generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

obviously we should send all the poets out to the Great Wasteland beyond the republic's walls

if someone "already" has the skills they'd need w/o college, then I dunno, lie about it, what's it matter to society? (besides Kantian objections against lying blah blah blah)

but o/w if someone can make it through a 4-year degree program with decent grades then they've shown they can handle some amount of grinding & that's a basic req & maybe the only basic req for the kinds of shitty office work that unfocused college grads end up (until now).

the point of life is to know the form of the good, duh

IMO Euler, a lot of what you are describing is related to the deliberate infantilization of western civilization and the blatant immaturity of ppl participating in post-secondary education. I know I was deeply unhappy during large parts of my academic career and that leaked hardcore into how much time I put into my classes. I would have benefited greatly from taking some time to live in "the real world" to acclimate myself to what my skills would be used for and to connect some type of tangible real-world goal to my academic studies, which were basically an extended prep course for grad school (of my college friends, I am literally THE ONLY ONE who didn't get a graduate degree).

Tie a system that better prepares students for what it actually means to be a college student to better, stronger support networks (and it really terrifies me to think that there are schools out there less supportive than Harvard when I was there, as the prevailing sense was that unless you were a professor's pet student or famous, you were thrown to the wolves) and I can't help but assume that graduation rates would increase sharply.

failing that, turn drinking games into a major

I majored in being the Asshole President

a system that better prepares students for what it actually means to be a college student

This seems like a biggie to me xp

it is very hard for me to think about education in america in any serious way, a lot of my friends are teachers now, and it is just still so hard to think about

and I don't even like america, conceptually

here is a random facebook status on my feed:

Taught my kids about how unions work today by having them all say "FUCK YOU" to me at once.

xp how can you not like the concept of America? it's got the American revolution and presidents with sideburns and Intrepidity and Innovation and Railroads!

another thing - outside of grad school what jobs ask for your transcript? almost none! even fairly official jobs usually believe you. as long as that's the case it really is more logical for someone at euler's school to just fuck around and then put a 3.9 on their resume.

― iatee, Wednesday, November 9, 2011 2:18 PM (2 minutes ago) [IP: 64.61.128.66: New York, United States]

not true. every public school teaching job asks for a transcript.

a system that better prepares students for what it actually means to be a college student

This seems like a biggie to me xp

Yeah I mean, I basically went through most of high school doing my work either during class or on the bus ride to school the day it was due; what this translated to is a work ethic as an adult where I wait until just past the last possible moment to do a task, then cram mightily and kill myself to pull heroic measures to get it done. I never actually learned how to finish things early or plan out my workload!

Me neither! I tried to make that a personal goal for myself in my last two years of college (which just ended heh, I act like it was forever ago) but I didn't make tons of progress on that front. (It is hard to learn how to do your best work when your halfhearted work gets good-to-excellent feedback. I finally hit a bit of a wall with that tactic during college but more importantly I realized that I did actually want to be proud of myself.)

yeah, I oughta keep my trap shut here, b/c I'm pos it won't go over well.

naw you can call us lazy :D

theres this weird thing were like, it seems p unfair that a le rosey alum who barely slumped her way through an creative writing degree at hampshire can land a sweet job in wealth mgmt after she graduates and plenty of other more qualified applicants are serving coffee but the le rosey girl is probably a better fit and if i was running pcs id hire her too. 'merit' is tricky thing i guess?

that's well-put & wise. My non-trad students are def better prepared for college work compared with similar trad students of similar abilities & talents (though less well-prepared than the best trad students, of whom we get very few anyway since they all go off to fancy private colleges like the one I went to).

but I dunno about connecting to tangible real-world goals of academic studies. I'm with that if it means: most majors should assume the bulk of their students aren't going to grad school & structure the curriculum accordingly. my department's in the process of working on that.

so I mean yeah: some of this is the fault of bad organization at the university level. & some of it's the fault of bad students. & those are intermixed! but "blatant immaturity" isn't the fault of university faculty.

also I wish we had a way of funding public education that didn't depend on graduating anyone b/c obv some people who go to college don't deserve a college degree but we also need them as "consumers" & this affects dean-level pressure toward grade inflation. it really sucks.

er xp to DJP a while back

Yeah I mean, I basically went through most of high school doing my work either during class or on the bus ride to school the day it was due; what this translated to is a work ethic as an adult where I wait until just past the last possible moment to do a task, then cram mightily and kill myself to pull heroic measures to get it done. I never actually learned how to finish things early or plan out my workload!

― sex-poodle Al Gore (DJP), Wednesday, November 9, 2011 5:36 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol otm. people really should be forced to work at mcdonalds for a few years before going to college

wait there are Hampshire alums working in finance? xp

i dont think its controversial to wish that kids who didnt work hard worked harder? or cared more? i think a lot of people in this thread might suggest that those kids would be better off not going to college, at least not at that point in their lives, given that theyre a) not really learning anything and b) probably putting themselves into debt. (this is all in a perfect world, where a college degree signified something more specific than "employable")

like in my plan the lazy kids would be working on farms. would get the laze right out of em

tho come to think of it my friend's evil ex girlfriend spent four years at Hampshire designing her own actuarial science major and is now an actuary no foolin

'actually an actuary' is the name of her forthcoming autobiography

or the name of a lesser-known Tennessee Williams play

like in my plan the lazy kids would be working on farms. would get the laze right out of em

― max, Wednesday, November 9, 2011 5:42 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is basically the premise of deep springs

yeah that's awesome for the 26 dudes who get to go there. Also I keep wanting someone to do an expose of Deep Springs having like weekly mandatory orgies or something

because come on

i think a lot of people in this thread might suggest that those kids would be better off not going to college

yeah, basically

or only to college later in life maybe

college should start at age like 26 probably

i would be so much better at college now than i was back then

yeah i appreciated the last two years of my undergrad way more than the first two and i'm actually excited to be in school now

euler's tirade against the lazy generation ignores what I said earlier- most of his students have absolutely nothing to gain from working very hard in his course! (other than personal betterment - but surprisesurprise that's not why most people are paying tuition)

if the top 20% of his class were guaranteed good jobs - similar to the situation at a lot of law schools - there'd be incentive to turn in the best goddamn paper you could write. (watched 'the paper chase' a few nights ago...good movie)

right now there are two groups who are gonna do well:
a. do really really really care about plato
b. want to go to grad school or one of a handful of careers where yr gpa matters

the rest prob want white collar jobs and an A+ in your class is really not gonna directly affect their prospects at one. there's really no reason not for them to be out having fun. maybe they should care about plato cause plato is pretty interesting but that's not why they're there. they're not lazy, they're rational w/r/t the value of their time.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_dropout_factories.php?page=all

i basically had no idea there were tertiary institutions anywhere in the world with < 50% graduation rates until i read this.

I wanna see the list of dropout factories that went with that article because based on the comments they accidentally put Concordia College in MN on it

iatee that's nonsense: they're not rational with their time, they're fucking around, playing video games, getting wasted, watching tv. that's rational? for fuck's sake they could learn how to write! or fucking scrub dishes, if they're not going to learn to use their minds.

I mean if your point is that most people don't want to be part of the ~knowledge economy~ then fine; but I gather you're prepared to see massive wage drops compared to now? if I'm a business owner I don't want to pay some know-nothing good coin to enter data into a computer; I want someone with ideas & energy to carry those out. & you don't develop those playing xbox or watching Jersey Shore while cased out on Schlitz.

Listen, when you work as an office drone, having ideas will kill ya.

getting wasted and interacting w/ modern technology is prob more related to the life of a modern office worker than reading about plato

I'm sorry but you expect everyone to be steve jobs or something, yes I am prepared for massive wage drops and your field is included in that btw

yeah that's just a failure of imagination, on your part & on the part of so-called college students today. no wonder everyone's depressed these days!

i.e. tl;dr; goodbye America

I'd like some evidence that hard-working philosophy majors have been something that contributed new *ideas and energy* to the american economy, iirc they just become lawyers

why are you hung up on philosophy majors

cause euler's a philosophy prof complaining about his lazy students

ah, so you're using the rhetorical stratagem known as "being a dick"

i feel like ive lost the thread somewhere, what are the two sides of this argument

you could start with "what do philosophy majors do" About 5,940,000 results (0.21 seconds)

& yes this oughtn't just be about philosophy; I think it's nuts to say it's rational for people to waste their time rather than work hard at learning (& yes I'm aware that I'm on this message board right now rather than writing today's lecture but this is a kind of meta-work for me right now as I try to sort out how to handle my classes today).

euler: our generation is lazy / has a failure of imagination / needs ~ideas and energy~, his evidence is some people in his class go out and party and play xbox
me: sorry dude they don't really have any reason to care about your class they just want a BA, that is why they are there, this is nothing new btw, they might not have been there 30 years ago when they coulda gotten a decent job w/o a BA

as I understood the argument, iatee's claiming that it's more rational for future "office drones" (his expression) to fuck around than to work hard at university

I disagree

I think "office drone" may actually have been my expression but carry on.

making personal connections + being sociable is more important to your future job prospects than being rly good at writing papers on socrates

another one of those 'true value of college' things

xp

also iatee you act as though as a BA has no value aside from signaling which I guess is your "conceit" on this thread but I'm saying: it's not just that you have a BA, but what you learned getting it, that gives you value. are you saying that you wish students could just go to class & give minimal effort & get great jobs w/o investing intellectual effort? because if so, I think I understand what you're longing for, where you're really coming from, at least.