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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13691 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

Screening for degrees saves employers time and boosts productivity without having to interview everyone.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).

agree. employers get so many applicants. they need some way to filter at scale.

That's pretty different from studying something like medicine or law, where the degree is much more directly tied to a particular profession.

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.

In some ways it's more of a qualification to learn how to do a job than anything else.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

That is what I love about electricity. You never need bother remembering anything if you have just basic math skills.

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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