Lack of variety, pure and simple. It’s the limit case of a monoculture.
He ‘walked into me by accident’… Was a shoulder barge, no hands involved. Plausible deniability to anyone unfamiliar with the students involved.
If it was just a handful of students in a rural college, it would be one thing, but it’s not. Educators all over have reported a huge upswing in similar attitudes.
ETA: I suspect rural kids may be especially vulnerable to online influences- they know they’re being brought up with a limited selection of viewpoints and experiences, and the online world is far more interesting and they have the same access as anyone else.
They also don’t have the experiences in real life to counter some of the extremist views- same with racism, it’s not much of a stretch to believe that some ethnicity is [insert stereotype] if you’ve never met anyone of that ethnicity. Of course they’ve met women, but not gorgeous (heavily filtered) girls like they see in male influencer videos.
I’m not so sure that the numbers of that link reflect an increase in misogyny specifically as much as it is one aspect of generalized student behavior issues since return from Covid.
Your specific campus circumstance in inexcusable and hard to comprehend. That some population of rural students are MAGA and are currently feeling empowered to act out on it in a college environment in ways they never have before … I can get that. A whole class refusing to work for a female teacher, that’s beyond that.
Yeah, but I thought we’d move a bit closer to ending those stereotypes than when I was in college in the early 70s. A Campus Crusade for Christ (I’m pretty sure that was the group) proselytizer who seriously thought Jews had horns.
With all due respect, I think my wife and I are trying to prepare our children for something a bit better than farmers college in MAGA county. I mean unless they have some burning desire to be farmers. Which I don’t think they do.
IMHO (and I believe statistics still show) that a college degree still leads to higher income potential. But I think you need to be smart about it. Just getting any old degree from any old college and expecting to land a six figure office job isn’t going to happen.
Other than that, my wife and I have slightly different philosophies. I tend to joke that she is more “Waterfall” while I’m more “Agile”. That is to say she tends to need a clear path, structured rules, and lots of boxes to check while I tend to focus on gathering lots of skills and having lots of flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
So my wife tends to think in terms of sending our kids to the right schools (my son’s current private middle school → her prep school → my undergrad college → either of our business school or other professional advanced degree) then select one of the following career paths
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My thinking is yes to the education, but the purpose is more to get exposed to lots of ideas, gain new skills, network, and develop critical thinking and an entrepreneurial mindset.
A lot of people mentioned the benefits of a higher education in “expanding the mind”. That someone by taking various classes with a ethnically diverse group of students that will magically make them better and more successful human beings. I’m not so sure that is the purpose or actual results of a higher education and it’s not really consistent with my experience.
College may be different 30 years ago, but my experience attending an elite northeastern private university was that it was a bit of a monoculture that was better at teaching how to navigate wealth and privilege and social politics one might encounter in Corporate America than providing an inclusive world view (beyond the sort of virtue signaling these organizations do for PR reasons).
There are multiple issues with the statistics show bit …
One. These are correlations and definitely at least partly are the result of selection bias of who had the resources, family and achievement level, to attend vs not. A big jump to saying that the same person, of the same SES group and other biasing demographics, same level proven ability to learn (or not), would experience the same lifetime income discrepancy.
Two. I do not think those statistics account for the opportunity cost of the investment, either as debt service or as other ways the same money could have been invested.
Three. The most salient to me - the comparisons have been college degree vs HS only; that is not the only alternative and not the one I am suggesting gets more promoted and supported. Not “no education after HS” but a trade apprenticeship educational path being recognized as also being a worthwhile after High School education path.
Lastly. Past performance is no guarantee of … There is no absolute certainty that AI will have lasting major impacts on the number of people needed in careers that require a college education, but there is very good reason to suspect such. Betting that much that it won’t may be worth taking a long think about rather than just assuming.
No question that my dad’s response to me when I was thinking about what I wanted to study and was worried about job competition (at that point I was considering architecture) - “there is always room for the best.” - is still true. Some people will get great ROI with their degree. But by definition dad, most of us are not the best. (Glad he believed in me though!)
Of course, this approach would work equally well for a white-collar job. If the job is the goal, why clutter it up with education? Just train people.
To some degree isn’t that what college is for many, in engineering, architecture, computer, nursing, and many business paths?
Many other white collar career paths though require a generalist who can be cognitively agile, correctly expressed here:
I completely buy into the value of a broad liberal arts education in proving a chance to learn a broad range of skills and knowledge that can help this group be agile in the future
That said I understand that the white collar apprenticeship model is common in some parts countries, like Germany for example, and not completely absent even in the US. It is an option to consider as one of several as well.
I guess my question is what does an apprentice model accomplish for white collar corporate work? Companies already have a pretty robust pipeline for obtaining, training, and growing the sort of candidates they are looking for through internships, campus recruiting, referrals, and so on.
The issue is that, right now, corporations are relying on individual students to pay a lot of money for four years of smoothing out the rough edges. These companies could do it themselves in a much shorter time frame, but at their own cost. They could, of course, charge tuition, and agree to hire only those who get good grades in the training.
Personally, I still think we’re better off giving a broad and robust education for the greater societal benefits. But, again, it depends what you think post-secondary education is for: if it’s primarily for jobs, we’re woefully inefficient. If it’s for building good citizens, increasing individual quality of life, and good jobs, I think universities work pretty well as they stand. The only issues I see are those of class, where we seem to think that blue-collar work is less than and doesn’t need university-educated people, and of cost. I don’t think the individual should bear as much of the education costs as the system requires now.
Or they could just hire unpaid interns instead of entry-level paid employees, but of course the Department of Labor would never allow such a thing. /s
For the employer minimal - it creates workers with the specific skills needed for the specific tasks.
For the employee it gets them in the career doing that task without the same magnitude of investment in time and money.
The loss for both is the loss of broader skill set training that has wider utility and application to other tasks.
And the employer loses the filter that getting through college provides - selecting for those with proven ability to learn and to persevere. The employee loses that signifier.
So trade offs yes.
Or more often, they actually pay their interns and teach them the basics of working for their company. The ones they like, they tend to hire back as entry level employees, many of whom go on to become managers.
I don’t think so. It doesn’t take 4 years to train for jobs in these fields. They’ll have their share of gen ed requirements, electives, and pre-reqs (e.g. chemistry) along with a wide breadth of technical classes. A lot of it you’ll never use again (at least not directly).
If you just wanted to train people up in something like programming software, a workplace could do it much more quickly and cheaply, but the apprentice would have a narrower base of knowledge. When something disruptive, like AI, comes along they’ve got nothing to help them adapt.
IOW, purely vocational ed is fine as long as vocations last longer than working lives. Once that’s not true, you have marooned 40- and 50-yos w no saleable skill and no ability to learn.
Once again, if you think education has no purpose other than career training. But people in their private lives still need to enter into contracts, travel, vote, do something with their leisure time, and a whole host of other things for which education is useful, but job training is not.
Agreed. General education does a lot more than create a worker. It also creates a citizen and a useful human who has options besides a wasted vacant life akin to a draft animal.
What I was really trying to say is that if purely vocational ed was ever adequate, it sure isn’t now when not only is jobs-for-life a nonstarter, but so is work-skills-for-life.
That hyperbole vastly underestimates the ability of those without college education to learn, and vastly oversells the degree to which college education teaches learning, so much as selecting for those with proven ability to learn in that format.
It isn’t worthless. Far from it. But no citizens without college education are not left with wasted vacant lives akin to be draft animals.
Of course that does seem to be the attitude of the many of the educated class (often the quiet part not said out loud) and many in D leadership. What a shock that those considered as such aren’t eager to yoke into where Ds want to plow …
DSeid, one of the things you are not considering are just how many forces out there which, by nature, are training people NOT to think. Much of algorithm-driven social media and AI, for starters.
Not going to college is a perfectly normal and fine life path. Lots of people on that path learn through reading for pleasure, through their hobbies, through social groups, travel, television, youtube (which, you’ll note, is also on my anti-learning list above: it really depends how you use it).
My biggest issue with the current status quo is that we have anti-learning forces out in droves, but few forces that are resisting and encouraging people to be lifelong learners. The universities are, but they are less valued societally than they were 25 years ago, and the argument against always seems to be about dollars. We want people to work, but it’s not like workers are all we need. We need workers who are going to contribute to society, and make this a better world, through their job AND through the rest of their life. Right now, we’re doing the economic part, but we’ve neglected the rest and allowed the rise of MAGA.
I’m a pediatrician. I am dealing every day with the consequences of these force with immunization refusers, vitamin K at birth refusers, and more. Believe me I consider those forces.
But y’know something? We have a very diverse practice including across education and SES lines. The MAHA crowd of refusers are overwhelmingly college educated and our less highly educated families are more eager to get the full vaccines, even when institutional barriers make it extra challenging.
The efficacy of college education as prevention against ignorance is not as great as I think you think it is. I reflect back on my own college experience, which was great mind you, but if I had not already been a critical thinker, learned at my parents’ knees, watching Columbo together and trying to figure out how the bad guy would be caught, watching “The Ascent of Man” together. Talking about the world and arguing about things as normative. If not learned then I would not have learned well in college. College did not teach me “habits of mind”; it gave me a bunch of stuff to apply them to. Most of the classes were memorizing and regurgitating honestly. Med school worse.
College is a wonderful opportunity. But its value in isolation is overrated. And the not college educated are not as ignorant as you seem to think, even if they don’t know who Plato was.