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In a shift from a mere couple of years ago, when a majority of Republican-Americans thought that higher education was a good thing, the majority of them now believe the opposite.
A Pew Research Center survey published Monday revealed voters have grown apart in their support of secondary education since the 2016 presidential election season, when a majority of Democratic and Republican Americans agreed the nation’s universities serve as a benefit for the U.S. Whereas 54 percent of Republicans said "colleges and universities had a positive impact on the way things were going in the country" in 2015, the majority now believe the opposite, with 58 percent saying such institutions negatively impact the state of the union.
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Newsweek: Majority of Republicans Say Colleges Are Bad for America
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:11AM (20 children)
The problem, I think, is the idea that has seized the US in the past 30-40 years. Wasn't it Bill Gates who declared that everyone deserved a world-class college education? The simple fact that he could say such a thing shows that he is surrounded only by highly intelligent people, and is entirely unacquainted with the rest of the population.
But the US went with this idea. To make it work, admission requirements were basically eliminated - if the customer will pay, the college will take them. But Bubba and Shanice can't afford college, so we get student loans to put them into college, and land them in lifetime debt. But Bubba and Shanice ain't gonna get outta no high school anyhow. So the requirements had to be watered down all way through primary school (NCLB = "no child gets ahead"). When I went to US public schools for a year in 6th grade...OMG, was I bored. That was more than 40 years ago; from all I read, it's far worse now.
Look at Chicago: you can only graduate from high school if you have a plan, however, actual literacy and numeracy is not required. [frontpagemag.com] And kids out of Chicago schools are supposed to go to college en masse?
The result, today: the typical college has a freshman year full of basically remedial classes. The costs are nuts, but the money goes to bloated administration [washingtonmonthly.com] and fancy sports stadiums, while the actual teaching staff starves. [huffingtonpost.com]
It's no wonder college educations are falling into disrepute.
Finally, an aspect that lots of people forget: in addition to starting life with debts, if you go the college route, you start earning a lot later. I have one kid who has taken each route, both in their early 20s, and the difference is remarkable. Sure, the college-educated engineer (this is in Switzerland, so no student debt) will ultimately have a higher salary, but the kid who took the trade route has a huge head start in earnings, in savings, and is currently living a more luxurious lifestyle. It's going to take a lot of years before their financial paths cross, if they ever do.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:18AM (4 children)
What other countries offer a better college deal for students in STEM than USA ?
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:03AM
Germany. Free - no tuition, none, even if you are a foreign student.
University degree if you pass the exams - attempt them as many times you want, I guarantee you they are hard - there's no incentive to anyone to let you pass without actually worth it - on the contrary, their reputation will suffer.
The only requirements for anyone - speak German and sustain yourself for the period (social security will, of course, be provided for German citizens).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @07:19AM
"What other countries offer a better college deal for students in STEM than USA ?"
If that's a serious question, here are two, both ranking consistently in the top 50 universities worldwide: the ETH Zürich (costs around $600 per semester for Swiss citizens), or the University of Edinburgh [timeshighereducation.com] (currently free for EU citizens [ed.ac.uk]).
Frankly, every country in the western world has perfectly fine universities that will give students an education as good as anywhere in the US.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @09:25PM (1 child)
Quantity matters as well as quantity. A web site ranked the top colleges in the world by country. The US has 61 of the top 100 (next was UK with 9), 92 of the top 200 (UK second again with 17), etc. The number and variety of choices is far greater than any other country.
Getting back to the original post, I agree with a previous post in this thread regarding the poll. Conservatives aren't anti-education, they never has been, that is absurd. They are anti-liberal-bias education, and there is a feeling (probably true) that the more modest liberal bias from previous decades is being replaced with unrelenting ultra-left-wing bias nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:32PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:36AM
Classic Republican mistake: Students are not customers, they are product. Get your head around that, bradley who had to drop out. Not a product.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:53AM (9 children)
But per the Fine Article, my lovely and redolent bradley-14, only amoungst Republicans. Can you explain this? Or is it beyond your intellectual abilities?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:56AM (8 children)
Why conservative voters are especially skeptical of college in the US? Probably due to the same political divide that put Trump into office. Colleges in the US today are thoroughly political, and theirs is the politics of left-wing progressivism.
Meanwhile, can you drop the gratuitous insults?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 11 2017, @09:10AM (6 children)
The insults are gratis, so I thought you would be thankful for them. If they are uncalled for, please show it. You are just wrong about American Colleges, I know whereof I speak. So stop insulting an entire profession, and I will consider not calling you out for being an ass. That is how it works, among scholars. I still await your apology.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:24AM (5 children)
"You are just wrong about American Colleges, I know whereof I speak. So stop insulting an entire profession, and I will consider not calling you out for being an ass. That is how it works, among scholars. I still await your apology."
I provided links for administrative bloat [washingtonmonthly.com] and the abuse of adjunct faculty [huffingtonpost.com], although both problems are well known. I only made three other criticisms, all of which are equally well-known, so you'll have to tell me which of these you have trouble accepting?
- Was it that lots of students in US colleges wind up in remedial courses [apmreports.org]? Put the blame where you will: students who don't belong in college in the first place, or high schools that fail to educate them. Either way, the criticism of colleges remains valid: they shouldn't admit most of these unqualified students in the first place.
- Or perhaps you don't believe that students are graduating with massive amounts of debt [marketwatch.com]? Really, there's nothing to discuss here, it's a simple fact, and hardly a compliment to the US educational system. The government program for student loans has had the primary effect of enabling and driving crippling indebtedness for an entire generation.
- Or perhaps you disagree with the more general idea that many students are simply not suited to college [timesunion.com]? Actually, the stupid thing about the article I just linked to is the word "unfortunately". There's nothing "unfortunate" about being good at a trade. In fact, good tradesmen can be hard to find in countries that have lost the corresponding educational system (like the US and the UK). In countries where we still have these systems in place, a plumber has just as much societal respect as a programmer - it's just a different life path.
So...rather than me apologizing, perhaps you'd care to explain which of the above points you take such offense at?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:28PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @08:41PM (1 child)
Lol cause you're a bastion of well sourced citations and proper critical thinking! Pot meet kettle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:16AM
If so, then I know what I'm talking about. Roll the credits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:11PM
It doesn't matter if the students are suited or not, they still have to go. Getting a job without having a college degree gets harder every year. Blame business for the mess, blame high schools for poor life education?, blame parents for not teaching their kids how to survive in the world, blame society for allowing parents to get away with it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday July 11 2017, @06:37PM
You are pulling a khallow. The points you bring up have some truth in them, but they are also irrelevant to the topic at hand. They are not enough to bring higher education as a whole into disrepute, and they are not the reason that Republicans specifically have shifted in their view of higher education. So stop being an ass, stop trying to change the subject.
(Nice to see that khallow his own self STILL is unable to differentiate knowledge from claims to knowledge, and expertise from authority. )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @04:27PM
It's because science doesn't back their particular weird views on the world. Colleges are in need of some reforms, but the reforms are significantly less drastic than what the GOP voters would have you believe.
The real problem is cognitive dissonance that comes from being brought up with wrong beliefs. Beliefs that are demonstrably wrong and rather hard to dislodge. We know that climate change is real and that humans play a massive role in it. We don't know exactly how bad it's going to be, but we know it's going to be bad. We also know that GOP tax policies don't work and we've known that for decades. Back in the '80s, it wasn't a liberal that coined the term voodoo economics to describe supply side economics.
These are the same people that insist that gays getting married infringes on their rights and that a failure to say merry Christmas is a war on their beliefs. People that poorly educated and ignorant aren't going to like college.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday July 11 2017, @12:14PM (2 children)
There are three other USA issues.
The first is demographic change. People who stopped observing in 1965 think the USA is still a 90% white country with white country IQs and performance levels. A lot of angst over USA education system can be explained by human biological differences and demographic replacement / white genocide. So the average white kid in the USA performs at "Norway levels" or above and nords are widely acknowledged as high performance and our white people compete pretty well with the top white euros. Likewise the average African in the USA performs at a level far above any African on the continent of Africa, the highest performing Guatemalans on the planet are located in the USA not Guatemala, etc. The problem is you go from a 90% white country to 50% non-white and no matter how high performing they are for their race, the inter race differences kick in and the USA education system is extremely low performing compared to a 100% white country in legacy Europe, because we're not a white country anymore. We have a great school system with excellent results compared to all of Africa, or Central and South America. Boomers think this is a white country because when they were kids, it was. Now whites are or are nearing minority status among current children, the USA used to have the population and educational results of 1960s Sweden, but soon both demographically and in educational performance it'll closely resemble 80s era South Africa. A tiny percentage of pale people building arms and nukes and soldiering and a huge population of non-pale people who are functionally illiterate and innumerate.
The second issue is you can view the existing college industrial complex as siphoning off the top kids, yet the bottom kids doing trades are still economically kicking the college kids butts. Its interesting to envision what if a top percentile kid becomes an electrician for example and ends up running a small (or not so small) business instead of going to college for womens studies and dying in poverty alone. Perhaps you could model the current economic malaise as kids with bright futures snuffed out by massive debt and bad education.
The third problem we have in the USA is a bad progressive infestation. Its kind of a mental illness. Martyr complex, self loathing, glorification of deviancy / hatred of conformity, holier than thou signalling... and higher ed has an awful infestation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @03:42PM
The above is standard racist claptrap. I live and work among a wide variety of ethnic groups, and individual personality differences make a far bigger difference than any racial difference.
That's something we can partly agree on. Building-related infrastructure maintenance can pay relatively well (plumbing, HVAC, cabling, electrical, etc.). The country should make it easier to get trade-school education also.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 11 2017, @05:47PM
Income is a better predictor of educational success than race. [stanford.edu]
Probably why you don't like colleges. When we base things on observable reality they tend to contradict your illogical opinions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 11 2017, @03:33PM
True, but post-high-school education of SOME kind is probably necessary to become anything beyond a Walmart greeter. AKA, "trade school".