12-03-2017, 08:34 PM
(12-03-2017, 07:03 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Millions don't have "great college scores and great talent". Those without the scores and talent shouldn't be going to college in the first place.
If one has certain grades from rigorous high-school classes and good college board scores, you probably should be going to college. Being excluded because one lacks the means means ruin in an economy that requires a college education for practically any job with non-routine responsibility. yes, many people will graduate from college and enter low-paying professions such as teaching and clergy -- but those people are very useful. If you are talking about people from disadvantaged backgrounds, then those are the people who might take their education back to, let us say, the Reservation or the bad part of town. Or for that matter, the depressed parts of the Ozarks and Appalachia. Working-class background? The fellow who works in a plant but has some knowledge of economics and accounting as well as the ability to write coherent reports might be the ideal shop steward. The only thing more noble about working in Daddy's real estate brokerage is that such pays better if one can use a college education in such a place.
I have made a case that the world in which we live is simply too complex for the once-adequate high-school diploma. The election of Donald Trump demonstrates that millions of people are vulnerable to a demagogue who seduces voters and then uses government power to hurt people on behalf of a Master Class of rapacious plutocrats and a Soviet-style nomenklatura. Under-educated white people voted heavily for Donald Trump in part because of his expressions of religious bigotry and in part because of his willingness to appeal to their resentments of the middle class. People vulnerable to a right-wing demagogue could just as easily fall for a left-wing demagogue when they get angry about economic elites, and that will be equally bad. Right or left, demagogues always get bad results once in power. Unable to achieve their contradictory promises, they can only find scapegoats -- "Jews", "kulaks", "Muslims", "blacks", "liberals", "homosexuals", "feminazis", etc. Their politics becomes the use of government to reward supporters through patronage or to punish people who 'voted wrong'. Yes, I get sick of listening to this horrid man even in bits and pieces on the news. Donald Judas Trump may have promised to simplify a world too complex for simpletons -- but much of what makes life satisfying involves complex things from dense counterpoint in music to the intricacies of a computer the size of a cancerette pack.
To make life fully satisfying, people need to learn the difference between the good stuff available to us and both the mindless 'ear candy' and pretentious $#!+ and care. We can live without entertainment, but we are empty without culture. In view of all the hustles that we face, we need to become more sophisticated in the use of logic. To be able to avoid some cons we need learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that nobody is in business to lose money. To get anything out of such a literary vehicle as cinema we might as well learn to treat it as literature. (In my case I have come to realize that I am the miserable Charles Foster Kane of Citizen Kane, only without the money and influence. Who knows? Maybe it is a good thing that I have neither power nor influence. At least I am not Don Vito Corleone, Darth Vader, or the Wicked Witch of the West!) People who know about alternative political systems including communism and fascism would have seen warning signs in ... you know who.
Sure, the economy and political life are both full of sophisticated hustlers who get rich by sticking people badly. In a wholesome economy there are ways to get rich without hurting people. Maybe we would be far better of fif people had the discretion with which to not be suckers.
...We are getting robots to do much of the productive work. In advanced societies, scarcity of material objects is no longer a problem. We will need to find ways to adjust our efforts to the reality of less need for labor. If we can produce what we need in 28 hours what we used to produce with the need of 40 hours and 40 hours was adequate 70 years ago for an economy that probably worked better than what we have now, then maybe we don't need to work 40-hour weeks anymore.
Quote:Quote:Quote:We are going to throw away talent that could be our great engineers, creative people, and executives, perhaps to be domestic servants and farm laborers because they cannot pay taxes on a college scholarship.
Scholarships continue not to be taxed. It's only people who are being paid partially through tuition forgiveness that are now taxed on that pay - you know, same as if they were paid the full amount in the first place and then used some of that money for their tuition payments. Basically the law just closed a loophole that permitted universities to bilk grant payers - usually the taxpayer - by artificially inflating their tuition rates.
The work that gets the tuition forgiveness is often a condition of work for a degree, typically research or graduate teaching. Research and graduate teaching are legitimate parts of graduate-sch9ool education because of their connection to what one does with a graduate degree -- quite often, research or teaching.
It's never required to get an RA or TA to get a graduate degree. Research is required, sure, but some people pay their own way, and do the research without being paid for it. If students want to get a TA or an RA, that's fine, but they shouldn't expect taxpayer subsidies. If they can't get an actual scholarship, it should be easy to get the minimal loans required to cover the difference - though I doubt they'll have to since the universities will likely change their policies to make things work, once they can't milk the taxpayer as much any more.
Quote:One of the schools mentioned for such a practice is MIT. You know what its students are like, and how desirable their research can be.
Some of the research is top notch. Most of it is forgotten as soon as it's published. Some of it is misleading and we'd be better off without it.[/quote]
To get an MBA degree once likely needs do neither research nor teaching. Physicians and attorneys generally do not teach, and their research is practice for the arcane gathering of information that they will need to do in their jobs. I do not know how one could be an expert in the humanities without doing some teaching and research. Engineering? Science? Little so hones one's ability to use language as does teaching.
As for the value of research, I can say what is said of advertising: much of the effort is waster, and much of it is precious. One knows not which research is precious and which is worthless until one does it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.