I put that pic on FB, and it was removed within an hour.

That meme is disturbing. Brings to mind a question I've been asking myself . . . STEM aside, do universities still provide a public good? Certainly, the two persons pictured have destroyed lives. Did that destruction happen in "higher education"?

Probably due to shitty or absent fathers.

Allow me to answer your question with another question:

Is it the nature of universities to indoctrinate students with a particular ideology?

Or is it simply the effect of universities to provide a space which is relatively free of adult supervision, in which young minds already at an age in which it becomes natural to rebel against social norms, are allowed to freely think and say objectively stupid things while receiving positive reinforcement from their peers for it?

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...a4fb3d8cc8.png

As my son is in college right now (for STEM), I asked him about it. Mostly, the ones who either outright oppose or just don't support those views know it's best just to keep your mouth shut. They have effectively silenced voices of dissent, for fear of retribution or ostracization. Why argue with someone when it gets you nothing but grief? This simply encourages those that yell the loudest, thinking they have the consent of the majority.

I've been trying to find some kind of background on the "White men are terrorists" guy.

No, not CNN host Don Lemon who, in an on-air conversation with Chris Cuomo in 2018 stated that "the biggest terror threat in this country comes from radicals on the far right, primarily white men" and has since defended that position multiple times.

I'm talking about the pink-haired nonbinary fellow.

Reverse-image searching turns up a ton of results. The image seems to have first appeared in late Sep 2017, and I have found it in blogs written in Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, French, Spanish, Finnish, Mandarin, and others. But I cannot find a single posting of it which actually gives some insight into who the person is, where the photo was taken, or pretty much anything else of that nature.

The person in the photo appears to exist only as a meme.


Which, in a way, is a commentary on the reality of conversations such as the ones taking place in this very thread. Images which Braineack posts, such as the Soviet meme above, tend to reduce situations to a very simplified caricature of themselves. Far-leftists do the same, when characterizing white conservatives as all being fascists or Nazis. People at both extremes of the political binary are just cranking out strawpersons left and right, and then feeling very self-congratulatory about exposing the absurdity of their invented adversary.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5e2cbfba7c.png

My youngest daughter (BS in genetics and finishing a Pharm. D. this May) had exactly the same experience when taking her humanity credits a few years ago.

I think that should have occurred in high school. The typical Uni is actively installing crap into student’s minds. (These two statements should be reviewed individually).

College is the new high school, so that we can further coddle and delay the entry into adulthood of the masses. And they get to be a huge voting bloc too!

Assuming you're referring to the earlier concept of the university as serving the function of providing a space for young people to experience freedom of thought...

I certainly believe that, historically, was an ideal function of the university. It is important to view this in the context of the fact that, until fairly recently, a university education was relatively uncommon, and limited generally to only the upper-class of society.

Here is a chart which I just made, based on US Census data:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5fa685b6b1.png

37.5% of all Americans 25 and older have a bachelors degree today, as compared with 4.6% in 1940.

And that's just the people who actually graduated. The graduation rate has actually decreased over time, as more and more people who are not really cut out for the university experience are crammed into the system. As of 2020, a mere 64% of those who embark upon a four year degree program actually graduate, so in reality, more like 60% of all Americans have been accepted to, and attended at least some, college.

In other words, a University education used to be a rare and elite experience. With such small student bodies, and perhaps more importantly, a very homogeneous student body drawn principally from the already-elite upper strata of society, it was realistic to expect the sort of Dead Poets Society atmosphere to have actually existed in reality.

But now that more than half of all Americans are being funneled into the university system, well... that means that, by definition, there are a lot of college freshmen out there whose IQ is below 100.

That's not snark, it's math.


And you just cannot reasonably expect such an enormous, heterogeneous student body, consisting largely of individuals from the west side of the bell curve, to be anything other than what it is today. It is a matter of simple statistics to observe that the average college freshman has become dumber over time.

But the reality is, that in order to get a decent job these days you need a degree. A degree in damn near anything.

Back in the mid 1940's, after the war my father walked into an engineering place, and they started him as a draftsman. Over the years, his reputation was all he needed to get another job. By the time I did the same in the early 1980s, my 2-year degree was barely enough to get an interview. Now try getting past the HR trashcan without a 4-year degree.

The exception, of course, is to go into a trade. But that means work, and no office. And for some reason it is considered a worse option, even though a decent plumber or electrician makes about double what I do on average.

Oh, I absolutely agree, with of course the caveats which you noted.

The bachelor's degree, today, represents about the same level of value in the employment marketplace as the high school diploma did sixty years ago.

That's not just a subjective comparison, ether. The percentage of Americans holding a 4 year college degree today is about the same as the percentage of Americans with a High School diploma in 1950, and the two have followed a similar trend.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...3fad23f8e2.png

That number actually came as a shock to me as I was researching this. But sure enough, only 24.5% of Americans graduated from High School in 1940, and 34.3% in 1950. (Again, US Census data)



And I'm sure that there are many, many factors which have driven these trends. H.S. graduation is probably linked to increased economic prosperity and decreased need for children as labor after WWII, followed by increased demand for semi-skilled labor in manufacturing environments of the type learned in high school vocational courses. Then, in more recent years, artificially boosted by educational policies designed specifically to retain students and drive graduation rates up by lowering standards and providing more remedial and supplemental programs.

The initial boost in college attendance was likely sparked by the GI Bill which was founded in 1944, and then further encouraged by exemptions and deferments to military conscription (the draft) during the Korean and Vietnam wars.


Whatever the causes, the results speak for themselves. Just as a massive increase in the money supply causes inflation and thus a reduction in the value of a dollar, this massive increase in college attendance has both diluted the value of a bachelors degree, as well as fundamentally altered the composition of the student body and the nature of the college experience.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...e571001e5c.png

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...db5f965144.png

I've still been thinking about this. Drove me to do a bit of research into whether and how the choices which students are making as to field of study have changed over the years. For this post, I'm using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which is an agency of the US Dept. of Education.

Here are the top ten, from 1970 to the present day:

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...61fdee8dfd.png


More or less the same growth trend across all of them, with the exception of social sciences and history.

I really did not realize how many business majors we have. On the plus side, those degree programs actually tend to be pretty well-rounded, including algebra, applied probability and statistics, quantitative analysis, English comp, IT fundamentals, sociology, etc.

No real surprise that healthcare is one that's seen major gains.


But what about things like gender-studies, which have been all the rage of late in terms of "Reasons to criticize the educational system?"

The NCES data lumps together "Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies" as a single statistic. And we'll go ahead and add that line into the chart as well:

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...1da30e0485.png

So... yeah. It's not zero, but it's also barely visible, and hasn't changed a great deal in the past 50 years.

It's so small in fact that we have to do some calculations on the raw data for it to be meaningful. Degrees awarded in this section numbered 2,579 in 1971, and 7,374 in 2021, an increase of 183%.

Doing the same math on every other field, we see that the rate of growth in gender/ethnic/etc studies is less than the rate of growth in Business, Healthcare, Biology, Psychology, Agriculture, Social Services, Engineering Technologies, Law, Communication Technologies, and Military Technologies and Applied Sciences.

Not only are the gender-studies crowd a teeny, tiny minority, they're not even growing in numbers as fast as the "real" degrees. They are down there at the very bottom of the chart with Theology and Religious Vocations, and have actually declined by 20% since the peak in 2011-12.


And I find that interesting.

That people have learned that useless degrees are actually *gasp* useless?

Well... yes.

It's certainly become fashionable in recent years for us middle-aged folks to be dismissive of gen-wu complaints about the difficulties of entering the workforce, by saying things which involve "... your gender-studies degree."

But in point of fact, it appears that the current generation of undergrads are actually more focused on degree programs which are of vocational relevance than their predecessors.


In the data from 1995/96 (when I was in college), 5,633 out of the 1,164,792 bachelor's degrees granted were in the ethnic / area / gender studies category, which is about 0.48%.

For the most recent crop of undergrads, it's 7,374 degrees out of 2,066,445, down to 0.35%.

Meaning that us gen-Xers were actually MORE likely to graduate with a degree in "gender and ethnicity" (or similar) than kids in college today.


In fact, it's approaching a 50 year low:

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...31f971408b.png



And that just turns a lot of arguments right on their head.