TerryBondsOD Student debt in 2011-2012 vs 1970
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Student debt in 2011-2012 vs 1970
Subject: Occupier Angst - Summing Up The OWS (Occupy Wall Street) Movement And Participants
This is part of a great article by an outstanding thinker and writer/author - forwarded by Dick Durham. Click on Victor Davis Hanson for the rest of his article on many of the participants in the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement in New York City and other cities. Many of these have graduated, and are still in universities and colleges, in fields that are flooded and hold little future. Not a pleasant thought during their waking hours for the past few years and the future years of many/most. Read some of the readers' comments below his whole article. Also click on Bio to learn more about Victor Hanson. Murray
Rage On - And On And On (Partial)
Victor Davis Hanson
October 23, 2011 - 12:17 pm
From PJ Institute's PJ Media
Victor Davis Hanson, in writing about the roots of Occupier angst, supplies a pretty good definition of what it once meant to be educated: The college curriculum was designed to instill inductive thinking. It prepared the student to write well, think, and have a corpus of dates, events, people and places at his fingertips for reference and elucidation.
But that has all changed: In other words, for much of the 20th century, college was not that exorbitantly expensive (my hardscrabble grandfather farmer sent all three of his daughters to college, two to Stanford, on the meager profits from 100 acres of raisins in the midst of the Depression). Students emerged literate and inductive. The most impressive degrees, of course, were not history or English (much less environmental studies). Instead the palms went to engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology.
These were the hard sciences and skills some of us could not master.
Social sciences were relatively small, tiny enclaves. And while science majors got A's in their anthropology, sociology and psychology & all liberal arts courses, the opposite was not true: The latter majors panicked when forced to take a basic physics or physiology, or chemistry class to graduate!
I note in passing that not only were there no black, Latino, gender, green, film, gay, peace, urban studies or leisure studies courses, programs and empires, but also a general impression that no one would wish to pay for such classes that imparted little real knowledge about the inductive method or the necessary referents of literature, history and science. So many of these classes were therapeutic.
Back prior to it becoming non-PC there existed an honest undergraduate degree ranking system posted on every campus. Physics, Chemical engineering, chemistry, Electrical engineering always were scaled near the 95-100 level of difficulty.........any degree in education, sociology, social work, english, history, philosophy, political science were ranked about 1 to 10 on a 1 to 100 difficulty scale.
GREs reflected that lack of challenge. Education, social science and humanities majors generally scored poorly on GREs - even though the GREs were biased towards liberal arts. The percentage of undergrads in the hards sciences, engineering and math has plunged as the percentage enrolled in "easy" degree programs has jumped in the past 25 years.
Let's have honesty & transparency in higher education. All Universities MUST publish their total costs and the entry salaries of all graduates in all fields! Darn it, we're importing engineers & chemist from Isreal and India.
Most were downright accusatory: go back through history and as melodrama point out the bad and good guys (based on present day liberal standards) or study how modern capitalism should be replaced by a more humane model - in environmental, financial, religious, racial, class and gender terms.So here is where the last thirty years all led: To way too many students who are indebted, poorly educated and without skills like high tech engineering, sophisticated medicine or computer design that the country needs.
They are consumed with contemporary furor as education's bubble of nearly a trillion dollars in debt is about to burst. They are mad at the system that they were taught oppresses them but also at themselves. Who would not be after spending so much money for something of so little value? Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than arrogance coupled with ignorance - and spiced with occasional glibness and the slow realization that they’ve been had.
Yes they should be angry. But as Mark Steyn points out "The great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at."They want Santa Claus to pay their tuition and the government to forgive their loans but they fail to direct any anger at the "Greedy Fat Cats" of academia - and at their poor choices.
Comments
Government likes dealing with BIG entities - whether it is BIG business, BIG unions or big donors.
Even if Obama raises $1B for his re-election and the GOP raises a similar amount......if you count ALL the money spent on elections in 2012 it will pale when compared to what Americans will have spent on potato chips in 2012.
I think Ron Paul is correct in that a root cause of the inequity in the system is the privately owned federal reserve. We should abolish the fed & return to government issued currency - probably backed by something tangible. Look up the ownership of the US Federal Reserve. It's the whose who of big American & european money. Interestingly, there's plenty of cross ownership of the federal reserves of all the european nations.......all PRIVATELY held an generating hundreds of billions in profits for doing ABSOLUTELY nothing each year. You'd see SERIOUS riots if Americans were educated about the evils of fractional reserve banking & privately "federal reserves."
Liberal arts are vital, but the market determines salaries based upon relative supply & demand. There are WAY too many graduates coming out of easy degree programs. They depress wages in their own fields.
Primarily, many kids are spending a fortune to earn degrees in social work, art history, urban studies (in lieu of hard sciences & math).......Then
they're complaining about not earning enough to pay off loans while working @ McDonald's.
Time for the colleges to become truly transparent. Each freshman should be handed a document showing the actual "real world" salaries of various degree program graduates from that school & the overall market.
I think the old 1-100 bachelor degree difficulty scale should be brought back. Use that to educate kids as to why chemistry & engineering undergrad degrees earn $50-$75K (high demand, low supply) vs the $15K a social work B.A. commands.
Scores of studies show: that today's youth are more narcissistic than ever before. While previous generations of the l8 to 24-year-old crowd prioritized family and meaning, today's young want six figures and they want it now. They have been raised to feel special and entitled, particularly those in supposedly disenfranchised groups (which, incidentally, is most of the American population). And if they have to take some of your hard earned dough to live the good life, no problemo. Meanwhile, we keep cranking out social science majors, art history majors, etc from expensive private schools. These kids are buried in debt with very poor job prospects.
My brother tells me technology firms in Huntsville are recruiting engineering talent from India, Israel, Europe, Korea.......because we're not graduating enough engineers
to replace retirees - ESPECIALLY M.S. & Phd level engineers. My nephew will very likely be the only American, in ANY PhD engineering track @ UAH if he elects to stay there. 100% of the remainder of PhD candidates are Asian, or European.
I think the Constitutional Convention is a dangerous road. I would much rather replace congress and ammend the current constitution. There is really no control of who makes the decisions in the convention, the way I understand it is the states appoint a deligation. That is politicians appointing them.
I also agree that there are a bunch of cupcake degrees in college that I think an average 10th grade student could obtain. Student debt ties you to someone, be it the goverment or private. BTW I am "entitled" to some fee for posting this, right? LOL
Closer to home......professional student debt (Optometry school) is not too different now compared to 30, or forty, years ago when adjusted for inflation. There's considerable data supporting that hypothesis.
Many students get into mischief when using student loans for nicer apartments, cars, trips etc.
Universities should do a better job of "educating" students regarding anticipated salaries upon graduation. It seems that they obfuscate that knowledge knowing that some students might seek alternate majors if made aware of realistic expectations in the post-graduation job markets.
Yes job market sucks post graduation. only thing available in commercial optometry. No private practice docs post job openings online, reps are no help and going to meetings are worthless. So yes the post graduation job market should be made known before we sign up to pay 150k degree. Sorry had to vent
NO students NO job for the professor. Optometry school, liberal arts, etc.
Harder it is to get something the more valuable it becomes.
Banzai Public News
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Inflammatory Disease
Inflammatory Disease
Much of what we deal with in health care is auto-immune, or induced inflammatory disease. Much of that is preventable, or can be reduced, via lifestyle modifications. Examples include simple carbohydrates like high fructose corn syrup. Here's a recent article delineating increased risk of coronary heart disese (CHD) caused by sodas. One can of pop per day seems to raise CHD risk by 20%!
Terry
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/760100?src=top10...
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Repurposed Drug Shows Promise Against Macular Edema
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Larry, Chuck & I were sitting in the airport one afternoon after a BANZAI.......... Topic of Crohn's, bowel cancer & inflammation came up.
India has significantly lower rates of bowel cancer than Europe & the US. Why?
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A Letter to the #Occup(iers): The principle of Non-contradiction:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/a-letter-to-the-occupiers_b_1007459.html
While it is certainly true that some, perhaps a lot, of the members of OWS or the Tea Party don't deserve the time of day I believe many of both deserve a hearing. Parenthetically I don't believe that everyone with an education has to be a doctor, lawyer, chemical engineer, computer scientist or the like to be a value to themselves or society. We do need musicians, teachers, artists, philosophers, etc. And those who take their education seriously will work just as hard at their chosen field as someone in Electrical Engineering. But, I digress....
While those protesting student debt are a component of the OWS protests, OWS protests and those of the Tea Party are emblematic of a rising discontent with a country that is not working FOR any of us any longer.
There is something radically amiss in this country and in my opinion and Lessig's it is the corrupting influence of money on our democracy. Be Tea Party conservative or OWS liberal but our individual positions don't matter spit when 99% of the money financing elections comes from 1% of the population. Our congress is beholden to the monied interests and none of us benefit from that fact.
A consequence of the above is that government policy, not hard work, luck (or lack of it), is the instrument of our increasing income disparity, unnecessary wars, housing bubbles and busts and on and on all of which are dangerous to our democracy. All has been bought and paid for by the monied interests in this country. Individuals have been cut out of the equation and that fact should be a concern for all of us. Just take a look at the recent CBO report on this and check out what has happened to income in this country for the top 10% -- particularly the top 1% compared to anyone else. Starting to look like France in 1789 -- Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake." Angry mob: "Off with their heads." Even those with science or engineering degrees know how this ended for the French aristocracy.
I don't know about the rest of you but I want to live in a civil society that works -- kind of like the time from 1945 until about 1964 if you are feeling nostalgic.
Congress will never change any of this, so grass roots movements like the Tea Party and the various Occupy __________ (fill in the blank) raging across the country should have a very common goal. Get the money out of politics and restore the individual voices of all of us -- and let the majority prevail, not those with the biggest wallets and the most to gain financially.
What we are seeing in both of these movements is a seething discontent with the way things are -- from very different perspectives. A key metric on this is that the public's approval of Congress is now 9%. (Time to measure the rate of disapproval -- 91%?) Time to throw the bums out, along with the Democratic and Republican parties who are both complicit and beholden to the $$ provided by the 1%. Lets restore the democracy that we once had. One citizen, one vote and a Congress who is beholden to us, not Wall Street, the NRA, the Unions, the Koch brothers, or George Soros. Choose your poison, but its all poison.
What Lessig is trying to do -- get a Constitutional Convention approved by 75% of the States and change the constitution to get the money out of politics. It can be done if enough of us are serious. Your politics don't matter -- literally -- true liberals or conservatives should be good with a congress that is fairly elected and beholden to no one except their constituents. Then 51% wins. I am good with that. Sounds like democracy to me.
Check out Rootstikers.org: http://www.rootstrikers.org/