Santorum: Obama 'A Snob' For Wanting Everyone To Go To College

[Torie]

Yes, Rick, higher education, and learning more abstract concepts, and how to parse abstractions, and read more complex text, is very subversive to traditional American values. That is why the Founders were so great. They were suspicious of that kind of book learning, and just let God inspire them to write the founding documents, including that closet atheist Jefferson, and not so closeted atheist Franklin.

Just why is it that you can discern such obvious truths that escape those with lesser insight than yourself?  You have a gift.

Why didn't Rick just say that besides the lack of motivation in some, perhaps not all those out there on the Fruited Plain have the tools to benefit from college due to our failed secondary educational system or something?   Why do you  need to personalize things the way you do, dissing Obama as a "snob" because he believes in the benefits of higher education for more young people?  Rick, on a personal level, Obama is probably better liked than you are at the moment. Lashing out at him personally will merely diminish yourself. Deal with it.

And is this one of the reasons why GOP performance among the more educated is tanking - the anti-intellectual tone of chaps like yourself? Hey Rick, do you think the theory of evolution is fundamentally flawed, resting on thin to no evidence, just like global warming, concocted by a bunch of those darn eggheads working 24/7 to sever America from its glorious?  Just asking.

[Torie]

I suspect if you adjusted it for race (made the other developed countries as black and brown as America, or vice versa), the US would be at or near the top of those rankings too.

Of course, this is all assuming that a college education is, per se, a universal good.  On the contrary, producing a large number of overqualified workers for available positions requiring less qualification and taking large numbers of people out of the labor force for several years both produce significant deadweight losses in the economy (as well as creating a major obstacle to upwards social mobility in the first case).

This is something else to consider.

If everybody had a college degree, are we going to have college graduates who are janitors? College graduates working the front-lines at Target? We already have quite a few who work at Starbucks...

In a more perfect world, with more resources, or if you can afford it, a college degree is more about enriching your whole life, and savoring more the stimuli your little senses perceive, and the joy of learning itself, and less about economics. I was fortunate enough to have that focus for my undergraduate time in college, rather than thinking about return on investment. But then I could afford to go to graduate school, well schools, so yes, we don't live in a more perfect world, because for most the economics do not accommodate that.

[Torie]

Yeah, nhazmagick is right you know. The entire point of teaching undergraduates is to corrupt them into voting for the Left, however defined. There is no other reason. It's also absolutely and utterly successful over the longterm.

That Al, is five death points for excessive hyperbole. And you should get another 3 points for having too much fun.

[Torie]

College classes don't make people liberal, the rather libertine social environment does.

Realisticidealist has found the main point of why college makes people more liberal. It's mostly not because some professor rams socialism down your throat (as some occasionally do, but I doubt that changes too many people's minds anyway). It's because of the campus environment where binge drinking is nearly ubiquitous and condoms are handed out that say things like "Love is Never Wrong", and the university residential housing staff is blatantly cheerleading liberal social causes. That's why college makes people liberals, folks. It's much more from that than it is from some random sociology professor.

Booze and sex makes one into a "liberal?"  Anyway, I have seen a couple of studies that based on self reports, conservative men are more sexually active and aggressive than liberal ones, FWIW.