5 ms·

Are you suggesting that no parents of your generation went to liberal schools?

by nkrisc 3mo ago

xyzelement 3mo ago
I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting its a risk factor - one that has emerged as more obvious.
mike_hearn 3mo ago
For my parent's generation they were typically the first member of the family line to have ever gone to university and it was considered a point of immense pride to have done so. There seems to have been no concern back then about intellectual standards or political bias in universities, it wasn't a topic for the average parent. This got passed down. My brother and I were both encouraged to go to university, it was actually the assumed default and when my brother decided not to it was quite the mini scandal. He was sent to private meetings with the headmistress of the school to try and talk him out of the decision (not going was the right call, he did great without a degree and much better than anyone else). But any university would have done. Nobody had concerns about competence or bias. A good question is whether that encouragement was because standards were higher. In some sense they must have been, at least for the quality of the student body, because they were so much more selective. But if you go back and read old scientific papers they were often not any better in terms of rigor or standards than papers are today and sometimes they were clearly worse. It wasn't noticed because there was no open access and no internet forums or social media where people could compare notes. It seems obvious that at least some people are going to be way more selective about whether to help their children go to university nowadays. The costs are much higher, cheating is vastly more rampant so the value of a degree has been devalued a lot, and awareness of the very low intellectual standards is much more widespread.
- nkrisc 3mo ago
  My grandmother and most of her friends were socialists and they all had 4 or more children. Life is way more complicated than university = liberal = no kids.
  - mike_hearn 3mo ago
    The paper observes that this problem is relatively new and did not apply to your grandparent's generation.

Are you suggesting that no parents of your generation went to liberal schools?

by nkrisc 3mo ago

Are you suggesting that no parents of your generation went to liberal schools?

xyzelement 3mo ago

I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting its a risk factor - one that has emerged as more obvious.

mike_hearn 3mo ago

For my parent's generation they were typically the first member of the family line to have ever gone to university and it was considered a point of immense pride to have done so. There seems to have been no concern back then about intellectual standards or political bias in universities, it wasn't a topic for the average parent. This got passed down. My brother and I were both encouraged to go to university, it was actually the assumed default and when my brother decided not to it was quite the mini scandal. He was sent to private meetings with the headmistress of the school to try and talk him out of the decision (not going was the right call, he did great without a degree and much better than anyone else). But any university would have done. Nobody had concerns about competence or bias. A good question is whether that encouragement was because standards were higher. In some sense they must have been, at least for the quality of the student body, because they were so much more selective. But if you go back and read old scientific papers they were often not any better in terms of rigor or standards than papers are today and sometimes they were clearly worse. It wasn't noticed because there was no open access and no internet forums or social media where people could compare notes. It seems obvious that at least some people are going to be way more selective about whether to help their children go to university nowadays. The costs are much higher, cheating is vastly more rampant so the value of a degree has been devalued a lot, and awareness of the very low intellectual standards is much more widespread.

nkrisc 3mo ago
My grandmother and most of her friends were socialists and they all had 4 or more children. Life is way more complicated than university = liberal = no kids.
- mike_hearn 3mo ago
  The paper observes that this problem is relatively new and did not apply to your grandparent's generation.