Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Lagunita’s Brown Shugga, a brewing mistake that turned into a “special ale” in their regular rotation. It’s quite good.
Once they lubricate the mind muscles, the boys turn their attention to recent proposals by some Democrats to make college free.
Is free college a good idea?
No, it’s not!
First, not everyone should go to college. College should be for the intellectual elite. Many people should pursue trades, not degrees.
Second, colleges are hardly “institutions of higher learning” any more. They’re mostly left-wing indoctrination centers. The liberals want free college because they know that colleges are mostly liberal and they want to push the culture to the left.
Free college is stupid enough, but it gets even worse. What about proposals to forgive student debt?
If we forgive the debt of people who made wrong decisions and got into a lot of debt, what do we do with the frugal people who paid their way? Do they get paid back?
Sen. Elizabeth Warren had her “Joe the Plumber” moment when a man confronted her with exactly that question.
It’s a good question.
Free college puts people in situations where they are likely to fail. It takes people who might have been successful and happy in a trade and makes them failures in something they aren’t prepared for. That’s not helping.
This is the Republican line. Keeping people dumb is where they’re coming from.
Your statement assumes that going to college makes someone smarter. Please provide evidence.
Didn’t you learn something about geology in college?
Does learning more about some area necessarily make someone smarter?
Sure it does.
Depends on whether what you learn is fact …. or fiction.
Geology is obviously a legitimate science.
I certainly learned some things in college. If that’s all you mean by smarter, then yes, I suppose college makes people smarter. But … it seems like a relatively trite definition of “smarter.”
Also, it’s not quite to the point. You’ve shifted the terms of the discussion.
You implied that since Republicans don’t want everyone to go to college, that means they want to keep people dumb. That implies that college is the only (or perhaps best) way to get smarter (or at least “not dumb”).
I don’t agree with that at all. Some people might get a whole lot smarter going to trade school, or joining the military, than they would by going to college.
One advantage of the Crowhill archives not being accessible any more is that I can reuse material and pretend it’s new!
Having spent my share of time in the postsecondary trenches on both sides of the desk, I agree the whole system is badly broken. And not just for people who want to be academics, for which it’s basically a pyramid scheme, getting low-paid mental labour out of young scholars most of whom have no chance of making it a career.
Unfortunately I don’t have any good solutions, but reducing and eliminating subsidies to universities is likely to be very clarifying. Glenn Reynolds always points out after he links to the latest lefty inanity coming out of a university — which has nothing to do with either being smart or being learned — that when people get tired of paying for this, they’ll be accused of being anti-intellectual or opposed to education or something.
I don’t know how much my experience can be generalized, but we used to talk about this sometimes at poker night at grad school. What we thought about the university pipeline, I mean. Even among those of us who all loved the university life (and some of us didn’t, but felt pressured for various reasons to keep going), the science types seemed to have a less romantic view of the matter. The humanities students seemed far more invested in the status quo and their place in the system. Which I thought was funny, because I was literally studying the Creation itself, and an English-major friend was studying the use of economic language in Elizabethan-era plays.
I had both less cynical and more cynical theories about why that difference might be.
DSM, why would Glenn Reynolds think anyone would ever do that? /snark
DSM, I have a different view on subsidies. I’d like to see both more and less of them.
First, I want it all done at the state and local level. The federal government has no business in education.
Second, I want the subsidies to go to low income people who have displayed academic excellence. For example, if you get good grades and a good SAT score in high school, you get help towards college. If you didn’t demonstrate academic excellence, no subsidies.
Third, I want the subsidies to go to a variety of types of schools, and I want schools that have huge endowments to be off the list. No government help to go to Harvard, for example.
What do you think?
(1) While I’m a decentralization supporter in general, and have no problem with lower-level control of university funding, I find I don’t have strong feelings on this one either way. College-as-training sits well with local funding for me, because the benefits will be mostly for the locals, but college-as-research-institute has benefits for everybody and so my mind doesn’t reject a federal role as quickly.
(2) I can also live with that, but there’s going to be a fight about what constitutes academic excellence. To help control for differences among schools, people have come up with policies like “top 5% in your school”, but that rules out people with higher scores at high-performing schools..
For my part, I’m happy to set a fixed limit and apply it across the board, but the consequences are going to be unpopular.
(3) Indeed. People joke that Harvard isn’t a university, it’s an investment fund with a college attached.
I don’t think of colleges here in isolation from the whole education system, though. Schools are often miserable places where suffering students come to hate learning, other kids, and ultimately themselves. I’m willing to entertain all sorts of radical approaches to avoid that.
Free…no. At a significantly less expense…absolutely! It shouldn’t take students 10 – 20 years to repay loans for a four-year education. Free college would likely create more of an “entitlement” mentality in a youth culture that already believes working no longer has virtue and society owes them something. As well, it would be an unnecessary bonus for the wealthy.
College exposes students to greater knowledge and life experiences…academically and socially. It depends on how one defines “smart”, to determine if that exposure achieves that end. There’s legitimate arguments on both sides.
Practically speaking, at least in the US, college can be a competitive advantage, in terms of employment opportunities for those seeking a middle class or higher lifestyle. So, for that group, cost is a huge factor. For those who are independently wealthy or have influential parents, college isn’t essential…it’s typically window dressing. Their opportunities and lifestyle are many times determined through family legacy.
I was pretty happy the way it was when I went to college in the 70s. The tuition was rather low at a state college for the residence of that state, while reasonable loans and grants were available for those who had difficulties paying the tuition and other necessities, especially books (which were in fact a bit on the expensive side). It wasn’t ideal, but I was not at all bitter about not being able to attend Harvard. Anyone with a high school diploma or the equivalent could in principle go to college.
Having a college education is available to the people is a lot like having public libraries. Sure, there may be libraries that are stocked with a lot of bad books. And people can always choose to read crap and may well fail to absorb the knowledge made available to them. But we don’t want to go back to a time when books were only a luxury item for the elite. Libraries are in principle a good thing for people of all walks of life, not just for the wealthy and powerful. However, I certainly can see why the wealthy and powerful would want to keep the riff-raff dumb.
> However, I certainly can see why the wealthy and powerful would want to keep the riff-raff dumb.
You’re not wrong, although I might have said ‘uneducated’ rather than dumb. I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that the wealthy and powerful may have nefarious motives.
If they did want to suppress knowledge, I can think of some ways which might be effective:
They could encourage a focus on credentials over content, and on identity over accomplishment.
They could aim university missions away from the search for truth and the accumulation of knowledge, both theoretical and practical, and recentre them on implementing social justice agendas.
They could try to suppress debate by declaring various commonly-held views so manifestly out of bounds they should barely be mentioned (except after suitable protective incantations) resulting in people who don’t even know how to defend their own views. They could also suppress debate by applying safety standards to some speakers and not others. (“This talk you want to have? We need to charge you extra to cover the cost of security against possible violence.” “Violence by whom?” “Violence by us.”)
They could encourage immaturity in their students, pretend activism is scholarship, and direct people into fields of study which guarantee they’re not going to be able to accomplish much.
And they could concentrate people’s attentions not on ideas, which could potentially be turned against them, but by obedience to the self-appointed clerisy and its various identitarian submovements.
All of these would generate a class of people who know a lot less than they could, and probably should, while also thinking they know a lot more than they do and are entitled to scorn everyone else. Plus, having invested so much of their life in this silliness, they’ll be very reluctant to admit that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system.
If all those strategies to keep people dumb are as prevalent and effective as suggested above, then why have the wealthy and powerful done all they can to make college education all but inaccessible to the riff-raff?
Subsidy spirals have had an effect on prices, but I don’t know how to square “all but inaccessible” with a basically stable enrollment fraction over the past decade (I’ll stick to US data here.)
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cpb.asp
Unless you’re saying that they’re _trying_ to make it inaccessible to the riff-raff, but failing? Then I guess I’d have to think about how closely you have your finger on the pulse of the rich and powerful, or whether you’re just taking something you don’t like and someone you don’t like and blaming the one for the other.
(sudden pang of nostalgia) How _is_ John, anyway?