academia

17 Million Unnecessary College Degrees; Obama Administration Seeks to Increase the Number

by Hans Bader on December 9, 2010 · 6 comments

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

In America today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.  Over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.  So do thousands of janitors.

As Richard Vedder notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”  This fact is “incompatible” with “the relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership . . . . Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.”  These depressing statistics are also discussed at The Economic Collapse Blog.

We wrote earlier about the college debt bubble, and how greedy, government-subsidized college administrators are charging obscene amounts of money for largely useless and ideologically-slanted “educations.”  (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more in tuition, compared to just 5 colleges in 2008-09, and federal financial-aid subsidies effectively reward colleges for increasing tuition to levels that would evoke outrage in other civilized countries.)

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

The College Debt Bubble: Is It Ready to Explode?

by Hans Bader on December 3, 2010 · 11 comments

in Economy, Employment, Zeitgeist

“Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?,” asks Laura Rowley at Yahoo! Finance. College tuition has skyrocketed much more than housing did during the housing bubble, in percentage terms. One hundred colleges charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition. College financial-aid policies punish thrifty families, so that “parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.”

“University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers,” notes Facebook investor Peter Thiel, “selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties,” he says, an assessment shared by prominent law professor Glenn Reynolds.

My wife is French. She spent twice as much time in class at her second-tier French university as I did in my flagship American university (the University of Virginia), and more time studying, too (even though I was studious by American standards, and as a result, later went on to attend Harvard Law School). France spends less per student on higher education than we do, to produce a more literate and knowledgeable citizenry.

Vast amounts of money are spent by American colleges on useless administrators and politically correct indoctrination. For many people, college no longer pays off as an investment.

Much of college “education” is a waste of time. I learned more practical law in six weeks of studying for the bar exam and a couple summers of working for law firms than I did in three years of law school. I spent much of my time at Harvard Law School watching “Married… With Children” or engaged in political arguments with classmates, rather than studying (much of what I did study was useless). Even students who were high on drugs had no difficulty graduating.

(Higher education is no guarantee of even basic literacy. When I worked at the Department of Education handling administrative appeals, I was dismayed by the poor writing skills of the graduate students who lodged complaints against their universities.)

I used to work for a polling firm, and found that people with a couple years of college were frequently factually dumber about the world around them, and more politically correct, than people who had not attended college at all, in their responses to public-opinion surveys. An electrician with no college degree is far more likely to know who his congressman is and to understand the economy than some liberal arts college dropout.

When law schools claim almost all of their graduates find jobs, what they don’t tell you is that they include low-paying, part-time and temporary jobs in non-legal fields in making that claim. Sending excessive numbers of people to college results in even unskilled jobs being performed by people with college degrees.

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

College Official Ignorantly Claims Pacific Northwest Is Racist

by Hans Bader on September 16, 2008 · 3 comments

in Culture, Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Is it worth it to spend $49,385 a year to send your kid to Connecticut College?   The answer is no, judging from a wacky, hate-filled, and ignorant editorial by an official at Connecticut College.  In it, the College’s radical History Department chair, Catherine McNicol Stock, vilifies residents of the Pacific Northwest.

Enraged at rural people who identify with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Professor Stock claims that the Pacific Northwest, which regularly elects female and minority lawmakers, is “populated” by “angry white men,” racists and sexists, and “white-supremacist groups.”

The exact opposite is true.  The Pacific Northwest is very open to advances by minorities and women.  Washington State has elected an Asian-American governor (Gary Locke), and two female governors (including the trailblazer Dixy Lee Ray in 1976), and both of its current Senators are women.  Idaho has elected a Native-American attorney general, Larry Echohawk.  Alaska has elected a female Senator and a female governor (whose husband is part Eskimo).  These states also have elected minority judges, like Washington state appellate judge Jerome Farris, a moderate who was later appointed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Women comprise 4 of the 9 justices on the Washington Supreme Court, and once comprised a majority.

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