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Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the wo

Nah, students never "cared" about learning. College started in the U.S. as a way for the upper classes to cavort under the ostentation of "learning about the world". It has always been a status signal. This is why the middle classes are willing to pay their left nut for a suitably prestigious degree - status signals to the middle classes are like honey to a bee (or something). There are perhaps .5% of the population for whom college makes actual productive sense - those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research. Colleges now fulfill sort of an odd intermesh in society: stamping the middle classes with seals of 'approval', and housing people who produce actual scholarship. There is really no logical connection between the two, and indeed most professors dislike 'teaching'. College isn't necessarily 'bad', but is when it saddles people who will be earning 40-60k the rest of their lives with 200k loan debts.

mkramlich 16y ago
> "those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research." you've heard of engineers, doctors and lawyers, right? lots of folks go to college to, in part, prepare to work in those fields. they may never do "original research" but can be quite intelligent and driven. I'm going to make a guess that you might be grad student or are otherwise on the academic/professor career path, if you said something like that. Because there are a lot of people who don't go down that path and actually have a uncomplimentary view of it, pretty much the inverse of what you said. i won't repeat the stereotypes here but they exist.
dkarl 16y ago
Nah, students never "cared" about learning. The ones who brought up the averages did. College may have been about prestige, but the system is rarely that honest about itself. Most of the people involved in maintaining the system -- teachers, professors, and students, certainly, and also many parents -- believed in the romantic image of college, and the ones who didn't believe, pretended. William James said that whatever you attend to becomes your reality, and thanks to everybody attending so closely to the myth of college as an educational experience, that's what it turned out to be in reality as well.
cj 16y ago
You're saying 199 in 200 people should not go to college? I disagree. A lot of people are going to state and community colleges and are not spending very much money to do so. There are very few people who graduate with over $100k in debt. Most have much less, if any.
- reader5000 16y ago
  I am saying there is no productive value in them going relative to their financial burden. For the many who go for free/cheap thanks to state subsidy, that's great. But then we shouldn't worry that students aren't studying, since college doesn't really DO anything in regards to future productivity and the like. Also, a lot of the "soft" factors people romanticize about college (spawning appreciation for the arts or some niche intellectual pursuit, civic/social development) have occurred for thousands of years by people just growing up.
arghnoname 16y ago
I don't agree with your percentages on how many people truly benefit from a 4 year degree, In all the coverage of Senator Byrd though I did notice an interesting fact. The recently deceased senator received a law degree in the early 1960's. Interestingly, he did not receive a bachelor's degree until the 1990's. Apparently back then you only needed a high school diploma to go to law school. There are a lot of things that are most efficiently learned and are useful to the world that colleges teach. It doesn't have to be just a place for future researchers, but as a society it would be useful for us to look at what we require a degree for, and figure out if that is really necessary or just a waste of time and money. Of course, the money is big enough that this is unlikely to happen in a measured, sensible way.
eru 16y ago
> There is really no logical connection between the two, and indeed most professors dislike 'teaching'. My math professors liked teaching. But that was in Germany. And they are also burdened with a bureaucracy, that makes teaching feel nice in contrast.

mkramlich 16y ago

> "those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research." you've heard of engineers, doctors and lawyers, right? lots of folks go to college to, in part, prepare to work in those fields. they may never do "original research" but can be quite intelligent and driven. I'm going to make a guess that you might be grad student or are otherwise on the academic/professor career path, if you said something like that. Because there are a lot of people who don't go down that path and actually have a uncomplimentary view of it, pretty much the inverse of what you said. i won't repeat the stereotypes here but they exist.

dkarl 16y ago

Nah, students never "cared" about learning. The ones who brought up the averages did. College may have been about prestige, but the system is rarely that honest about itself. Most of the people involved in maintaining the system -- teachers, professors, and students, certainly, and also many parents -- believed in the romantic image of college, and the ones who didn't believe, pretended. William James said that whatever you attend to becomes your reality, and thanks to everybody attending so closely to the myth of college as an educational experience, that's what it turned out to be in reality as well.

cj 16y ago

You're saying 199 in 200 people should not go to college? I disagree. A lot of people are going to state and community colleges and are not spending very much money to do so. There are very few people who graduate with over $100k in debt. Most have much less, if any.

reader5000 16y ago
I am saying there is no productive value in them going relative to their financial burden. For the many who go for free/cheap thanks to state subsidy, that's great. But then we shouldn't worry that students aren't studying, since college doesn't really DO anything in regards to future productivity and the like. Also, a lot of the "soft" factors people romanticize about college (spawning appreciation for the arts or some niche intellectual pursuit, civic/social development) have occurred for thousands of years by people just growing up.

arghnoname 16y ago

I don't agree with your percentages on how many people truly benefit from a 4 year degree, In all the coverage of Senator Byrd though I did notice an interesting fact. The recently deceased senator received a law degree in the early 1960's. Interestingly, he did not receive a bachelor's degree until the 1990's. Apparently back then you only needed a high school diploma to go to law school. There are a lot of things that are most efficiently learned and are useful to the world that colleges teach. It doesn't have to be just a place for future researchers, but as a society it would be useful for us to look at what we require a degree for, and figure out if that is really necessary or just a waste of time and money. Of course, the money is big enough that this is unlikely to happen in a measured, sensible way.

eru 16y ago

> There is really no logical connection between the two, and indeed most professors dislike 'teaching'. My math professors liked teaching. But that was in Germany. And they are also burdened with a bureaucracy, that makes teaching feel nice in contrast.