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In a recent study, we investigated how many of the wealthiest and most influential people graduated college. We studied 11,745 U.S. leaders, including CEOs, federal judges, politicians, multi-millionaires and billionaires, business leaders and the most globally powerful men and women.
We found about 94 percent of these U.S. leaders attended college, and about 50 percent attended an elite school. Though almost everyone went to college, elite school attendance varied widely. For instance, only 20.6 percent of House members and 33.8 percent of 30-millionaires attended an elite school, but over 80 percent of Forbes' most powerful people did. For whatever reason, about twice as many senators – 41 percent – as House members went to elite schools.
For comparison, based on census and college data, we estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of all U.S. undergraduates went to one of the elite schools in our study. The people from our study attended elite schools at rates well above typical expectations.
Why waste $150,000 on an education you could get for $1.50 in late fees at the public library?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @07:46AM (3 children)
I wish I had been a college drop-out, so I could threaten the world with biological warfare, like Billy Gates [theguardian.com], or Nuclear Arms and Get-it-on, like L'il Kim, the Turd. But:
showing an employer you're willing to stick with something for 4 years.
Teaching at a college, and after consulting with my colleagues, it seems that most students, and this is a new thing this semester, are not able to stick with something for four or five months! Attendance has plummeted. First, I thought it was me, since I am a "bad teacher", (even though I look nothing like Cameron Diaz), one of those who forces the sad puppies of college who only want to learn stuff they can sell to the highest bidder to actually learn stuff, and if they blow me off, I have no difficulty in depth-charging their GPA, reporting them to the dean, and shooting their dog in the ass. And I do, on a regular basis. They complain to the admin, and I say: listen, you punk ass STEM major, do you have any documentation that you attended the course after the third week of the semester? Can you answer ever a SINGLE question on the final exam? Why are you too stupid to be able to know what a syllabus is, let alone read one? Oh, my god!
Alright. Faculty. End of Semester. Accredation pressure. Accountability pressure from total assholes with degrees in "education management" and selling out to the Gates foundation and Lumina. I am jaded. I am pissed off. My only hope, which has always been the hope of all teachers everywhere and throughout time, is the some of my students, the ones who show the fuck up, read the goddamned assigned material, and actually do more study than is required, they will go on to preserve the profession of scholarship, and ultimately, become just as bitter as I am. I love them.
And to those "drop-outs" who succeed in spite? You are uneducated. You are a Runaway, with billions of dollars. How can you not scare yourself, let alone the rest of us?
(Score: 2) by Jerry Smith on Friday April 21 2017, @08:10AM
Teacher here. I hear ya.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @10:51AM
Unless the point of the class is to study a particular professor, it's usually much more illuminating to read textbooks and whitepapers and do gobs of problem sets—and this is 100x the case for STEM subjects.
You're right: After the first 3 weeks, I usually stopped attending classes, and just read my books. It was so much better than listening to some Indian practice his English for an hour.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @02:33PM
I got a STEM degree and had very poor attendance for most of my science classes.
Lecturing was not the most efficient use of my time for me to learn most of the time. Attending lectures were a luxury for me because it meant that I had enough down time (no immediate assignments or impending exams) from my other STEM and non-STEM classes that I could sit through someone explaining the topic to me. This held true for any lecture-heavy class excluding some of the upper-division/MS level courses that I was able to take in my third and fourth year.
Despite my formal education, I am more than aware that a university degree does not necessarily mean someone is not "uneducated". I got my degree because I was smart, I was motivated enough to tolerate all the bullshit requirements involved, and because I could "afford" (grants, scholarships, community college courses, and loans) a subsidized public university. Mark Twain had a nice quote on the subject along the lines of "Don't let schools interfere with your education".