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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Colleges have 4 competing goals. Figure out which one you want and decide from there. Want a career that will make you lots of money? Figure out how you want to do that and get those skills and certifications and whatever else you need, no college necessary unless it's part of the certification process. Want to be a Renaissance Man, with a life enriched by an understanding of history, literature, art, etc.? State college might be appropriate. Want to contribute to human knowledge by doing Science and writing important papers in important journals? Find a school with at least some prestige in your field of choice and be prepared to play a lot of politics and be poor all your life. Want to be part of a grand social experiment of dismantling the patriarchy and white supremacy helping ensure equity across America? Well, don't, but if you must, then pick one of the many schools that makes that their priority above any actual education of its students.

But given that we've got several people who attended Ivies here in the comments who are affirming that it is true, and the actual purpose of elite institutions was always and forever as a finishing school for the elite and not temples of knowledge, what should a smart person do?

Go to Cal Tech or MIT. Hell, go to any flagship state school, they're actually world class institutions in general. The Ivies are fine as well, there simply is no secret and special form of education that actually conveys anything all that special at the undergraduate level. If you're actually someone that's a pure knowledge-seeker, you're going to stick with research after undergrad anyway, and going to any top-notch state flagship will get you into top notch research programs more or less wherever you want.

Obviously state schools are focused on being vocational schools for normies, and opportunities for professorships are dead in the water for anyone who isn't diverse, and universities are more interested in ideology than knowledge.

Oh, bullshit. There's plenty of ideology to go around, but if you actually just want to go bust your ass working on T cell biology or plastics engineering or some obscure mathematical concept, there's plenty of room to do so across the academic spectrum. Insisting that you can't do serious work at Stanford or Cal or a million other schools because you're Asian, so Substack is the only way out is the copiest cope that ever coped.

Oh, bullshit... obscure mathematical concept

I've been there. It's not impossible but it's hard to begin with... And you're competing with people who have more resources (either family money or grants).

I really miss the passion I (and everyone else) had in grad school... Being able to lose myself and fall into beauty that so few people could see. But it became impossible for me to not have a job (needed to support family). It sucks when you work you ass off... Harder than a lot of the people who have more than you. Just to have those people say, 'We have so much, so not you'.

I think it might be interesting to get people not affiliated with universities to do more on giving out knowledge for the sake of knowledge— cheap, guided courses taught mostly online with minor assignments to be done as knowledge checks. There’s no technical reason it couldn’t be done. I could even sed academies devoted completely to academic research and teaching no students just doing what should be done — dispassionate search for knowledge.

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