers, or construction workers. In our new post-productive society, everybody gets to be whatever they want! There are no crappy jobs that need to be done. Everyone is qualified to be a surgeon. Everyone gets to be president. We don't need our garbage picked up.
Look, we tell our children and ourselves that in America, anyone can be whatever they want to be. What did we expect would happen? Some jobs get no respect and shitty pay, despite the fact that they absolutely need to get done. Because, you know, once you've figured out that there isn't really a career in art history, you still need to pay off those college loans. Looks like the DOT is hiring road crews!
Why can't we admit that not everyone gets to be a fashion model, a football star, or a CEO? Why do we emphasize the importance of some jobs, like advertising executive or investment banker, that add nothing of real value to humanity, while denigrating those who pick up our trash? I mean, is my day going to suck if I don't get to see any catchy ads? Probably not, but I've been around a garbage workers strike, and that shit ain't pretty.
We overvalue positions of leadership and expertise, while lying that everyone could do those jobs. And tons of unqualified people rush to fill those jobs, because they were told they could, and that those jobs were more important than hauling garbage. But let's face it: most people don't have what it takes to become a surgeon or a CEO. Does that mean they are worthless? No. It takes all kinds of work to make a complex society run. We should not overvalue certain jobs and undervalue others, because that creates societal inefficiencies where we have too many people trying for the fun, high paying, well respected jobs. And meanwhile, the people actually doing the crucial dirty work get shit on by society.
No marketing drone is worth hundreds or thousands of times what a sewer worker is worth. Yet our society says they are. If we have too many people going to university, maybe the answer isn't to say, "Hey, realistically most of you are fucking plebes who will never work in whatever you majored in. You should practice your table-waiting and ditch digging instead." Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected. I respect a dishwasher who works hard and does a good job more than I respect a CEO who golfs all the time and takes credit for his underlings hard work. But society says this privileged douchebag is worth thousands of times more than the guy who washes dishes. So what do we expect people to do? Everyone wants to be that pampered and privileged CEO, nobody wants to build bridges and roads. And so we have Wall Street profiting while the economy crumbles, and meanwhile, most of our infrastructure is falling apart.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Things that are making college degrees less valuable, and therefore necessary for an even wider range of jobs:
1. High school degrees are now worthless. "Bill showed up for four years."
2. Affirmative action. "Even though Jake got a 950 on his SAT, he can go to Harvard."
3. Grade inflation. "We wanted Suzy to feel on par with her classmates, so the lowest anyone can get is a B."
4. Politicization. "If you want an A in English Literature with Dr. Rosenberg, you'd better write about feminist theories of hermeneutics."
5. Dumbing down. "The staff decided it's too hard to code up a parser on a 64k Apple II, so we're going to start you off on Logo for Windows 7."
Thanks to the feelgood policies of the 1970s, every precious snowflake feels entitled for just showing up. Schools have responded by making sure everyone has a place. The result: college degrees are no longer worth much, since they're easy to get.
Rarity of college degree = value of college degree
It's like having $100. If you give everyone in America an extra $100, the value of your $100 declines because there's more money floating around.
Futurist Traditionalism
Which is why CS majors also need credits in the humanities and why art majors need credits in math.
That second bit isn't really true. One of my exit courses for my CS degree was a communication class. It was taught by an English graduate student who didn't know that a nanosecond was a measure of time. I don't have a problem with technical degrees having liberal arts coursework as a requirement, but I'd like to see the liberal arts students take as many math/science classes as I had to take liberal arts classes.
A friend of mine dual majored in Philosophy and Political Science, and he never took any math classes at the university, and only one science course. And the science course was optional.
Learn something new.
I think it's a great idea to take a year off after high school and work as a welder if you feel like it.
But I also think college is a great mind-expanding experience, and that everyone should have the opportunity to go to a 4-year college if (and when) they feel like it too. How good a welder can you be if you don't understand basic physics and chemistry? What happens when the welding jobs disappear (as they did in Germany)? What happens when she gets tired of welding?
And everybody should go to a 4-year college without going into debt. Talk about the road to serfdom. $20,000 in debt that you can never discharge in bankruptcy, and that will accumulate exhorbitant interest for years, sounds like serfdom to me.
Up to the 1970s, America used to be a land of opportunity. Free access to college education was a big part of that. Now America is turning into a two-class society. http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15908469 People in the middle will move up or down, and most of them will move down.
Traditionally, a college degree has been the way out of poverty, and the great equalizer. If these economists have data that it doesn't work that way any more, I'll look at it carefully. That's what I learned how to do in my 4-year college. But I wouldn't accept a major reversal of a long-established social goal based on a couple of associational studies.
We just spent $3 trillion on the war in Iraq (according to Nobel-prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz). That's about $10,000 for every American. So we can certainly afford to spend $20,000 or so for a college education for anybody who is capable of it. And the rich are doing extremely well. We can tax the rich to pay for the poor. There's more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is vote.
If you're middle-class in America today, you're taking a crap shoot, according to The Economist. You might move up. And you might move down. In the European social democracies, you don't have that risk of moving down.
In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy committed us to the goals of sending a man to the moon and eliminating poverty. We sent a man to the moon but we didn't eliminate poverty. There's no excuse for that. The Scandinavian countries have basically eliminated poverty. We have whole cities where people can't get out of poverty. If you don't want to just transfer a lot of money from the rich to the poor, the other way to eliminate poverty is to give everyone a good education, and a free college education is a centerpiece of that.
These economists are trying to talk us into giving up on the goal of eliminating poverty and educating our population the way the wealthy European nations do. I don't buy it.
I'm in the same boat as you fellow Captain. I find however that the issue is employers seeming to THINK that Highschool isn't enough when it really is. Browsing the job market I see 75% of jobs requesting bachelors (of anything) or greater can be accomplished by two weeks of in-house training and a grade 10 education. The problem isn't that we have too many degrees saturating the market, its that every employer feels their entitled to request only those qualifications for their position when not required.
Telling an American to do something because Europe's been doing it is like telling a Toyota to stop because you hit the brake?
The article is of dubious value, but you have some interesting points. I don't think we suffer from an "Overabundance of qualified, educated people". I'm risking getting blasted here, BUT, I think we have an overabundance of mediocre people with a degree. The difference is that we're producing fewer and fewer people with degrees in science and technology fields and more people with degrees which have little direct applicability in the workforce. Further, we're "forcing" people into 4 year programs who have more potential in vocational-type programs.
And I'm NOT being condescending regarding vocational programs. There's talent, skill, and dedication required for those jobs which I do NOT possess. I am a menace with any kind of carpentry tool and when doing anything an electrician probably should have touched live wires (120v, thankfully) more often than I'd like to remember.
But I absolutely agree with your point that we're falling behind in the US. We've been content to let other people do the "hard work" and encouraged many of our smartest and most talented people to pursue "quick-and-easy" money in areas like the financial industry to the ultimate detriment of other industries. This is anecdotal to a degree, but as a hiring manager, it was VERY difficult to find people of reasonable intelligence and talent. A friend who's a recruiter runs into similar problems finding programmers in SF for the rates companies are willing to pay. Yes, the bay area is expensive, but the salaries offered were reasonable for what I considered mid-tier and lower-end senior folks. The company was very flexible (including allowing varying degrees of remote work). Still he has a tremendous ongoing challenge to find, and place (before they get snatched) good people
The bottom line is that we need to encourage people to get education in areas where they can succeed AND which are in demand by the market. If someone wants to get a degree in a field not in demand, that's their business, but I don't think merely "getting a degree" should be the end goal nor encouraged.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
I say this as a business owner with no education over a GED (tech solutions consulting firm). My job postings always ask for experience or demonstrated knowledge, never a degree.
4. Politicization. "If you want an A in English Literature with Dr. Rosenberg, you'd better write about feminist theories of hermeneutics."
Actually, there's a valuable lesson to be learned from that situation. Specifically, at some point in your life you're going to have a boss who gives you a task you don't like and tells you to do it in a way you don't want to. Suck it up and do it well anyway.
-and-
So why did you spend 2 years avoiding the money being doled out?
And student loans are designed to be repaid. That's not being "doled out".
I think too many people are confused between "money for education that does NOT have to be repaid" and "money for education that DOES have to be repaid).
I must be in the minority in America, because I never took an IQ test, and I only know of a few who had. My experience in American education: all students are encouraged to go to university. A majority either don't go or realize it's not for them within the first couple years. Of who's left, the majority realize it was a waste of their time. I could be off base though.
In the US, that same selection process happens all right, but instead of being tied to the child's ability to pass exams it's tied to the child's parent's ability to pay for the child's education.
It also starts much younger than you think, because the child of wealthy parents will be in a top-notch pre-school that provides that child with a good grounding in basic language and mathematical skills, whereas the child of poor parents will most likely be in a low-quality day care that does little more than keep the kids from dying while the parent(s) work. Even of those children end up going to exactly the same public school system (unlikely - wealthier kids live in wealthier school districts and thus get better school systems), the rich kid will be starting about 1-2 years ahead of the poor kid. His academic ability will be recognized quickly, and as a result they will be tracked into gifted-and-talented programs as quickly as possible, so that by the time he's in 6th grade he's about 3-4 years head of his typical poorer counterpart.
By the time you get into high school, poorer kids who have demonstrated real academic talent are consistently tracked lower than rich kids who are good students but not particularly outstanding. And for the other poor kids, they are either encouraged to go to vocational schools, or (much more likely) ignored until they drop out of school.
I am officially gone from
The only thing we have a dearth of is free time. Instead of focusing on making more, lets take the time we would have used to produce excess and enjoy life instead. If we have too many people and not enough work, distribute the work around equitably. We could all work 20 hour weeks if our society weren't so focused on production as the only measure of value.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
IQ tests may not be perfect, but who is to blame for that?
If a system is imperfect the correct attitude would be to try to improve it. Unfortunately no one dares to try to improve IQ tests for the fear that there could be intrinsic limitations on some people's intelligence.
Let's face it, people do have limitations. I'm too short to play volleyball or basketball, too skinny to play football, too clumsy to play baseball. Why should we deny that some people are too stupid to go to college, even if they get sports scholarships?
That article is worth a read. The elephant in the room is that real income per hour worked in the US peaked in 1973. Real income per capita doubled from 1947 to 1973; it's only gone up 20% since then, and that gain is only because there are more two-income families and longer hours.
Think about that. All the progress since 1973, and there's no payoff. Nobody talks about that much. Until the 1970s, annual improvements in per-capital real median income were trumpeted in the press. Today, it's tough to find those numbers in Department of Labor tables.
Until the 1980s, the US had very few homeless people. Now that's accepted as normal.
There's an illusion that things are getting better, because one of the classic measures is whether income is increasing for an individual. Income increases with age, but today's thirtysomething makes less than the thirtysomething of twenty years ago.
So doing better with your life requires getting ahead of someone else. That's where a college education comes in. It's not so much the useful skills; it's a product differentiator for people.
Many, many people have the talent for running a business successfully, but no capital and therefore, no chance to prove it. The illusion that running a business takes some kind of special genius is a self serving illusion perpetuated by the people who run businesses. You know why so many businesses fail? Because shitheads with no skills, no brains, but plenty of good old fashioned daddy-money are the ones who get to start businesses. It's got nothing to do with how hard it is.
In the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain, they have a 90% startup success rate, because everyone is encouraged to start a cooperative, and they are given all the help they need, from cooperative lending, to cooperative staffing, to cooperative business planning. It's not hard. Anyone can do it. Only in capitalist societies where the barrier to entry is set so high only the rich can start a business do we see the reverse, with the majority of startups failing. It's not that rich people are idiots, or even less intelligent than average. It's just that they believe their own lies, and you can't be that delusional and function well.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I wasn't going to comment in this thread - I really wasn't, but I couldn't ignore this.
I've studied enough economics that, well, my college education can debunk this right away. ;)
Supply and demand. Let's say "no one wants to pick up garbage". What you're saying is that "no one wants to pick up garbage at such a low pay rate and no respect". (Actually, the truth is, *really* - no one wants to pick up garbage, not even the guys that do it, but that's besides the point...)
Trash company suddenly can't find anyone to pick up trash at the rate they're asking. What do they do? Well - they could go out recruiting (unlikely), or they could up the pay rate. Cycle continues until either the trash company goes out of business, or they find someone willing to work at that pay rate. If enough people are working at the higher pay rate, if the trash company can't turn a profit, they will raise the rate of what they charge their customers. If customers switch trash companies as a result, that one might go out of business, but someone else will step in - the cycle continues. Actually, we're describing rudimentary inflation to an end - but the basic point is this: society won't collapse from too many well-educated people. Sure, I like to work in my field of choice, but at the end of the day I kind of like to eat, have clothes on my back, and a roof over my head. Push comes to shove, even I would go pick up trash if I had to in order to make ends meet. Would I be happy with it? Heck no! Society WILL find a way to adapt. That's the beauty of unmitigated capitalism. The ugliness of it however is that it breeds monopolies over time. That's why we have anti-trust laws, which are clearly socialistic. We have grown into an amalgamatic socialistic/capitalistic state.
Anyway - your point is moot. :P Our infrastructure may crumble - for a time. Pride will eventually give way to necessity. Always does.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
You assume that labor actually operates under the laws of supply and demand. First off, you learned some economics, so you know the paper about lemons? As in, bad cars? It talks about the effects of information imbalance on the market. Well, the labor market is a prime example of this effect. Workers know more about their true value than bosses do, therefore, bosses must assume that all workers are overstating their value and therefore, all bosses systematically undervalue labor.
Capitalism values capital more than labor. It's systemic. And the owning class see each other as valuable, while the working class are replaceable. Thus systematically devaluing labor again. Your theory also assumes people are rational actors, this has been disproven by many, many recent experiments. The owning class do not make decisions based on their rational self interest. Many of them, for instance, would bankrupt themselves rather than give in to worker demands because giving in puts them lower down on the old totem pole, and being high in the social hierarchy is the real reason they became rich in the first place. They would rather go bankrupt and be able to say "Fuck you!" to the workers than pay a fair wage and be seen as an equal. That is culturally systemic to the owning class, and they make the rules because they have the capital.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Except in America every child is special and deserves to go to college, and no matter what system you list above, nearly everyone somehow ends up in college.
And to quote from The Incredibles:
"If everyone is special, then no one is."
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
This really isn't true. I live on a comfortable upper-middle-class income. My wife stays home with the kids, so they don't get sent to day care. Our oldest daughter went to a sort of neighborhood pre-school where the moms just took turns teaching the group. She was never in GT Kindergarten (seriously---why do we need GT Kindergarten?) But she's in third grade now, and she's one of the best students in her class. She's well ahead of some of the kids who got shoved into "top-notch" pre-schools when they should have just been playing with toys.
Our second daughter didn't go to any pre-school. She didn't want to, and we didn't see any reason to force a four-year-old to do it. But she had a lousy Kindergarten teacher who basically assumed that all the kids had gone to pre-school (which meant she didn't have to teach---just "review" what they're already supposed to know, and then shove worksheets at them). She treated our daughter like she was dumb because we had dared to let her just be a little kid, and that shot her confidence. We spent the whole year basically trying to mitigate the damage formal education was doing to both her emotional and intellectual development. That year, she learned despite her schooling, not because of it. Then this year she's had a really good first grade teacher, and like the older one, she's pretty much caught up with her friends who went to "top notch" pre schools.
This "get an early start" mentality is stupid. Kids that little don't need to be learning vector calculus. They need to be playing. Sure, teach them things while they play. Our youngest son likes to watch the Leapfrog alphabet video, and then he'll find the letters on his alphabet puzzle and tell us what sound they make. We're even thinking about letting him join a little twice-a-week pre-school this fall, but only because he seemed to really enjoy it when we checked it out. We don't stress him about academics. He's going to have plenty of academic stress the rest of his life. No point in starting it early.
Basically, this mad rush for early academic excellence is a way for people to feel a vicarious sense of achievement at their children's expense. It's stupid, and it doesn't help the kids. By the time they're in second or third grade, you'd never know which ones went to pre-school and which ones didn't. The ones who are going to excel will excel. The ones who are going to flounder will flounder. The really big difference is not what they were doing when they were three. It's what's going on at home right now.
If you really want your kids to be successful, let them be kids while they're young, fill your home with lots and lots of books, make education a priority, and spend time with them. Eat dinner together, for crying out loud and then sit down and read with them and help them with homework. Kids who associate reading with spending time with their parents will love books. Kids who do nothing but melt their brains playing video games all afternoon---while Dad surfs porn and Mom gossips on Facebook, and everyone munches on greasy delivery pizza and flat Dr. Pepper---are not going to become the next Stephen Hawking just because they had a year or two of pre-school.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Rich people have rich friends and family to lend them money. Poor people don't. When you say, "It doesn't have to be yours" you reveal your own cultural assumptions, which are very different from those of say, a working poor family. You just assume that capital is easy to come by, because for you, it probably is. For most people, not so much.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sir,
You make an interesting point. My counterpoint is this: the effect you speak of leads to a winner-take-all society. For example, the sports players that are in the top 1% of their field collect 99% of the money to be made. Minor league baseball players make diddly squat compared to the major league players.
This is due to the effect of mass media and a global society. Everyone watches the major leagues, because the media carries them, while the minor leagues are ignored. And the money follows the media attention.
So there are a VERY FEW "winners" and a lot of losers who barely scratch by.
This holds true for ALL entertainment. Many talented musicians make nothing. The top 1% of their field makes a killing.
With large companies, this is happening too. Executives are cleaning up in companies, everyone else is getting diddly.
This is leading, almost inevitably, to an insane stratification. Someone who outperforms YOU by 5% or even 1% gets paid 1000x what you do. The elite collect ALL the wealth. Everyone else just scratches by. Whole professions are dominated by a few superstars who collect all the money to be made, while the rest (who are almost as good, or BETTER but unknown or unlucky) languish in obscurity.
Yes, this is a result of supply and demand, and a result of mass media and popular culture, and is an "economic" truth. THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT OR DESIRABLE. It offends me that some idiot THUG who CAN THROW A BALL 1% better than OTHER BALL THROWERS makes hundreds of millions while the doctor who saves my life by spotting and removing a melanoma makes $200k/year working 80 hour weeks and has to spend 40 of those hours filling out BS health insurance forms. (And incidentally, by catching this melanoma early, this doctor also saves my health insurer $1M in cancer treatment bills!)
This is pure social inequity and I have NO problem fixing this brokenness in the market via VERY progressive taxation at the high end. The capitalist free market is NOT holy, it is NOT moral, and it should serve HUMANS not the other way around!
--PeterM
I really don't see this in the current system - at least in elementary school where my friends' kids are and where my daughter will soon be. What I see is a constant dumbing down of teaching across the board. It is all about teaching to standardized tests and not discriminating (for any reason).
In the Seattle school system, every kid in the same grade gets the same math lesson on the same day. It is ridiculous - the current methodology, so far as I can tell, is teaching everybody at the level of the lowest common denominator.
When I was in school in Colorado (many years ago), we had 3 "tracks" - high, middle, and low. We were slotted into them by performance and teacher recommendations. There was never an IQ test that I can recall. I'm sure it was hard to get out of your track once you were in it, but I don't know. Luckily I was in the "high" track and so had a relatively challenging and interesting education in the public school system. Something I fear my daughter won't have.
I'd like to think there were enough people who lacked ambition (enough Hank Hills), that these jobs can and will be filled, and that my trash will continue to be picked up.
"Maybe we should instead strive for a more egalitarian society where everyone's contribution is respected."
My opinion is that people can think what they want, and it is not up to the government to tell us to be comrades. I don't think about the dishwasher. If someone were to ask me about the job a dishwasher does, I'd ask them if that was a trick question.
"We overvalue positions of leadership and expertise, while lying that everyone could do those jobs. And tons of unqualified people rush to fill those jobs, because they were told they could, and that those jobs were more important than hauling garbage"
It's not up to you to say who can, and cannot, do something. How would you feel if your advisor told you, "No, you can't do this very well - I can tell by just looking at you. You shouldn't go to college either. You should work in the coal mines instead."
That's not the government's job - that's the job of the hiring manager. They are responsible for filtering unqualified people out. If a person wants to waste their lives trying to do stuff they aren't good at, fine, let them be.
I think it is important that we should pursue what want. We live not to serve the state, but our own interests. It's not up to the government to decide what we should do with our lives.
Although this isn't a career: I want to strap a pulsejet to a bicycle. Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone should do that. But this is a free country. (And that's just for a hobby. For a living I want to animate- I am teaching myself because the schools that teach animation are prohibitively expensive. My success in this field are completely dependent on my ambition and willingness to work harder than everybody else. -- In the meantime I attend a local college for a degree in Graphic Design.)
They say freedom isn't free. You pay in other ways. If that means my degree isn't worth much, so be it. At least I'll have one. I'll let my brains (provided its not splattered on asphalt) push me the rest of the way through in life - as it should be.
There are 300 million people in the country. They don't need protection from disappointment. If they can't do something, they will find out - and they will look for other work. That's perfectly fine.
I'm not suggesting that 3-year-olds should learn vector calculus. I'm suggesting that wealthier parents (which whether you know it or not, you are one) got to their first day of school knowing how to read, write a bit, count to 10 or 20, and possibly do some basic arithmetic. A lot of wealthier kids get that at preschool, but they could also get it from an attentive adult in other settings. In your case, your advantage was that you could afford to have your wife stay home and/or work with the neighborhood to start giving kids those basic skills.
By comparison, most poor kids (who didn't have access to Head Start and similar programs) start learning to read when they're 5 or 6. For instance, I was bored senseless in first grade because most of the time was spent trying to get my classmates capable of handling reading "See Spot run." Most of them couldn't do it the first day.
Oh, and what poorer parents are doing with their time at home - mostly mentally and physically resting from their jobs. If you really want to understand the life of a poor person, ideally talk to some of them and get to know them, or at the very least read about or watch smart capable and educated people try to live under the pressures that poor people do.
I am officially gone from