The Majority Of Republicans Think Colleges Are Bad For The U.S., Poll Shows

[Associate Justice PiT]

     One could write a book to fully address this question. There are many ways in which they contribute positively and many ways in which they contribute negatively. I am not comfortable approaching it as a simple yes or no.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     One could write a book to fully address this question. There are many ways in which they contribute positively and many ways in which they contribute negatively. I am not comfortable approaching it as a simple yes or no.

You're joking? You seriously think that the existence of American universities has an ambiguous effect on the US as a country?

That anyone would even consider that is one of the most moronic things I've heard. Jesus Christ.

     They have done a lot of good historically. They still do a lot of good today, but L.D. Smith is right; the system is deeply flawed. We shouldn't look at only the good and ignore the role they have played in the proliferation of debt among naive young adults or trends in admissions that have promoted social stratification, just to name a couple of problems associated with higher education today.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     One could write a book to fully address this question. There are many ways in which they contribute positively and many ways in which they contribute negatively. I am not comfortable approaching it as a simple yes or no.

You're joking? You seriously think that the existence of American universities has an ambiguous effect on the US as a country?

That anyone would even consider that is one of the most moronic things I've heard. Jesus Christ.

     They have done a lot of good historically. They still do a lot of good today, but L.D. Smith is right; the system is deeply flawed. We shouldn't look at only the good and ignore the role they have played in the proliferation of debt among naive young adults or trends in admissions that have promoted social stratification, just to name a couple of problems associated with higher education today.

Right...so let's weight it up.

Cons: some people get debt, some gender studies majors can be annoying, some people waste a few years on degrees

Pros: you have doctors, engineers, scentists. Medicine, bridges, computers. Trained professionals who can do advanced labour.

I feel uncomfortable answering yes or no here, it's a real toughie.

     Colleges are useful for teaching certain advanced skillsets that lead to certain professions. I do know that there is a significant gap between Europe and the United States here (I recall hearing that 12% of college students study engineering over there compared to 4% here), so I can give you some benefit of the doubt on your mischaracterization of the situation.

     Many degree programs in the liberal arts suffer from low demand for the specific knowledge and do a poor job of imparting critical thinking skills (especially compared to yesteryear). Graduating college requires little effort outside of STEM fields and the quality of many graduates, even from prestigious universities, is frankly embarrassingly poor. Liberal arts programs are structured to funnel students into grad schools, where they are used as cheap labor for departments and offered little opportunity for advancement unless they are fortunate enough to enter top programs (even in the sciences, which carries its own baggage). For many jobs, universities are treated as a form of filtering wherein unnecessary degrees are valued for HR reasons and folks are corralled into seeking degrees they don't actually need. At top universities, social filtering both in admissions and in student life ensure that the best opportunities are reserved for upper-class youths, as middle-class strivers are led into a rat race that is stacked heavily against them.

     The spread of these problems that I just described affect far, far more students than do the opportunities offered by engineering and medicine. As I said, there is much good that colleges do. There are also many problems, and I could easily go on. Your dismissive tone only proves that you do not know what you are talking about here.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     One could write a book to fully address this question. There are many ways in which they contribute positively and many ways in which they contribute negatively. I am not comfortable approaching it as a simple yes or no.

You're joking? You seriously think that the existence of American universities has an ambiguous effect on the US as a country?

That anyone would even consider that is one of the most moronic things I've heard. Jesus Christ.

     They have done a lot of good historically. They still do a lot of good today, but L.D. Smith is right; the system is deeply flawed. We shouldn't look at only the good and ignore the role they have played in the proliferation of debt among naive young adults or trends in admissions that have promoted social stratification, just to name a couple of problems associated with higher education today.

Right...so let's weight it up.

Cons: some people get debt, some gender studies majors can be annoying, some people waste a few years on degrees

Pros: you have doctors, engineers, scentists. Medicine, bridges, computers. Trained professionals who can do advanced labour.

I feel uncomfortable answering yes or no here, it's a real toughie.

     Colleges are useful for teaching certain advanced skillsets that lead to certain professions. I do know that there is a significant gap between Europe and the United States here (I recall hearing that 12% of college students study engineering over there compared to 4% here), so I can give you some benefit of the doubt on your mischaracterization of the situation.

     Many degree programs in the liberal arts suffer from low demand for the specific knowledge and do a poor job of imparting critical thinking skills (especially compared to yesteryear). Graduating college requires little effort outside of STEM fields and the quality of many graduates, even from prestigious universities, is frankly embarrassingly poor. Liberal arts programs are structured to funnel students into grad schools, where they are used as cheap labor for departments and offered little opportunity for advancement unless they are fortunate enough to enter top programs (even in the sciences, which carries its own baggage). For many jobs, universities are treated as a form of filtering wherein unnecessary degrees are valued for HR reasons and folks are corralled into seeking degrees they don't actually need. At top universities, social filtering both in admissions and in student life ensure that the best opportunities are reserved for upper-class youths, as middle-class strivers are led into a rat race that is stacked heavily against them.

     The spread of these problems that I just described affect far, far more students than do the opportunities offered by engineering and medicine. As I said, there is much good that colleges do. There are also many problems, and I could easily go on. Your dismissive tone only proves that you do not know what you are talking about here.

I'm not talking about opportunities for individuals. If the US educated zero doctors, zero lawyers, zero engineers, zero economists, zero scientists of any kind I think you'd have problems. If you think you'd be better off in that world, where there are no universities in the whole of the US, then you can say they're harmful.

I'm not sure what you think you told me in this post that I didn't know. It contained no new information that would make me less dismissive of the absurd claim that universities would be a net harm to the country.

     Meh, it beggars belief and is ahistorical to suppose that there would be no such people educated in absence of universities. The university is certainly more efficient at doing so (perhaps too efficient in the case of lawyers, as that field is hopelessly glutted and 80% of law schools are a net harm and should shut down), but the alternative is not zero.

     I did not claim that universities are a net harm to the country. I claimed that the reality is complicated and they do a great deal of harm along with a great deal of good. You decided to ignore all of the harm and focus only on the good. My point goes well beyond opportunities into other effects that they have for the individual, as well as touching briefly on structural societal effects. All of that is only the tip of the iceberg too.

     In the post I responded to, you had posited a slanted cost-benefit analysis and played down the cons to the point that the only possible readings were ignorance of the subject or an attempt to propagandize on it. If you actually do understand the subject and are voluntarily putting your head in the sand to pretend that everything is okay, then there is frankly little point in discussing this with you. The cons greatly outweigh "some people get debt, some gender studies majors can be annoying, some people waste a few years on degrees", and I have it on your say-so that you know better.

[Associate Justice PiT]

I'm not sure how you propose people get university education without universities? But it's true you can have people pretending to be doctors without training and some of them won't be totally useless. I think it's fair to say that if there existed no med schools there would be close to zero qualified doctors.

Your claim was that it was ambiguous whether they were a harm or not. That it was a difficult question to answer. My claim was that it's not particularly hard to answer. That is not a denial of harms existing and anyone with some university education should be able to figure out the nuance between "clear net positive" and "no negative impacts".

Actually, my "slanted" summary seem to have covered most of what you said. Apart from the odd claim that education holds back the middle class (as opposed to a university free world where the middle class would advance, how exactly?) it did cover it. You seem weirdly passionate about this anti-university crusade and thus was triggered by my admittedly somewhat glib language and I guess that's too bad. But ultimately, yes, I understand that it can be a personal tragedy to get indebted for a useless degree. I understand that when a college professor says something silly you can have a heart attack from conservative outrage. Some of these are real problems, some of them less so. But they all pale in comparison to having any higher education for anyone in an entire country, leaving your position equally absurd no matter how hard you push those harms.

     These sorts of professional programs have not always been and need not be associated with universities as Ernest pointed out. It is not realistic to suppose that no doctors would be educated in the absence of the university. The thing is also that, contrary to your characterization of an anti-university crusade, I am not suggesting that universities (or liberal arts programs, though they are the focus of my critique) should be abolished. Rather, they badly need reform.

     The way that you described the cons strikes me as underselling ("glibly", as you noted). Besides, my list was hardly exhaustive; we also have opportunity cost, cost to the taxpayers, the rise of an ivory tower and a corresponding decline in the quality of academic output, and other things with broad economic implications.

     I referred to the middle-class to note that they are encouraged to strive towards top universities without being taught to fully appreciate how much the odds are stacked against them with facing legacies, athletes, development cases, and other preferred categories. It is a less important point, but it underscores the extent to which top universities are not the meritocracies they claim to be.

     However, it seems that you have misunderstood what I was getting at this whole time (and I misunderstood your point too TBF), so I will try to explain it as succinctly and explicitly as I can. Overall, colleges are important to the country and the economy. There are also many, many problems associated with them, many of these problems resulting from an unhealthy relationship we have with colleges. Eliminating universities is not the answer, but we need to question common assumptions about the role of college in society, particularly dispensing with the idea that every 18-year old ought to go. The question of whether college is a net benefit or a net harm is just not an important one and I wish I had not touched on it at all, as the answer to that question does not change what needs to be done. In my view it is the wrong question to be asking, when we should be asking "how can we mitigate the negative effects of universities in the United States today?"

[Associate Justice PiT]

It totally depends on the program and degree  in my opinion

Many of the liberal arts degree for example I believe are bad for the country (gender,racial , religious studies for example ).

Me taking RELS 3755 On the Divine was bad for the country!? Gimme an effing break.

I'm not talking about people who just take a couple classes in those areas ,I'm talking about doing your  major related to that . I clearly said doing  degrees in those subjects are bad for the country not taking a couple classes in that area.

But... bad for the country?

yes as many of the degree make people SJW and that is terrible for the country.

Ah, religion, the province of the left. This of course ignores history, literature, philosophy...

     I took a really interesting Religious Studies course in college. I can see how a Bibilical literalist would see it as leftist since it discussed the historical context of the Bible (and particularly Genesis), but it really wasn't that left-wing by reasonable standards.