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What's Wrong With the American University System
ideonexus writes "The Atlantic has an excellent interview with Andrew Hacker — co-author with Claudia Dreifus of a book titled Higher Education? — covering everything that's wrong with the American university system. The discussion ranges from entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing and parking spaces than quality teaching; to 22-year-old students with unrealistic expectations that some company will put them in a management position after graduating with six-figures of debt; to football teams siphoning money away from academic programs so that student tuitions must increase to compensate. It really lays out the farce of university culture and reminds me of everything I absolutely despised about my college life. Dreifus is active in the comments section of the article as well, lending to a fantastic discussion on the subject."
The reason education means less and less is the same reason technology does with each passing week:
Before we "globalized" our economy, our labor force was a limited size and so we had to automate and use technology and training to increase output. Now that we are competing in a marketplace where labor is orders of magnitude more plentiful, there is no reason to automate and no reason to train. We can pay 10, or even 50, what we previously paid 1, to do the same job.
The chinese government is building city after city, housing millions, over a spread of a few years. We've gutted ourselves to the point where as a "service based economy" we can't rebuild one damaged city, let alone construct any new ones.
If we want to be competitive... we need to either close our borders to trade, or we need to move away from a service based economy back to an industrial one. This is why education is worthless... and the only reason people are demanding it is because the unemployment rate is sky-high and they can write wish lists for employee qualifications and get them.
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Mods, please. Comedy gold.