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

[Gustaf]

     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.

[Gustaf]

     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.

[Gustaf]

    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.

Would you say that still if colleges suddenly started acting like Bob Jones or other Creditless Christian Schools or if University of Phoenix types became even more prominent than they already are?

Not hard to deny the current system is deeply, deeply flawed.

Doesn't mean the positive don't outweigh the negatives of course.

If there were a few more crazy college courses I'd still think it's more important to have doctors in the country I live in, yes. And I'd find it totally moronic for anyone to disagree.

[Gustaf]

     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.

[Gustaf]

The question in the poll is whether the institution has a "positive or negative effect on the way things are going in the country" not whether the institution is a "positive or negative" institution in general.

Colleges are currently putting a generation and their families into debt without actually providing them with what they need to enter into the job market at a salary that will let them escape that debt.  They are having a net negative impact right now.  Colleges aren't a bad thing however; the problem is people think they need to send their kids to the big expensive colleges with jacked up tuition fees as opposed to smaller public colleges with lower tuition fees.  The problem is also that lack of government funding for education is the actuality and only going to be worse under this administration.

More affordable college that didn't put millions of families into debt would absolutely be a huge positive for the country; more government funding for education past K-12 would absolutely help that.  Unfortunately the problem is probably only going to get worse both as colleges remain with their ridiculous tuition and the fact that more and more young people will simply choose not get a quality education because they want to avoid the debt (which is a very reasonable decision).

So yeah, honestly colleges are kind of a net negative in the current environment and will likely remain that way for a while until we address the underlying problem.

This topic is about colleges specifically; but in reality I'd probably say all of these institutions are net negatives right now, but most people rating them as net negative in this poll are probably doing so for vacuous reasoning.

I don't understand what your comparative is. You seem to say that because colleges have some negative impacts it follows that they are a net negative. That's not true.

To determine whether colleges have a negative impact on the US you need to imagine a world where there are no US colleges and whether that world would be better. That's the thought experiment. If the metric is "could I imagine a better version of this institution" then everything in the world is a negative but I don't see why that would make sense.

[Gustaf]

     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.

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.