I agree, and I believe that ultimately, maybe within our lifetimes, the system will change dramatically, precisely because college does not and can not prepare people for the workforce and because there will always be increasingly fewer "good jobs" per capita.
Eating Tide Pods?
- Thread starter Urban Cryer
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That's easy to say, but it's unsustainable. Soon we'll be forcing our children to choose their careers in grade school, then elementary school. The changes since my parents, to me, to my kids is crazy. It can't go on without the system exploding at some point. Humans aren't built to survive that way.
Thanks for that - that makes sense.
I have a serious question, and I don't want it to come across as "taking a shot" at anyone.
What is the benefit/purpose of a liberal arts degree for anyone who isn't starting out already wealthy, or who specifically aspires to a profession related to their liberal arts studies - like an English teacher, museum curator, etc.?
It seems like the whole professional world has turned into an environment where employers just want cogs to fit into their machines, and the cogs should be as uniform and replaceable as possible. So, to come in with a degree in being a more whole person, and maybe a better thinker, would not be an advantage to an applicant most of the time.
I understand, intrinsically, why that type of education would be preferable - I'd love to have taken more classes on philosophy, languages, literature, ancient civilizations, etc.. But extrinsically, it seems like a poor investment of time and resources in most cases - again, unless your family has already assured your continued wealth, or you want to teach the subjects to others going forward.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's anyway back from that. It's a spiral that's irreversible. Our society is going to keep getting worse and worse (or, more and more unsustainable) until it reaches the point where it collapses in on itself. Once that happens, some other type of society will rise up to take it's place.
I am not backtracking at all. The vast majority of students go to liberal arts colleges; that is simply an easily verifiable statistic. At UCLA, more than 85% of the undergraduate degrees are granted by the liberal arts college, and I know that the liberal arts college is the largest and grants the most degrees at FSU, as well. Generally, of the 1.8 million bachelors degrees granted each year in the U.S., 1.2 are granted by the liberal arts colleges. As we all know, that liberal arts degree does essentially nothing to prepare a person for a job, good or bad.
This already happens in a number of developed nations, such as Germany where students are placed in formal tracks toward various types of employment starting in secondary school. One of the major differences, though, is that Germany has maintained a societal respect and veneration of "blue collar" jobs, like manufacturing.
This is WAY different than our model, where we're outsourcing or automating manufacturing jobs as quickly as possible, while simultaneously moving from a "repair" to a "replace" society. Soon the only jobs in this country will be service-related and we'll all just shuffle our money back and forth amongst each other without ever making anything.
The intellectual development and enrichment of both society and the individual seeking the degree. Education was never intended to be a pathway toward material wealth, quite the opposite. Our doctoral hoods still have an alms pocket to remind us that devoting yourself to education has historically meant foregoing material wealth and professional success.
I don't know how you can forecast Jefferson's lack of success in modern times considering he had a conservative estimated IQ of 160 and a level of ambition and energy few posses. He would have been easily identified as special and would have sought out many of the numerous opportunities presented to him.
In other words, the cream rises to the top and the rest of us are unfortunately the coffee filling the cup.
I look forward to the rise of our A.I. overlords. Sigh.
I don't know about that. Despite his intelligence, ambition, and extraordinary privilege, he still died broke and miserable.
I agree and hope that this doesn't stray into politics, but providing enormous guaranteed student loans for degrees that provide little prospects of helping a person to prepare for or obtain a job that pays well enough to pay back the loans seems like a very bad idea.
I agree with that. It does not make sense, and I think it's going to be viewed, historically, as one of the most damaging developments of our era. The entire funding model for higher education needs to be upended and rethought, but I also think that, as a society, we absolutely must move away from the belief that getting a college degree is a prerequisite for success.
I don't see how you can "conservatively estimate" the IQ of someone that lived 200 years ago. IQ tests look at:
- Verbal Intelligence.
- Mathematical Ability.
- Spatial Reasoning Skills.
- Visual/Perceptual Skills.
- Classification Skills.
- Logical Reasoning Skills.
- Pattern Recognition Skills.
They are also fairly useless with regard to better than average intelligence, as defined by what the particular test asssesses. They are diagnostic tests designed to identify deficits in cognitive functioning; they don't really provide any other useful information.
More archaic thinking that won't serve anyone well going forward. It's sad to watch/listen to, really.
Until it's not the history anymore.
If you can't see the writing on the wall, I don't know how to help you.
How is it archaic? Again, I didn't make this up. The history is the history, and the present tells the same tale.
You think training people to be cogs in the machine from birth is the right way to go forward? When has education and enlightenment never been the right answer?
...and yet you wrote this.
"For back then he was very well educated. Nowadays there's no way he's getting into W&M, and there's no way he's becoming a lawyer. He'd be some guy working at a Costco, who people really like listening to when he talks."
So you are now a master of debunking estimated IQ tests as well as a forecaster on how an historic intelligent individual, who came from far less than any of has ever known and risen to heights we will never obtain, and make the assertion he would be a person of very modest success if any in today's "difficult" world? And while you at it throw in other "great thinkers" into the claim. I don't think you suffer cynicism as much as hubris. Which in my eyes doesn't validate your point or prove to be a productive ethos for those that have the ambition to stake their claim in this world. Struggles, challenges and difficulties are timeless and ambitious individuals have always found ways to overcome them. I don't believe we have evolved in 7-8 generations into those big brained Star Trek aliens to simply scoff at our ancestors, not yet.
Bear with me, as this will be hard to do over the phone...
I'm not discrediting estimated iq tests. Rather, I'm questioning how iq can be estimated using such a limited data set. I'm also not questioning intelligence, as much as their ability to overcome the modern day set of boxes they'd have to check to get into a competitive college like William and Mary. And how did he come from less than any of us can imagine? He inherited 5000 acres of land. Plus, he was a white male in a time when that was the only group allowed to go to college (or do anything else). He was hardly at a disadvantage. My point is that he and others benefited greatly from living in a time when the barriers to, and requirements for, success were a lot lower and the pool of other potential "great thinkers" was a lot smaller. His literacy alone probably put him in the top 10%.
I think that it's a lot more difficult now because of a myriad of factors like competition and cost. Gone are the days when guys like Andrew Carnegie can take $10 and turn it into a fortune, unless you're really good at YouTube videos.
Jefferson's path to success was literally:
Learn to read
Read some books
Go to W&M
Inherit a bunch of land (and free labor)
Profit
Be a founding father
He benefited from being one of only a couple of dozen white men in America who were dealt similar hands.
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I went to the same liberal arts school TJ did. You could still major in sciences but it forced you to take a certain amount of classes in literature, history, economics, sociology etc. that I might otherwise have avoided. I think it made me more balanced and actually helped me have a successful career as a Geologist due too a wider perspective and ability to converse and get along with a range of folks compared to some of the other engineers and geologists I have worked with who focus more on just science.
The entire education system needs a massive overhaul from how we fund it to why people go onto whatever sort of higher education. Trade schools and the way Europe does things have some really great merit; the value of being a plumber, electrician etc and then one day owning your own business is way underrated. Going to college and getting some garbage degree is equally overrated. One of the major issues to the change is how the federal government manages and funds higher education; throw in how higher education is one of the few things not effected by market forces and good luck with this fight. When the college knows exactly how much you can get a loan, grant etc. for they are likely to price their product accordingly.
One commonality among very high IQ individuals is the ability to self teach and learn at an abnormally high rate in childhood. As we are learning to talk, they are learning to read. When we learn to add and subtract they are consuming Calculus and so on so forth. It wouldn't be difficult to reverse engineer an estimation from a historic analysis. The difficulties in that process would come if you are consumed with ridiculous modern day pc dogma that ignores one's achievements based solely on economic standing and skin color.
Carnegie was a very hard worker and ravenous investor. He gathered much of his wealth buy joining with several other investors and purchasing a steel mill for $100,000 (2.5 million in today's dollars). Through improvements and added profitability he was able to invest more into this "newer" industry and create such wealth. There are many that invest in newer technologies today that have amassed large sums of wealth and not sure how this is unknown. All these people through out history created success from their ambitious spirit and none of it came from the color of their skin. Some created a mass of wealth and others great inventive ideas while others simply taught us to have a better understand each other from a different viewpoint. Just as it always has been and always will be great individuals overcome all the obstacles the rest of us put in front of them.
I agree with your premise on this topic, by the way. However, I'd point out that historically, university education was reserved for people of some means. Obviously not exclusively, but when the system was educating 10% of the population that could afford to not go straight to work on the farm or in the mill, it's real easy to set aside the pathway to material wealth.
I'm jealous when I read books dealing with figures as recently as the 40s and 50s that went to college for an actual "education", learning Latin, and philosophy and literature, etc. That truly was an education.
But to also be fair, to characterize that college shouldn't just be a "pathway toward material wealth" sounds pretty good, like a lot of greedy bastards ruined it. But that's another way of saying that college should not be a tool of upward mobility either...if you are poor, don't look for college to be a means of improving your means. If you're a poor inner city kid who wants to be an accountant...going to college to get an accounting degree is actually a path to do that. Without that pathway...I don't see how that kid makes the jump, if he literally probably knows zero accountants in real life. The implied solution that we should just respect blue collar work more so nobody has to feel bad that he becomes a janitor instead of an accountant...that's a pretty bitter pill.
I think it's debatable whether college works all that great for economic mobility, or if that was the most efficient mechanism, or we ever should have positioned college as for more than the leisure classes. But that will be almost impossible to roll the clock back on and bring higher education back to being a luxury of the elites.
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I've said as much already.
In an effort to retain the historical education model (even though it's broken, miserably) professors and by association their liberal arts colleges, will fail, be fired, not get tenure, etc.
This is happening. Colleges are closing. Professors are no longer being retained in many places. Colleges are hiring instructors, not faculty. Etc.
$50,000 in debt for a humanities degree is a failure. There's no two ways about it. You can't get a job and you can't get out of debt. This is all known. That you're insisting that it be spelled out (for the millionth time) shows you're just being resistant for resistance sake.
Maybe not the easiest path but I think you can actually do that but at some point will have to narrow a focus on a MCAT, LSAT or similar exam to further your education into a specific trade. My roommate at FSU took the MCAT and scored in the upper 5%. Imagine coming from a "party school" and beating out 95 % of test takers some of which came from some of the most prestigious pre-med programs across the country. It took a combination of remarkable awe-inspiring amount of work combined with natural talent but it can be done.
But I do wonder where this never ending cost increases in tuition ends or slows down. Our family combined income is more than we probably deserve. Both sets of grandparents and ourselves have set aside money over an extended period of time and still there is a sense of panic and sticker shock at what these universities are asking for out of state tuition. Which pushes our buttons even more to strongly persuade our children to narrowly focus ones studies on a cost basis alone.
I loved the fact that I got to go to college outside the state where I grew up. I enjoyed the experience and possibly derived some benefit from being outside my comfort zone. I suspect that group that will be able to do that in the future is dwindling beyond the truly gifted or very wealthy.
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The banks increase the amount of loans they'll give out, so the schools increase how much they charge, or vice versa/chicken and egg. The government takes money from the banks and endorses the current system by insuring the loans and cutting off any possible escape (other than death) for paying back the loans. Employers don't care, because there are enough applicants where they can continue to require degrees that probably don't actually correspond to the applicant's ability to be successful at the job. And the students who want any of the available white collar career choices have no choice but to go along with it.
Between the schools, the banks, the government, and employers, who is most likely to change the current system? The question's rhetorical, since none of them will.
During a freakanomics podcast, they discussed Germany and how they are doing well from manufacturing and stability perspective. Part of that is associated with their apprenticeship programs. Pretty interesting stuff.
While we definitely push college is the way to go, there are some interesting movements to get people back to the trades. Mike Rowe's foundation is a pretty vocal / active movement to show the needed value in trades; college certainly isn't for everyone. It doesn't SEEM as glamorous, but it is still a viable way to make good money and career.
While we definitely push college is the way to go, there are some interesting movements to get people back to the trades. Mike Rowe's foundation is a pretty vocal / active movement to show the needed value in trades; college certainly isn't for everyone. It doesn't SEEM as glamorous, but it is still a viable way to make good money and career.
Yeah, TJ was the second smartest president of all time, just shy of 160.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.us...qs-and-success-in-the-oval-office?context=amp
That IQ is above the IQ needed to get a perfect score on the LSAT, MCAT, GRE and SAT. So I think you can go pretty far in the world with perfect testing scores.
I do think a system that separated a true liberal arts education that taught you to understand the world in general and how to think and solve problems and how people have approached the challenges of existence through time, from a graduate/vocational program that taught you what you needed to know to be an accountant or a plumber or a securities trader, would be a tremendous benefit.
But how do you turn back the clock on that? The entire system is broken in that sense. Nobody can afford or should spend $200-300k to "learn about life" with no potential career return, and there is no reason it should cost that much in the first place to learn those lessons. The books are there. The history is there.
It's going to have to take a complete paradigm shift where a better way is offered. Maybe something that grows out of a Khan Academy like project. There won't be reform for the reasons others have pointed out...at some point, there's going to be an alternative offered that breaks up the system completely I think.
I think undergraduate education is largely overrated. My FSU social sciences education isn't worth anything to me. A lot of that is my fault, because I skipped class a lot, didn't take it seriously, etc. On the other hand, teaching via large lectures taught by barely intelligible graduate assistants is all on FSU. The lack of any effective student guidance/academic advisor program is all on FSU.
"Assessment began by extracting personality descriptions from several biographical sources for 39 presidents from Washington through Reagan. All identifying information was then removed to produce anonymous biographical profiles. Several independent judges used these profiles in conjunction with the Gough Adjective Check List (Gough & Heilbrun, 1965) to rate the presidents on 300 descriptors, obtaining reliable assessments for 110 adjectives (cf. Deluga, 1997, 1998; Historical Figures Assessment Collaborative, 1977)."
So the bases for assigning an estimated IQ for each president and declaring who was the smartest were the literary choices made 200 years ago by biographers to describe them?
No, they mean that they used various biographical accounts of their behavior to make that assessment. So inaccurate as %*%*, BUT I have no doubt TJ was brilliant. He was youngest member of Congress when he was selected to draft some of our founding documents.
So I’m a modern day graduate of the College of William and Mary (picked up my JD there) and consider myself pretty bright. The lowest I’ve scored on various grad school entrance exams still placed me in the top 98th percentile of testtakers. I speak two languages conversationally and can halfway fake my way through a third enough to get and give directions and other touristy things. I can usually understand and engage in a wide range of subjects from physics to chemistry to whatever (In fact, in law school I made my spare cash doing freelance ghostwriting projects covering topics in magazines devoted to astronomy, legal issues, physics, palaeontology, biology/wildlife management, photography, etc...). I still play the sax in my spare time. I’ve got numerous hobbies like creating home brew retro games for vintage consoles and computers to literally home brewing booze.
So I’m pretty smart....TJ is a full on genius. He spoke SEVEN languages fluently as opposed to my 2.5. He was considered an excellent player of five completely different musical instruments while I’m merely a good player of one. He invented countless machines (which he chose not to patent as he believed advancements should be shared freely) including the earliest polygraph machine, one of the first portable printing presses, the revolving door still used today, the first dumbwaiter/elevator, many different revolving cyphers used for coded conversations for military and political purposes, etc... He was one of the first people to seriously study agriculture in the US including being one of the first white individuals to farm tomatoes (considered poisonous and inedible before him), developed strains of rice that made America one of the highest rice producers, developed grape hybrids that allowed so called noble grapes to be grown in the US (there’s a root rot disease that kills any varieties straight from Europe being grown east of the Mississippi) so that good wine not just sweet muscadine wines could be made in the US, etc... He studied books on architecture for about a year and then personally designed his plantation home in Monticello, Virginia and not only has it survived centuries, but is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the US and is still copied to this day (FSU’s law school is based on its design). He redesigned the roads in D.C. and became basically one of the first civil engineers in the US as most cities were not planned prior to this. He spoke modern Greek fluently and studied Ancient Greek and as a result created the Jefferson Bible by translating the oldest Greek sources available into the English of the time. The University of Virginia was created by Thomas Jefferson and its original library was just TJs donated library (every single book was said to have been read by TJ at least once and covered every subject Universities would have been interested in studying).
So yeah...TJ would have had no problems succeeding in the modern day. He was a literal genius and blows my tiny accomplishments completely out of the water.
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But where did he say the Cuban sandwich originated?
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