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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13676 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.

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.

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