Increasingly, college is becoming four years of partying and indoctrination between high school and the real world. Making it free will only make that worse.
It seems “free college” is worth every penny
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Someone should tell Williams that the title of a course does not indicate its usefulness. Actually, as an economist, he should already know that.
Regardless, the point he makes about most students not being “college ready” is valid. I’d suggest the actual number Of “ready” students is 20%. Most students should begin at the Community College level and progress that their own pace.
As to the tired harangue on “leftist professors”; it’s not a surprise that intelligent people capable of critical thinking tend to lean Progressive.
However, passing on those critical thinking skills is not “indoctrination”
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“Critical Thinking” is not possible without a basis in knowledge and math skills.
We are graduating people who can’t place the Civil War within 50 years and don’t know an octopus is a mollusc and not a fish, taught by professors who mistake correlation with causation.
Starting there, just how much critical thinking can you expect?
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“We are graduating people who can’t place the Civil War within 50 years…”
Not to mention an entire political party who thinks 2nd place was a win, or worse, who won’t stop fighting it.
I’m one of those who believes that college, even state supported, should not be free. However, I do believe that a state school should be financially possible, sans debt, to a person working at minimum wage.
I worked minimum wage jobs, 20 to 30 hours per week in the winter and 60+ in the summer, paid for living and school, and graduated debt-free after 6 years. There were two years where I had to keep working for Fall semester.
But I had a goal, and it was attainable then. It’s not attainable for those in the middle, let alone on the bottom.
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Second place is a win? As in electoral college votes as it should be?
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@Tabor
Actually “critical thinking” is a “process” independent of knowledge.
Of course validated knowledge (the more the better) will improve the outcomes of the “process“ when applied.
As to your “professors who mistake correlation with causation” silliness; every PHD program requires training in Research Methods which has at its core a very clear delineation between the two.
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Don’t argue. He’s a Dentist. He knows calculus.
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You know, I never used that term for tartar speaking to a patient. I don’t believe in using jargon to impress people. Not relevant, I know, but communication is more important than showing off.
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One of my college professors insisted that we call it “the Calculus” to distinguish it from hard, smelly substances… wait, what, which?
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And yet we see thousands of papers published every year that make that mistake.
https://www.bmj.com/content/308/6924/283
https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-of/65890
https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/3/4798840/fake-research-paper-exposes-poor-standards-open-access-journals
Quantity is not quality
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@tabor
Anybody can publish anything.
That’s why we have refereed (peer reviewed) Journals that separate the “real” from the crap…
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the journals that SCIENCE spoofed were refereed.
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Took a bit to look through the 6 year old “sting” article.
Found two things; the so-called “peer reviewed” work cited was academically a joke and that the few more reputable reviewers involved were fired (and a couple indicted).
Bad actors abound, but I’ll stick by my fundamental comment that the vast majority of university level professors clearly understand and differentiate the difference in their research and teachings.
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Speaking of critical thinking:
“ Highly religious Americans are more likely to be Republican than those who are less religious, which helps explain the relationship between partisanship and beliefs about human origins. The major distinction is between Republicans and everyone else. While 58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, 39% of independents and 41% of Democrats agree.”
https://news.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx
So why are we blaming the progressives? If 3/5ths of conservatives believe that the world, or universe for that matter, was created by the wave of a magical wand, it makes science and history kind of hard to study. It effects our relationship to the environment also in that we are but a part of it, not the master.
BTW, College is not for everyone. But decent education is. No excuse for a inner city school to be rat infested and a Scarsdale school to be better than top notch private schools.
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The article is far more damning of our high schools than our colleges. It highlights statistics documenting the real harm being done by tax hating “conservatives” increasingly starving schools of the resources they need.
With that said, let’s apply some of your favorite logic to prove the problem is not as severe as it may seem. Let’s just leave out the places where it worst and – voila – much better. Using that method, let’s omit those measurably backward areas that still support Donald Trump. Much better.
BTW, indoctrination? Really? The more people learn, the less likely they are to agree with you? Is that what you mean?
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Williams article was legitimately concerned UNTIL he added, as his closing line, left wing indoctrination. To that I call horseshit. Perhaps the critical thinking he claims does not happen actually does and the result is young people who believe in what is right IN THEIR MINDS at the time. Indoctrination happens in re-education camps, not on college campuses. Give your children the choice and ability to think with an open . mind, they will grow.
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RE: “Making it free will only make that worse.”
Making K-12 “free” pretty much ruined it. We should expect the same, and for all the same reasons, of making college “free.”
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and it only took 200 years of conservatism to damage it.
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There is “free”, affordable and ridiculous.
Currently we are in the ridiculous mode.
Everyone should have some skin in the game when it comes to education (and healthcare, too). But being “skinned” is not the same.
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RE: “Everyone should have some skin in the game when it comes to education (and healthcare, too).”
No thanks. Having skin in a game that harms children is not my idea of virtue.
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I had to read that twice to see that you did not understand what I wrote.
Having skin in the game, to me at least, means having to pay for what you receive. So that education should not be free, but affordable. Low income can use part time jobs that would cover their tuition and expenses. As income increases and ability to pay increases, maybe less work and more money.
It was not a collectivist idea, which I know you don’t like. It was individuals paying for what they get within their means.
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RE: “It was not a collectivist idea, which I know you don’t like. It was individuals paying for what they get within their means.”
How do you propose to adjust the payment to the means?
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Just like I wrote.
Low income can use part time jobs that would cover their tuition and expenses. As income increases and ability to pay increases, maybe less work and more money.
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RE: “Low income can use part time jobs that would cover their tuition and expenses. As income increases and ability to pay increases, maybe less work and more money.”
That’s what I thought. You are proposing collectivism.
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Whatever you say.
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All of this free education also leads to producing complete idiots like AOC who think a loss of 23,500 jobs is cause for a victory lap. Or is that just the dumbing down of America that liberals champion? You know, basic police academy math is racist if certain people can’t pass it. Funny that liberal “critical” thinking skills are devoid of common sense.
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What loss of 23,500 jobs?
You mean Amazon’s HQ2? The 25,000 jobs, very much like the B.S. that Foxconn conned Scott Walker’s Wisconsin with, was an unsubstantiated number and represented a best-case scenario at least 5 years down the road, per Amazon’s own numbers.
Instead, Amazon leased 335K sq ft and this year alone is hiring 1,500 workers in Manhattan. Now, my company has 2 leases in NYC, we’re paying $30 sq ft in rent. NYC rent tax is 3.9% (after the base rent reduction). So Amazon is coming to NYC, will pay $400K in rent tax, and did so without $3 billion of incentives paid for by NYC and NY state taxpayers, no publicly financed helipad for Jeff Bezos, no Queens residents or small businesses being pushed out, no neighborhoods destroyed (Hudson Yards is an already existing development on the Manhattan waterfront.
On a similar note, without having to pay extortion to them, NYC is getting Google, which bought Chelsea Market and the Milk building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in addition to its Hudson Square campus. All told, Google has added 8,000 jobs in the last 2 years and says it will double that in the next 5, and, as noted, has bought the buildings to do so.
All told by the end of 2020, Hudson Yards will have 40,000 employees working in companies across the development, including Facebook (2,500 jobs, 2.2M sq ft office space) WarnerMedia, Turner, HBO, CNN and Warner Bros, Tapestry and L’Oreal USA, VaynerMedia, BCG, BCG Digital Ventures, Intersection, SAP and Sidewalk Labs, BlackRock, KKR, Wells Fargo, Silver Lake, Third Point, Intercept, Milbank, Point72 Asset Management, MarketAxess, DNB, Boies, Schiller & Flexner and major law firm Cooley.
LOL, I especially love this in view of last week’s Facebook post by ex-Congressman, now forever ratbleeper Scott Taylor, with a Forbes magazine article talking about how terrible NYC is, how supposedly 1M people have left the city and no companies are adding jobs there. Yes, it’s so terrible that Forbes has a major office and event space in Greenwich Village – and Steve Forbes parks his nice yacht right there at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. And the reality is that the population of the city has increased every year 2011 – 2019, and, as above, plenty of companies are adding jobs there.
Meanwhile, you and I get to pay $750M incentives to Amazon + the citizens of Arlington county another $23M for the jobs that might come to northern Virginia. Making traffic and affordable housing in Crystal City and environs even worse. Oh, and since we elected Keegan, Cosgrove and DeSteph and Democrats now run the Senate, it will indeed be you and I in Virginia Beach paying for it, not northern Virginia.
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