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Any idiot can explain why a cup of coffee costs a million dollars. Most idiots get away with it. If you’re even basically literate, you won’t buy that cup of coffee. If you can do a cost breakdown, you get insulted. Ever-rising college fees are looking very much like that.
Dear Old Ivy is about to hang two already-broke generations with these fees. Apparently, these constantly rising fees also don’t really cover college costs.
Why not, you schmucks? Ever heard of AI, the internet, or (gasp) smartphones? Do you need a colossal, expensive brick-and-mortar infrastructure to deliver academic outcomes, yes or no?
If you buy the American college vs non-college spiel, you don’t even question it. You’re even grateful that your offspring has been accepted by the Great Academic Roomba for processing.
The problem is that the social and income status of college education is now the sole selling point. Harvard, Princeton, Yale. It’s a name-dropping exercise as much as any sort of education.
College vs non-college incomes are regularly featured in the media. More median stats at best, and that’s the image. Fraternities and sororities are American folklore. Thousands of forgettable movies tell the tale of the last 80 years of unmitigated American bliss.
The hell you say.
Let’s start with some basic ideas:
What is the purpose of education?
Training, maintaining, and developing the skills base of the world.
What is the most cost-efficient way to do tertiary education?
Merit-based with appropriate technologies for accessibility. Not excluding high academic achievers due to fees.
How credible are college graduates?
Not very, if at all. “Buying a degree” is the general impression, right or wrong. Most of the people you see getting indicted these days have college educations. Even Disaster Donny has some sort of boondocks college qualification.
No number of fanatical chickens could defecate long enough or on the scale required to deliver this mess.
Maybe being a qualified idiot makes a difference. People should survive high school to be managed by “qualified” morons, right?
This elegant image is set against the background of an intellectual-hating culture that can’t even find its way off the set of Leave it to Beaver. Jerry Mathers passed the torch to Married with Children 30 years ago, but not academia. Has anything at all happened in the last 70 years, do you know?
Can you “work your way through college” anymore? Or do you have to settle for dying trying, years later? Why should you effectively sell the cost of raising a child to be indebted for years with a degree that may or may not work in the real world?
Academia, like politics, apparently no longer knows or cares why it exists. Trashing generations is now the norm. Gen Z and Alpha are already being costed out of any possibility of existence, and you’ve decided to help them go broke?
If you want to educate people who have no hope of financial survival, mission accomplished. Even the idea of a “normal” job will vanish in the next 20 years. Demands on skills vs income may well depend on multiple totally different skill sets. You’ll probably need multiple income streams.
…And you’re hyper-expensively producing specialists to live in 1950s-era china hutches? One-trick wonders? People whose illiterate bosses won’t listen to anyway? You’re creating a cost base for people’s lives that has nothing to do with reality or anything else in the process?
Is it true that straight-F people with the money beat the straight-A people with the academic achievements for places? If so, you’ve failed monumentally. The straight Fs should go back to kindergarten or middle management.
“Killing the world…?” Yep. America’s money-grubbing idiocies go global fast enough. In Australia, we were working on free tertiary education in the 1970s. We’re now doing the same thing as America, making tertiary education a privilege, not a right.
This wilful deformity of America and the world’s skills base can’t work. You can’t run a modern world without a vast range of skills. From the deserts of STEM to critical thinking capabilities, Ozymandias is doing fine. Quality of training also seems all over the shop. The people who are trained seem to be merely processed, not necessarily trained to even industry standards, let alone professional.
I’m not anti-academic. I’ve known a few professional academics for decades. I’ve helped people get degrees. I found out the difference between lazy students and real students almost instantly, and long ago. Why haven’t you?
These rich tourists in academia are useless. They’ll never be anything but useless. Do you really expect these placeholders to do anything useful, ever? Don’t pander to the ridiculous little brats. Rewrite the script for admission. Manage the costs with technology.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
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