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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
It doesn't matter. De facto a college degree is just a four year vacation. It's still a good investment to make, but less so.
Now, the motte is going to chime in that there's an absolute dingbat making six figures answering emails somewhere. I believe that, even if this isn't actually the boss's boss's mistress. But if you replace this person with a random trucker or construction worker, you will discover why this person's job required a college degree. There are of course jobs that require a college degree and don't need one- they don't pay six figures, but they exist. They also have a lower early-termination rate than their equivalent which doesn't require a college degree.
I happen to work an office job at a trucking company. A lot of our office guys don't have college degrees, a lot of them are former drivers, and I would say that my employer is more willing to take a chance and invest resources into training someone than many (They hired me with a stale humanities degree and driving/dispatching experience from outside of trucking.), but as a rule the managers are either 50+ or have a degree. Similarly, while it's likely true that the best dispatcher would have driving experience there's a good chance that a random driver plopped into the office either isn't bright enough, lacks the necessary computer/literacy skills, or lacks the disposition/patience to sit in an office all day and be professional when things start going wrong. That, and the sort of drivers who have those skills make more money driving than the dispatchers and either aren't interested in management or are stuck in the golden handcuffs such that they can't afford to stick out the lower office paycheck long enough to make terminal manager.
And FWIW as someone who was a lousy student who nevertheless graduated with a 3.5 from a state school on scholarship I think at minimum a college degree demonstrates some combination of industriousness and competence (maybe not what you would call "smart", but one does have to attend some amount of classes, complete some amount of assignments, and pass some amount of tests) or at least some variety of talent to pass those classes with a smoke and mirrors show. Was I a pizza delivery driver first, an alcoholic second, and college student third? Pretty much, but I did write those papers, pass those tests, and was able to triage assignments and exams such that I made the grades I needed to with a minimum of effort. Was it a waste of an opportunity to be educated and/or network my way into a real career? Probably. Did pulling it off when I could've just dropped out and gone full townie demonstrate something? I'd like to think so.
Oh, and we tend to shuffle our dingbats into the safety department.
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