IWETHEY v. 0.3.0 | TODO
1,095 registered users | 0 active users | 0 LpH | Statistics
Login | Create New User
IWETHEY Banner

Welcome to IWETHEY!

New I can't agree.
I think it's easier to make the case that we have too much capacity right now. My youngest graduated from IU last December, but I remember going on her campus visit with her and what the then "Junior" leading the tour said as she was describing the variety of courses that were available at IU. She said, "For instance, I needed a history credit, so I took 'History of the Beatles' and that satisfied one of my general education history requirements." I said, "That was a junior level history course? (she'd mentioned the course number and I cannot recall right now what it was, but it started with a 3)" She said, "Yes, it is." The fellow father standing beside me said, "And we're paying for this nonsense." I wholeheartedly agreed with him. Take a look at some of the "majors" you can work toward at IU these days:

Apparel Merchandising, Bachelor of Science
Arts Management, Bachelor of Science
Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Bachelor of Science
Fashion Design, Bachelor of Arts
Game Design, Bachelor of Science
Gender Studies, Bachelor of Arts
Interior Design, Bachelor of Science
Outdoor Recreation and Resource Management, Bachelor of Science
Real Estate, Bachelor of Science
Sports Communication—Print, Bachelor of Science
Sports Communication—Broadcasting, Bachelor of Science
Sport Marketing and Management, Bachelor of Science
Visual Arts Education, Bachelor of Science

https://www.indiana.edu/academics/degrees-majors/?
degree_title=Bachelor%27s%20degrees

Are you kidding me? We *need* universities to teach these subjects? Let alone the fact that you can actually receive an undergraduate degree in this nonsense. The problem with idea that "Everyone has to be able to go to college" is that it leads inevitably to this sort of nonsense. If everyone gets to go to college, then you have to come up with majors that everyone can get through. That's not the solution and its not what "free tuition" means. What "free tuition" means is that your best educated folks are not graduating owing their souls to Wall Street. Having society's brightest going to college is a positive for society and the profiteering of those educations by the criminal class on Wall Street should not be tolerated.
New It's not the major that's most important, its that they learn how to learn.
College is mostly about learning how to teach yourself new things, learning how to express yourself clearly to others, learning how to interact with and appropriately consider the opinions of others. The major is the icing on the cake.

I don't use my knowledge of how to type up Hollerith cards too much any more. Most of the specialty knowledge picked up in college becomes obsolete very quickly (especially these days).

BS in Games Design Requirements. It doesn't look like they sit around and play Fallout 4 all day...

Don't get hung-up over the names.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.
New So it's not a bug, It's a feature
You've gone from "college should be free" to "college should be free for the people who should be going ."

So who gets to decide who should go to college?

Oh, and since we *haven't* repealed NAFTA/CAFTA/TPP and rebuilt our manufacturing sector yet, what do we tell all those "other people" to do now that we've closed them out of college?
--

Drew
New When did I ever say, "Everyone should go to college?"
It's been a popular notion for several decades and is the reason for the sprouting of diploma mills (Evergreen University, Grand Canyon University, UoP Online, etc.) all over the place. We only need those mills if we accept the premise that "Everyone should go to college and get a degree." That's plainly false. Prior to the "Third Way New Democrats", the Democratic Party used to take the position that learning a trade in a Union shop was an *equal* way of climbing the economic ladder.

I've already answered above, but I'll quote myself here, "Reinvigorating the Union Movement in this country would go a long way toward building a future for the great majority of people who cannot make it through a college curriculum. We need those people, too. We just haven't valued them equally in the past 35 years. But that works only if we don't pull anymore stupid tricks for the Wall Street masters in the form of NAFTA, CAFTA and the TPP. We need to pull out of all of those so that meaningful, rewarding jobs not involving a college degree can remain here in the United States."

And "Who decides?" are the same as its always been: admissions committees.
Expand Edited by mmoffitt May 26, 2016, 09:36:41 AM EDT
New And how do we get there?
Trades should be valued. We should have a strong manufacturing sector.

But we don't. And the jobs that are left, it's hard to get in the door without some kind of diploma.

So until trades are valued again, what do you think will happen if we "fix" education funding first?
--

Drew
New Let's not over-state problems in US manufacturing.
(summarizing info from several sites)

1) China passed the US as the largest manufacturing economy in 2010. US is still #2.
2) China is expected to fall from #1, with the US again taking that spot, in 2020.
3) Manufacturing employment has been falling worldwide since 1990 (or earlier).
4) Ranking of manufacturing are usually done by "value added". That ranking is hard to do because it depends on things like relative values of the currencies converted back into dollars.

Industry Week

1. United States

By 2020 the U.S will overtake China to earn the top spot for the most competitive nation in the world.

The reason for this ranking, according to Deloitte and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, is due the country’s investment in research, technology, and innovation.
“Manufacturing competitiveness, increasingly propelled by advanced technologies, is converging the digital and physical worlds, within and beyond the factory to both customers and suppliers, creating a highly responsive, innovative, and competitive global manufacturing landscape,” says Craig Giffi, co-author of the report.


Yes, the US relative ranking has fallen a lot since the 1960s, but we're still a monster in worldwide manufacturing.

NAM - Top 20 Facts About Manufacturing

Cheers,
Scott.
New "Advanced technologies" usually means "fewer workers"
That's why our productivity is through the roof, but wages are stagnant.
--

Drew
New Yup. But wages being stagnant is a choice.
Lots of things went together to prevent workers not getting their usual slice of the pie. The gutting of unions and pensions, the mantra that inflation is always bad, the cult of the MBA and short-term thinking, the worship of finance, the nickle and dime-ing of the bottom 50% of the population via 20+% interest rates for unsecured credit, the lack of control of healthcare costs and the pushing of the increases onto the workers, the lack of paid overtime, paid sick leave, and onerous restrictions on vacation and personal time, etc., etc.

Getting better at making stuff via increased automation is a good thing. The problem is we haven't been investing enough in new products and new industries to take the workers that are no longer needed in the mature/maturing industries. Where are our flying cars? Bullet trains? Personal transportation gizmos that let us commute to work without dragging 2 tons of steel around? New types of houses that are more efficient and less costly than the 3000+ sq ft McMansion in the suburbs? 21st century water and sewer plants? River scrubbers to clean up phosphates, excess nitrogen, 100 year old toxic waste, etc., etc.?

Stagnant wages were a choice that our leaders (in industry and government) made. It didn't have to be that way. It still doesn't.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Hold on to your hat.
I am in *complete* agreement with your post.

Not to spoil the moment, but I don't think insisting that "everyone goes to college" will do anything to reverse that "choice."
New College is important.
Whether it's a 4 year BA/BS or a 2 year AA/AS, post-high school education is important. The world is more complex, people have to know how to do more with themselves and their lives now than in the past. People need to know how to think for themselves, how to figure out how interest and risk and investments work, how to make informed political choices, etc., etc.

Vocational training doesn't have to be separate from college. The University of Cincinnati is famous for its cooperative education model where college students in engineering, etc., work in companies as part of their education.

It's not either-or, it's both-and.

Cheers,
Scott.
New I'm not so sure.
For instance, we need pipe fitters. Does a pipe fitter need a Western Civilization course at the college level (junior college or 4-year)? College isn't supposed to be "vocational training." The vocational training being done at junior colleges today used to be performed by apprenticeships granted by Union halls. We should do what we can to open more Union halls (so that the wages go up) and have them return to their function of training the next generation of blue collar workers. One way to encourage that is to require all government contracts to be filled by Union shops only. I'll give Obama this much, he encouraged PLA's through an Executive Order, but didn't mandate them. It was a good first step, but insufficient.
New disagree with one statement
One way to encourage that is to require all government contracts to be filled by Union shops only
davis bacon act allows union shops to bid at a comparable cost as non union, because the pay rate matches the union rate. Now I would like davis bacon be applied to IT work as well. That way you dont have multinationals paying $6 an hour to Ukrainian programmers to build the Obama Care website (cough)and pocketing a ton. Good american programmers need the work.
always look out for number one and don't step in number two
New "Good american programmers need the work"
I seem to recall from way back when I first began hanging out in these precincts thirteen years ago some discussions about how machinists, assembly line personnel, millworkers et cetera should have seen the inevitability of their jobs going overseas, and ought to have had the good sense to learn code like the smart guys at IWT. When the boys from Bangalore started making off with those gigs, I noticed that the tune shifted to a different key.

cordially,
New There are pipe fitters and there are pipe fitters.
My dad has a pond with a small earthen dam on his property. He needed to lower the level to repair a rusted galvanized overfill-drain pipe. How does one do that cheaply? Make a siphon, right?

Well, making a siphon is actually pretty complex when you're moving a bunch of water. Sizing it can be tricky - you don't want turbulent flow (bubbles will break the vacuum) and you don't want it to be too small (takes too long) or too large (expensive, hard to start for small drops). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rgpRJ1xCeM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLyknJHxGz0 are a couple of decent videos (check the descriptions).

There's lots of interesting physics and math behind figuring out how to move fluids. Reynolds number and so forth.

Copper's too expensive to use in most new houses these days, so plumbers need to understand new types of fittings, how various adhesives work together, what's a safe solder and why, etc. Sure, trade schools can teach that, but knowing the "science" behind the stuff is valuable too, especially with the pace of technological change these days.

Cheers,
Scott.
New huh? drill thru the base of the dam, throw in a pvc pipe $400, plug when water is low enough
always look out for number one and don't step in number two
New Is that how the British Navy does it? ;-p
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9XEMUfbzN0

You don't go messing around with dams, and you don't do anything to weaken them.

(Yes, I know you were just yanking my chain. ;-)

Cheers,
Scott.
New that is how it should have been built to begin with, a safety valve :-)
always look out for number one and don't step in number two
New what a pipe fitter needs
Does a pipe fitter need a Western Civilization course at the college level (junior college or 4-year)?
Will it make him a better pipe fitter? Not necessarily, although it might make him a better human being, and that, I submit, would likely make him a better pipe fitter (one, for example, who regards sound craftsmanship as a good in itself, and not something to be compromised if no one's looking). And a pipe fitter trained in critical thinking and grounded in a humanistic cultural background that allows him to form political opinions based on historical context might be a harder target for a demagogue on the prowl for marks.

There's no guarantee, of course: plenty of educated fools about. But we've raised a couple of generations now on a lewd, violent and trivial popular culture with little effort made to provide a body of coherent countervailing influences, and few people, including the products of that pedagogic malign neglect, appear altogether happy with the outcome. I recently came across a piece, opening a forum on "What is Education For?" that included these lines:
To make judgments about the course of human events and our government’s role in them, we need history, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, not to mention math—especially the statistical reasoning necessary for probabilistic judgment—and science, as governmental policy naturally intersects with scientific questions. If we are to decide on the core principles that should orient our judgments about what will bring about safety and happiness, surely we need philosophy, literature, and religion or its history. Then, since the democratic citizen does not make or execute judgments alone, we need the arts of conversation, eloquence, and prophetic speech. Preparing ourselves to exercise these arts takes us again to literature and to the visual arts, film, and music.

In other words, we need the liberal arts. They were called the free person’s arts for a reason.
The essay can be found here.

cordially,
New Emphasis on "college level".
That wasn't loose talk. I do not disagree that "we need liberal arts" for much the same reasons you cite. However, I think you'll agree that taking a U.S. History course in college is a different exercise than taking a U.S. History course (even properly taught - if such still exists) in high school. Going back to "what we can afford now that we're richer", in the 1960's and 1970's, elementary school children were afforded the opportunity to learn violin, viola, cello and bass beginning in the fourth grade. By junior high school, beginning orchestra students (of which I was one) were provided those instruments by the school itself. But not everyone was capable of playing in the college orchestra. That doesn't mean there was no value in making it possible for everyone to be exposed to classical music in their K-12 educations.

I remain *stunned* that entire school systems where I live now have no orchestras of any type. The arts, foreign languages, literature, etc. are all necessary for all citizens. As are math and science (personal bias aside). I know I'll be called an elitist for this, but it's my position that not everyone is capable of success in the study of those topics at a true college level. My position on this can pretty much be summed up as: Give them decent K-12 educations, do not infect our institutions of higher learning with vocational training and allow the people who are actually performing the tasks of a given vocation to provide that training.

I didn't go to college (or grad school for that matter) to be trained. I went for the opportunity to educate myself.
New No disagreement
...although I wonder at the use of the word "infect" in "do not infect our institutions of higher learning with vocational training." I don't see a necessary conflict there (and indeed, aren't the professional schools such as law and medicine themselves forms of vocational training?). Among the many regrets I have when I consider my line-of-least-resistance progress through college, a period in which I lazily exploited my existing strengths and made little effort to cultivate new ones, is that I passed up the opportunity to learn the craft of traditional letterpress printing under William Everson, even though I had already formed a nascent interest in typography.

I remain grateful to my parents, both of whom felt bad about not having extended their own formal schooling past the end of high school, for imparting to their children something of their intellectual yearnings and, yes, their cultural pretensions: I don't think they really appreciated classical music, but they thought it was the sort of thing that was appreciated in the circles to which they aspired, and so we absorbed a great deal of it growing up—and it stuck to our ribs.

cordially,
New This isn't chicken and egg, though
People go to college because that's a requirement in the current economy. You've explained really well why it shouldn't be a requirement, but that's where we are. You can't just cut funding and restrict access to college first. You have to fix the economy so that college is no longer required.
--

Drew
New dunno, did you have to pay a plumber or mechanic lately?
were they US born and raised?
always look out for number one and don't step in number two
New Don't know if this is still valid...
In the late 60's early 70's, GM had apprenticeship programs.You worked for a dealer at lower rate (depends on the situation) and went to GM training center one day a week. I got into it sort of accidentally; the old man who ran the body shop took a liking to me and felt I did good work, so he took me under his wing and one thing led to another.I was expecting to be drafted so I was living a day at a time anyway. Turns out that being in a GM program is "essential for the defense of the country" so I got the same (possibly better) deferment as the college guys. I didn't end up going to Case until I was 30. Had fun doing body work and painting for a while.
Point is: we DID have a mechanism for building trades. Don't know if it's still intact though.
"Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."
~ AMBROSE BIERCE
(1842-1914)
New Jeez, I didn't even see Trump University in the list! :)
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Mea Culpa. I actually intended to include that one. ;0)
     The "None of the Above" candidate. - (a6l6e6x) - (60)
         Democrats are more likely to go Green party -NT - (malraux) - (2)
             Well, Bill Weld was/is a rare specie known as a Moderate Republican. - (a6l6e6x)
             It isn't easy being Green - (rcareaga)
         Dunno. - (Another Scott) - (56)
             That's a bit of a mischaracterization. - (mmoffitt) - (55)
                 Your privledge is showing. - (Another Scott) - (9)
                     You might want to review this as well. - (mmoffitt) - (8)
                         Anything in particular? -NT - (Another Scott) - (7)
                             Is this okay? - (mmoffitt) - (6)
                                 Well, that beats the Donald's "Because I said so!" -NT - (a6l6e6x)
                                 I meant, is there anything in particular there that you want to talk about? - (Another Scott) - (4)
                                     Who can countermand a Kill Order issued by the President? -NT - (mmoffitt) - (3)
                                         Someone has to decide those things. The President decides with the input of others. - (Another Scott) - (2)
                                             Good Grief. You support that decision, too? Wow. -NT - (mmoffitt) - (1)
                                                 (sigh) -NT - (Another Scott)
                 "Supreme Court" - (malraux) - (3)
                     Yup. -NT - (Another Scott)
                     How much worse can they be than "Pro-Citizens United, Pro-Gitmo" Garland? -NT - (mmoffitt) - (1)
                         Quite a bit. - (malraux)
                 [head slap] Now I get it - (drook) - (40)
                     with crooked hillary you know exactly what you will get - (boxley) - (3)
                         The most qualified, most stringently vetted, and smartest candidate this cycle. HTH. -NT - (Another Scott) - (2)
                             yeah, pretty sad isn't it, feebs are not quite finished with vetting her tho -NT - (boxley) - (1)
                                 Heh. There's nothing there either. -NT - (Another Scott)
                     I'll bite. - (mmoffitt) - (35)
                         Purity kills. - (Another Scott) - (34)
                             Gotta linky for you. - (mmoffitt) - (33)
                                 Lots of slogans there. - (Another Scott) - (32)
                                     I'll see your "real world" and raise my own personal experience. - (mmoffitt) - (31)
                                         My Dad paid very little for college too. - (Another Scott) - (28)
                                             Her position is, more or less, status quo. - (mmoffitt) - (27)
                                                 Re: Her position is, more or less, status quo. - (Another Scott) - (26)
                                                     I can't agree. - (mmoffitt) - (25)
                                                         It's not the major that's most important, its that they learn how to learn. - (Another Scott)
                                                         So it's not a bug, It's a feature - (drook) - (21)
                                                             When did I ever say, "Everyone should go to college?" - (mmoffitt) - (20)
                                                                 And how do we get there? - (drook) - (19)
                                                                     Let's not over-state problems in US manufacturing. - (Another Scott) - (16)
                                                                         "Advanced technologies" usually means "fewer workers" - (drook) - (15)
                                                                             Yup. But wages being stagnant is a choice. - (Another Scott) - (13)
                                                                                 Hold on to your hat. - (mmoffitt) - (11)
                                                                                     College is important. - (Another Scott) - (10)
                                                                                         I'm not so sure. - (mmoffitt) - (9)
                                                                                             disagree with one statement - (boxley) - (1)
                                                                                                 "Good american programmers need the work" - (rcareaga)
                                                                                             There are pipe fitters and there are pipe fitters. - (Another Scott) - (3)
                                                                                                 huh? drill thru the base of the dam, throw in a pvc pipe $400, plug when water is low enough -NT - (boxley) - (2)
                                                                                                     Is that how the British Navy does it? ;-p - (Another Scott) - (1)
                                                                                                         that is how it should have been built to begin with, a safety valve :-) -NT - (boxley)
                                                                                             what a pipe fitter needs - (rcareaga) - (2)
                                                                                                 Emphasis on "college level". - (mmoffitt) - (1)
                                                                                                     No disagreement - (rcareaga)
                                                                                 This isn't chicken and egg, though - (drook)
                                                                             dunno, did you have to pay a plumber or mechanic lately? - (boxley)
                                                                     Don't know if this is still valid... - (hnick) - (1)
                                                                         GMI, also too. It was spun off in the 1990s. - (Another Scott)
                                                         Jeez, I didn't even see Trump University in the list! :) -NT - (a6l6e6x) - (1)
                                                             Mea Culpa. I actually intended to include that one. ;0) -NT - (mmoffitt)
                                         Show me where Bernie says most people shouldn't go to college - (drook) - (1)
                                             put money back into highschool shops and union apprenticeships -NT - (boxley)

Tasty little nuggets of alien technology...
162 ms