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Um... you are posting a jab against credentialism, and yet with straight face consider academic success in the mandatory battle royale gulag as a measure for smartness?
The overreaction to this fairly mild joke is brutal - I don't know why the observation that there are more camel toes in a modern gym than in a zoo struck a nerve. And even less why said nerve was so exposed. I think because it was the offhand way the comment was delivered - not only he did what modern blue tribe hate the most - being judged, but that he dared to make this judgement not a center piece of the monologue or even the joke. A fat unattractive straight guy has the audacity to think so little of their hypersexualization attempts, that he give the hot jacked gay guys more screen time than to their vaginas. The ultimate insult.
Credentialism except from telling something about the mindset of the person with the credential - the more indifferent said person is about the piece of paper, the higher the chances of real brain functioning behind the eyes. The moment you say - I have a bachelors in something, which means you should take me seriously, you know it is safe to discard their following sentences.
A friend of mine, and me graduated from really high end and very selective school for gifted kids. That is actually one of my achievements in life that I really hold dear. She continued with the academic path, it took me more than 15 years to get a bachelor's. She really likes to lean heavily into her various diplomas when discussing stuff - both from - I have studied this so I know more than you, and life owes me a bit of nice things to happen to me because I am educated angles. So I had to snap at one point with "Look - you think you are smarter than the others because you graduated X, I graduated X because I thought I was smarter than the others. We are not the same." . It didn't land as well as the Shane's whore joke did.
As an offtopic - the step by step episode where Dana and Cody are into di.. SAT scores measuring contest, to which Cody is even unaware he participates in is one my favorite.
I believe the only women who can wear tight-fitting pants and yet not expose their camel toes are the pretty and slender ones – it’s just how female anatomy is – and women who aren’t like this don’t want to be reminded of it. The bygone patriarchy enforced the norm of female modesty which acted as a sort of non-aggression pact among women and took the ‘unfair’ advantage of hot women away. Feminists have demolished this without thinking twice and now their daughters and granddaughters are rightfully mad. Ideas have consequences.
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The expansion of credentials has been a disaster. Most credentials are useless, and in fact most outside of highly technical degrees are almost an anti-intellectual signal. The degrees do not, generally, require any serious rigor, no real achievement, and therefore are mostly ways for the schools to admit more dummies to study things that don’t matter in an environment where failure is almost impossible. Comedy should not be a stand alone area of concentration in a college. Very few humanities programs have serious rigor, and even those that do serve no useful purpose.
People who want to work in writing or comedy or art or music would be much better served to major in business to manage their career and do the work of learning the craft on their own in places where they get meaningful feedback from the future audience for their work. It’s not useful to become a good comedian to study it in a classroom and read theory. You need to get out in front of a crowd in a bar and fail until you learn how to read the crowd and tell jokes that land. Or play music in seedy bars until you learn to put on a good show.
They serve a function from the perspective of employers in corelating well with baseline proficiency . There is a huge gap in writing skills and other signifiers of ability of 4-year grads, even for humanities degrees, vs high school grads. Screening for degrees saves employers time and boosts productivity without having to interview everyone. This could also mean improved customer satisfaction from having smarter and more competent employees.
So does an IQ test.
A degree works because it is an IQ test, just one that costs at 50,000 dollars and 4 years of your life to complete, much like high school used to be in the days before graduation rate became something governments would be punished at the voting booth for failing to sufficiently game.
Now, there's an entire industry that depends on forcing perfectly good high school graduates to spend at least 50,000 dollars and 4 years of their lives, in co-operation with a management system that refuses to employ anyone who didn't take this kind of IQ test. If they wanted to increase the fee, management has no reason not to agree, forming the bedrock of the academic-managerial complex, if you will.
A degree tests both IQ and conscientiousness. An IQ test is much cheaper but not a full substitute. An IQ test plus far easier hiring and firing would be, but we don't have that either in most professions. This may be why high-turnover professions can get away with just the Wonderlic (which, ironically, was the test banned by Griggs) and no degree.
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many employers use the Wonderlic, which is very similar to an IQ test, in addition to checking for the usual credentials. But some may only use the Wonderlic. I agree IQ is way more efficient, but OTOH it does not test for diligence . getting a degree is a grind due to large coursework and having to show up , and many people do not finish for this reason .
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Exactly, but it also means that the people getting these degrees not only waste 4 years of their productivity being IQ tested, but because they start out upwards of 200K in debt, which delays all kinds of things that would be useful for the economy. Crazy things like, buying a house, taking vacations, having children and thus needing the kinds of things you need to feed and clothe a child. These things, in 1950, generally happened in your twenties, and now most people are forced to delay their home and family starting activities into their thirties which reduces the likelihood of having lots of children and thus raising children. This has by now created a situation in which the population is shrinking and thus unless we import workers, there’s no way to keep the systems running.
Remember when I said this system was fundamentally just child sacrifice?
Well, I meant it.
Or in other words, the sacrifices to the academic-managerial system have consumed everything, just like those Easter Island heads. The system has to look for more and more people who are born outside of it (and ban every other sector of economic activity) to keep its asset prices inflated.
One notices the system lives in fear of those who would rather burn them at the stake instead, and the split between Blue and Red (and the other dichotomous groups that are proxies for this) is in many ways a looming socioeconomic pension crisis specifically because we sacrificed too many kids, and too much youth, in the service of building [or inflating, if you will] so many heads.
Which is perhaps in large part why, right now, the political fight in the West is between the academic-managerial class and everyone else. That class is expecting a payout in political power that most countries simply can't afford to honor if they want to remain solvent.
I largely agree, though I think it’s also the old people as well, as so much of current social and political activity seems to be going towards coddling the elderly and at best ignoring if not punishing the young that it’s almost absurd. Tax rates for retired people is capped in my state, especially real estate taxes which fund stuff that workers and parents need like good roads, schools, police departments, etc. Most of the entitlement programs outside of WIC by dollar are for old people— SSI and Medicare cost more than the military at this point, and with no requirement that the older people do anything productive for the economy or society in general.
As far as infrastructure, there’s much more political will for things that older people want around than for stuff younger people want. Play grounds are too much money, but golf courses get breaks. Low end restaurants you could reasonably take a family with kids aren’t built as often as higher end places that are pretty kid-unfriendly. If you’re under 40, you don’t matter
In fairness I was going to add that- the old have a lot to do with why the academic-managerial complex is dominant in the first place, with outdated cultural outlooks that were harmful back then too.
But I'm too angry to talk about it at this point and I have no idea how best to exploit it (and am to a point the wrong identity; the progressives already have that exploitation on lockdown, as they embody the fantasy the old always wanted).
And if you send your kid there we'll abduct them and destroy your family. The future is too unsafe.
I am aware that there are still a few places where the spirit of the West lives, and maybe if I can get to one...
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This gap has been rapidly closing in the last two decades thanks to lowering standards at universities. Frankly the only reason the gap hasn't disappeared completely is because of similarly lowering standards at high schools.
yeah as long as there is a gap, the universities serve a purpose. the college dropout rate still stands at 50% and many still take 5-6 years of a "4 year degree "suggesting it has not necessarily gotten easier. I think this "lowering standards at universities" is much more anecdotal. There are certain standards that degree-awarding colleges must follow.
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I think a sort of college can be useful for these fields. The problem with today’s colleges is bloat.
Most importantly, people who want to work in writing or comedy or art or music should write or act or draw or make music. But most will benefit from working with like-minded peers and learning theory. So imagine a group of people in a profession who practice, work and somewhat live together, and older members coach the younger ones. IMO, that’s art school as it should be.
(Notice the above description doesn’t mention “admin”. A couple managers, social media consultants, etc. are probably ideal, but there should be way more professors, not the other way around; and if there are more admin than students…is the institution a school anymore?)
Art school, even a literal clown college, can be a net benefit that is seriously worth your taxpayer money. But the artists should definitely perform or give away their works publicly. Then it’s obvious why.
Now credentials for creative work are practically meaningless. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. have credentials most importantly because if they mess up, someone will die or suffer seriously. And attend many lectures and exams because these skills are more methodical and can be measured far more objectively. Your “GPA” for a creative profession is your output and awards, and awards from an ingrained “credentialed” institution are less accurate than an organic one (see the slop that gets “prestigious” awards, sometimes literally AI slop).
Isn’t art school typically a non-collège program focused on teaching technical skills?
There are several types of art schools. Some are non-degree programs (AI tells me the traditional name for such schools is "Atelier"). Some are Masters of Fine Art (MFA) programs intended for people who already have undergraduate degrees (not necessarily in art). But many are college programs granting a bachelors' degree (BFA).
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I don't think "technical" is really the right criterion here. I'm an engineer, which is plenty technical, but that doesn't necessarily say much about my ability to do any particular job. In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.
I mean, I know a fair bit of university math and have some basic university-level knowledge in a bunch of technical fields, with a bit more in one specific area. But the main thing my degree tells an employer is that I'm reasonably intelligent and capable of putting in the work to learn difficult things.
I've had plenty of colleagues without engineering degrees who were about as capable of doing the same jobs. Maybe my education prepared me a bit better (in fact i would argue this), but it was hardly some strict prerequisite.
That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession. My competence base is pretty broad and nonspecific, and a lot of what I actually need to know for my job is stuff I learned afterwards anyway, or could have learned through other routes.
So I guess my point is that there's a much more meaningful distinction between degrees that actually qualify you for a specific profession and degrees that mostly give you a foundation to build on. Whether they're technical or not doesn't seem like a particularly useful way of making that distinction.
Im trying to find a better term for what I mean. What I mean by technical is a program that is skill based and related fairly closely to actual career paths that a person might do in the future. So an engineering degree that’s math, physics and engineering skills taught with the aim of working in engineering is technical, but so is a business based degree that teaches the kinds of skills that would be typically used in an office setting doing business work — things like marketing, finance, accounting, business management, etc.
What im making a distinction against is the kinds of humanities degrees that are based on learning things that are not based on any kind of useful skills. At best provided that the school cared enough to require professors to do so, you might end up with marginal writing and research skills. Even then most of those skills would be more easily taught in the technical degrees. They’re mostly useless, and I can’t imagine that anyone would look at a guy with a history or literature degree and choose them over a person with a degree in some more “technical” degree focused on useful skills that can be immediately applied to my actual business.
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I think you're significantly underestimating how much of required engineering is actually learned in university (or you're overapplying the American liberal arts college generalism to everywhere). A random mechanical engineer is going to know fuck all about DSP and I, as an electrical engineer, would be completely lost if I had to do a stress analysis of some motor part.
Engineering degrees are better IQ tests than most degrees (probably no better than hard sciences though, or computer science at better schools), and MUCH better conscientscious tests than most degrees. It's REALLY hard to phone in an engineering degree no matter how bright you are.
I don’t think anyone disputes that.
What I dispute is the claim that an engineering degree is only an IQ test with the contents of the degree supposedly being irrelevant (where software engineering is a major outlier).
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I am not. I'm saying that most engineers are actually not working in hardcore engineering in their subfield.
There are career paths as an engineer that actually depend on the technical specialization of said engineer but those are far fewer than the vaguely technical generalist roles that absorb engineers of various different backgrounds and some people of other backgrounds as well.
Engineering frequently works as a sort of finishing school for the non-retarded.
I’m not talking about hardcore engineering but basic stuff. Show a circuit to a civil engineer and they have no idea what’s going on. That is hardly ”hardcore engineering” (and frankly neither is basic DSP - it’s normal third year stuff).
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agree. employers get so many applicants. they need some way to filter at scale.
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There is right now an interesting trend going on. First generation UK migrants sending their second generation progeny to study medicine in my EU country because it is relatively cheap and the tutors take bribes (and anyway are forbidden from failing them because the university really like the tuition fees). When they come back to UK they will be more capable killers than SAS and Spetsnaz combined.
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I wonder how this is different than your IQ + your demonstrated ability to jump through hoops.
Universities love to say they "teach you how to learn". In my mind, this is cope. There is no indication that they are making an effort to do this, nor that it is even possible.
Regardless of their purpose , whatever it is, employers sure want it.
Employers don’t want the things universities teach you, they want the evidence that you can function in a normal white collar office environment.
Sorta. A high GPA means you’re intellectually capable of absorbing large quantities of material. It’s more than just being able to function in a particular environment. If an employer sees that someone has a 4.0 in literature or philosophy, that signals they’re good at reading and making sense of large amounts of text. This is useful in a work setting when having to process reports, or make sense of disparate pieces of information. But the high GPA is also indicative of an ability to fucus and get work done, so there is an IQ and attentiveness component.
It’s also a point that you chose a major that has no practical value in the real world. Im not sure about most employers, but to me, it’s sort of a negative that a person chose an entire course of study that everyone knows is useless.
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Yes, it has signaling value. So does an IQ test. But no one says that the process of taking an IQ test makes you smarter.
Really, we've been down this road a million times. I've never heard a convincing argument against Bryan Caplan's "The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money".
I think they are both true. his book is right but at the same time employers derive value from degrees.
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I think its more that you demonstrate that you're capable of long term sustained effort at solving difficult abstract problems. Forcing you to do this does in itself teach you how to think.
This is both separate from demonstrating a willingness to jump through hoops and it is teaching something important beyond the object level.
Now, if you're getting a degree in something simple that doesn't require work or intellectual ability, that also doesn't have practical applications then that is probably more or less useless beyond the fact that you might have qualified for the education in the first place.
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Good professors model critical thinking skills and ask their students to reflect on the material in a manner they may not have considered. Don't just memorize the formulars. Figure out what purpose they serve and think about how you might use them to make something real.
I think in general "teach you how to learn" may be cope in a lot of cases. But "teach you how to think" is absolutely not. Just from personal experience, a lot of the students I started university alongside were terrible at reflecting on the material. They became better due to interacting with it and receiving feedback from the professors.
I don’t doubt that good individual professors can have a positive effect, but these are quite rare. If there is a pedagogical philosophy, it’s not something that the university is promoting. Teaching is often an afterthought. In almost no cases is there a serious effort to educate educators, especially using any sort of evidence driven approach. College instructors are often just thrown into classrooms with no training. How can they “teach you to think” when they dont know the first thing about teaching?
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That is what I love about electricity. You never need bother remembering anything if you have just basic math skills.
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I think they do "teach you how to learn" but that really consists in widening the distance between checkpoints and motivating you to figure out how to learn by yourself. Some people can develop these skills alone but it isn't easy.
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