BF2S Forums Florida considers socializing their colleges

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Let's nudge students to get a higher education for jobs they don't want because it's what they can "afford." That will improve our workforce. Yay.

Jay wrote:

Then again, if they're that type then they're not likely to survive engineering school anyway so meh.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

I think everyone on BF2S can agree that this is a terrible idea.

Jay wrote:

Then again, if they're that type then they're not likely to survive engineering school anyway so meh.

Depending on where they get their engineering degree. Some schools are pretty lax.

aynrandroolz wrote:

you have too many graduates, period, which is why you have to encourage 'shaping' and 'funneling' into the job-market. too many cushty soft colleges with 75%+ acceptance rates giving out degrees to people who have no business being 'undergraduates'. it stems from america's pathological fear of anyone being denied access to a privilege. in ideal and principle, sure, but in practice you need less colleges or more stringent entry standards. college is becoming increasingly seen as an 'entitlement' in america, which is why, on paper, you have too many grads. in reality, you probably have great employment rates for grads coming out of ivy league level schools, and a shit-tonne of grads with 'communications' or 'tourism' degrees from barely-just-on-paper 'colleges'. which is why extreme measures are being called for.

i'm all for education for everyone regardless of background and access, but it shouldn't be regardless of INTELLIGENCE. higher-education and freedom to enrich and nourish yourself - yes, great. not accepting that some people just aren't college-material, and then hyper-inflating the graduate pool because you're afraid to enforce rigorous entry standards - not great.

Jaekus wrote:

It annoys me how people use the term bipolar incorrectly.

aynrandroolz wrote:

Jay wrote:

aynrandroolz wrote:

you have too many graduates, period, which is why you have to encourage 'shaping' and 'funneling' into the job-market. too many cushty soft colleges with 75%+ acceptance rates giving out degrees to people who have no business being 'undergraduates'. it stems from america's pathological fear of anyone being denied access to a privilege. in ideal and principle, sure, but in practice you need less colleges or more stringent entry standards. college is becoming increasingly seen as an 'entitlement' in america, which is why, on paper, you have too many grads. in reality, you probably have great employment rates for grads coming out of ivy league level schools, and a shit-tonne of grads with 'communications' or 'tourism' degrees from barely-just-on-paper 'colleges'. which is why extreme measures are being called for.

i'm all for education for everyone regardless of background and access, but it shouldn't be regardless of INTELLIGENCE. higher-education and freedom to enrich and nourish yourself - yes, great. not accepting that some people just aren't college-material, and then hyper-inflating the graduate pool because you're afraid to enforce rigorous entry standards - not great.

Weren't you the idiot screaming about how education is the most important thing to a society and that they should not raise your tuition rates because it was so essential? Now we educate too many people? You're a joke. One minute you're an effete elitist snob and the other minute your an effete everyman looking out for the less fortunate. Confused bipolar jackass.

you are an idiot. an absolute idiot. they are not mutually inclusive. they are mutually exclusive.

i am ALL for education for education's sake, as a principle, i.e. i am all for people studying whatever abstruse corner of ancient history or whatever slavic texts they want to study. if someone wants to spend 4 years reading persian literature or contemplating metaphysics in a philosophy department or looking at mycenaean ruins for an archaeology course... be my guest. i am all for 'equality of subjects' in terms of prestige and access. i am ALL for education being free, too, although in my own circumstances that will never happen. but, yes, politically, i do believe that everyone should have ACCESS to ANY education (i.e. any subject, regardless of its supposed 'market demand'), whether they are rich or poor, male or female, black or white, etc.

this has NOTHING to do with how many graduates a country has, as a percentage or proportion of any given generation. the push to put everyone through college - even those who are not, to put it mildly, intellectual, or studious - is a farce. this has nothing to do with access determined by background/class/wealth, and nothing to do with one subject receiving preference or being pushed over another. it is to do with there simply being too many institutions, taking on too many people annually, and graduating people at a ridiculously low standard. i am all for universities - but they should be a cultural and educational elite. this isn't 'elitist' to say that universities should be centres of EXCELLENCE and serious LEARNING. when you have 1,000+ colleges, 70% of which are shitty and aren't worth the paper their degrees are printed on, then the value of being a 'graduate' is completely worthless. a degree becomes a 'flat-rate' standard, rather than an actual merit, or achievement. this is a problem. a problem that boneheaded politicians such as the above try to solve by introducing misguided and arbitrary 'price incentives' and 'subject preferencing' to try and rectify. the basic problem isn't that humanities degrees are worthless to society: it's that the society is over-producing graduates (of all stripes, but we'll stick with humanities for the florida case study) who, going on their intelligence and educational background, are giving the term 'graduate' a very wide and lax definition, indeed. this basic, honest, and pragmatic view is no more 'elitist' than it is 'elitist' to not allow fat and unfit people to join the military. you need STANDARDS for any given institution - be it academia, the military, professional sports, or whatever - otherwise they lose their purpose and societal value. it is no more elitist to say that a non-intellectual person is not suitable for a degree than it is elitist to turn away a morbidly obese person from the marines. GO DO SOMETHING ELSE, it's just the honest truth of the situation. the problem is that in america college has become sugar-coated as a middle-class lifestyle 'rite of passage'.

again, how is that contradictory? if you are intellectual, and if studying is your thing, i believe you should be able to go and study whatever you like - for free, too, ideally speaking. what i am absolutely against is high-school dropouts flunking it into some bottom-tier college because the degree is seen as a 'must have' absolute requisite to adult life. it isn't. university isn't for everyone. i'd be perfectly happy seeing only 15-30% of any given year-group/generation go to university. not everyone is destined to be a thinker, or a researcher, or a professional. heaping them with 3-4 years' of debt and a mickey-mouse degree to entertain this pretension doesn't help anyone... except, of course, the banks providing the loans. who are doing verrrrrry well out of this 'must go to college' narrow-mindset. the problem is that universities are seen as a MUST DO THIS stepping-stone to any sort of respectable adult life now... whereas really, they are centres of academic research and learning. forcing a kid who is not book-smart or not motivated by learning at all to go to (a bad) college, to get a (shitty) degree, just does him more harm than good. then people start looking around and complaining that there's 'too many unemployed graduates'. well, this needs some qualification: there are mostly too many unemployed graduates with shitty degrees from shitty colleges.

law and medicine have their house in order, in comparison. they are (supposedly and idealistically) open to everyone, according to merit. however, top law and medicine schools are fairly elite and keep their classes small. they know that, in any given year, there will only be so many hospital jobs or law firms taking on new trainee solicitors/lawyers. they don't sell a fantasy to as many people as possible, in other words, to cash in on tuition fees and bank loans selling misguided youths on a future that will never be theirs, statistically speaking.

i love education, and i love learning. what i loathe are people who eat up spaces and waste 4 years of their lives because they couldn't think of anything better to do, or because their parents were applying pressure to 'get a degree', despite them basically hating studying and being of no value to the student/university community. what has happened over the last 30-40 years is that, gradually, the group that formerly went to vocational training colleges or took up apprenticeships or industry jobs (of high skill and worth in-themselves), have started to see this as 'shameful' or a 'failure' of some sort, and have now packed to go off to academically weak universities to study shite. in the UK, these former vocational-industrial schools were called 'polytechnics', and there is literally a black-and-white line of demarcation between the top 25-30 elite 'universities', and then the 90-100 or so polytechnics and training colleges that now 'grant degrees'. bogus degrees. it's a structural and cultural problem: a feeling of entitlement to be supposedly 'well-educated', but a lack of interest to actually be well-educated, or to take a proactive interest and make efforts towards their studies (let alone any research or serious work beyond undergraduate level, which is by all accounts set-up as a training to create - quelle surprise - graduate students); and then a system/structure that is all too happy to lend lend lend vast sums of money to these misled youths.

either you are drastically misreading my (simple) argument, here, or you are being incredibly dumb. at no point am i reversing my statements or proving hypocritical.

These estimates come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which also estimates that 728,200 people were working as lawyers in America in 2010.  ABA law schools have issued approximately 1.4 million law degrees over the past 40 years. This suggests that 48 percent of the people who graduated from law schools over the past four decades are not working as lawyers.