I love this guy!
So there is this young man in Kansas, obviously intelligent, who has been clever enough to figured out at a young age that his university is only concerned about fleecing the flock, it's all about the money. Among other things he notes:
1)printing $6 textbooks for $200
2)being taught by teachers who have never done any actual work in the field
3)learn the quadratic formula when kids should be learning how to do their taxes
4) costs have gone up 18x while wages only 5x in the past 40 years.
5)Engineers learning more in the first 30 days of work than in 5 years of college.

I think he's right on, we should demand accountability to these blood-suckers. In Utah our governor reported that more legislative money goes to higher education than any other other program. What do ya'll think?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1303356226404197&set=a.261322733940890.60841.100001894950443&type=3&theater

So if higher education is a scam, then so too is the workforce that demands most of today's workforce have a college degree. Whether or not that degree pertains to the task at hand is irrelevant. It's the norm.

Maybe college is unnecessary to learn a task. What it does do is prepare people to engage in a democratic society, and to endow a social awareness and conscience to really reap the benefit of a higher education.

With the costs of higher education it can sure feel like a ripoff, when people come out feeling more like indentured servants than college graduates. Paying back student loans takes years and affects the choices people have entering the job market, credit scores, and so on. Of course with all the fighting about socializing healthcare, it'll be a cold day in hell before America wakes up and does the same for higher education for its masses.

With trickle down economics, better to keep the wealth concentrated among the elites. Too much power in the hands of an educated workforce would be a dangerous thing, after all.

"So if higher education is a scam, then so too is the workforce that demands most of today's workforce have a college degree. Whether or not that degree pertains to the task at hand is irrelevant. It's the norm."

Since college tuition costs have skyrocketed over the last few years, that line of thought is less prevalent. A lot of people simply don't want to go to college. I was one of them. Also, there are many, many good jobs that don't require a college degree. For instance, my wife dropped out of college when we got married in 1979, and she raised our four kids over the next 28 years. Seven years ago, she got a $9 an hour job in a senior care facility. Four years later, she was made the marketing director for the whole company. The CEO told her that she's the best one they've ever had. And she's the only worker in management of the company who doesn't have a degree. She doesn't need one, because she has brains and talent.

Another example is my wife's sister's hubby, who started on oil rigs as a roughneck, and within a few years, he had become one of the top directional drillers in the country, making $200k plus. He had no college at all; he's simply good at math and is a good, hard worker.

There are countless similar examples, including starting your own business. Hell, I'm just a high school graduate, but I've managed to keep my small business going for 19 years now.

"Maybe college is unnecessary to learn a task. What it does do is prepare people to engage in a democratic society, and to endow a social awareness and conscience to really reap the benefit of a higher education."

Yeah, well, maybe some of us are able to learn all of that without spending four years and tens of thousands of dollars on college. I took civics class in the 8th grade.

"With trickle down economics, better to keep the wealth concentrated among the elites."

There are currently over 10 million millionaires in the USA.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/07/record-number-of-millionaires-living-in-the-us.html

Looks like that "trickle down economics" is working spectacularly---10 million American "elites."

>There are currently over 10 million millionaires in the USA.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/07/record-number-of-millionaires-living-in-the-us.html

>Looks like that "trickle down economics" is working spectacularly---10 million American "elites."

And 43 million Americans living in poverty.

http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-united-states

"And 43 million Americans living in poverty."

That may be true, but it has nothing to do with the subject, nor does it reflect poorly on the American economic system.

>That may be true, but it has nothing to do with the subject

It has as much to do with the subject as the fact that there are 10 million millionares.

>nor does it reflect poorly on the American economic system.

That is a matter of opinion.

randyj Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That may be true, but it has nothing to do with
> the subject, nor does it reflect poorly on the
> American economic system.

Sure it does. Look at the average earnings I posted. How many of the 43 million Americans living in poverty do you think have college degrees? Probably a very tiny percentage.

And it *does* reflect poorly on the American economic system. A system that praises accumulation of wealth and abandonment of those who can't obtain it isn't a system that's going to last. Eventually those 43 million in poverty (and the 150 million more that aren't that far above poverty) are going to get pissed off enough at the 10 million "elites" and take their stuff. You might do well to read some history on the rising up of the poor against wealthy elites.

This!!1! 'm quitting my quadratic formula class right now and becoming an engineer. Them egghead professors and their fancy math! Losers, every one of them. Why don't they have a class to learn how to use the TurboTax? Probably so you don't find out the government's taking like 120% of my hard-earned money and giving it to a bunch of so-called intellectuals and "scientists." What good have they ever done? Take that suckers in Hollyweird and New York! Kansas rules!

What do I think?
I think the guy is full of crap.
And I've got the evidence to back it up.

Avg. weekly earnings without a high school diploma: $493
Unemployment rate: 8%

Avg. weekly earnings with a HS diploma but no college: $678
Unemployment rate: 5.4%

Avg. weekly earnings with some college (no degree): $738
Unemployment rate: 5%

Avg. weekly earnings with an associate degree: $798
Unemployment rate: 3.8%

Avg. weekly earnings with a bachelor's degree: $1,137
Unemployment rate: 2.8%

Avg. weekly earnings with a master's degree: $1,341
Unemployment rate: 2.4%

Avg. weekly earnings with a doctorate/prof. degree: $1,730
Unemployment rate: 1.7%

Scam? Nope. It's the clear path to higher earnings, more job security, and a better life. Yeah, getting those things isn't free, it takes work and costs money. How about that.

edit to add:
I use the quadratic formula every single day. And derivatives, integrals, and even (gasp!) geometry.

When Billy (the guy with the "viral" FB post) needs to calculate the exponential decline of his future career without a degree, he won't be able to -- it's a quadratic equation :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2016 09:46AM by ificouldhietokolob.

I do not have a collage degree but make a bachelors degree salary.

A college degree is good to have but not necessary for a good paying job. Hard work and dedication in a chosen field is.

Degrees all depend on the company's view of having them and what dicipline you are in.

Engineering -- you need a degree if you want to make the money.

Experience is very good -- BUT HR will always fuck you over IF you don't have a degree. It's their excuse to pay you less.

HR does not like employee's to talk about the wages they earn. Because if you don't know, they can improve their bottom line by keeping it all hush hush, and confidential. If it was open, then may be other issues too about so and so is more lazy than another worker but paid the same.

Those who work harder than others making the same amount of money will be promoted and tasked with better jobs, opportunities from competitors etc. The lazy bitches will continue in the same job, be fired, or go elsewhere.

"What do I think?
I think the guy is full of crap.
And I've got the evidence to back it up."

The average incomes of college graduates versus non-college graduates doesn't mean that EVERY college graduate is going to make more money than EVERY non-graduate. For instance, my oldest daughter is the only college grad of my four kids, and she hasn't earned a dime in 4-5 years now. But my oldest son, who barely graduated from high school, is a big wheel in a national company and makes way above the average income. A lot of other factors other than a degree come into play, including basic smarts, work ethic, and entreprenurial skills.

Here's a sample of very successful people who had no college degree:

http://elitedaily.com/news/business/100-top-entrepreneurs-succeeded-college-degree/

randyj, the word average has a definition.

"randyj, the word average has a definition."

Really? Did you learn that in college?

I responded as I did because college isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. So the "average income" means nothing for those people who either don't want to go to college, or can't afford it, but who become successful doing something that doesn't require a college degree nonetheless.

I'll repeat a personal experience I related here a few months ago: When I was 29, I was a journeyman plumber, remodeling a high school. One of my co-workers was this overweight guy around 50 years old. He talked and acted "too smart" to be a plumber, so I asked him what he had done before. He replied that he had been a junior high school principal, and quit because he got tired of dealing with the teenagers. He had degrees from (IIRC) Marshall and West Virginia. When he was in college, he had worked for his wife's father's plumbing business. So when he decided to quit education, he got back into plumbing. My point being, he did all that college, and got all those degrees, and wound up doing something that didn't require any college at all.

So there he was, crawling underneath a dusty old school, running pipe along with me, and making the same salary as I was. And I never went to college at all. In fact, I never even went to plumber's apprentice school. I learned it on the job, and took my journeyman's test and passed it after working in the trade for the required four years.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2016 08:11PM by randyj.

randyj Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I responded as I did because college isn't a
> one-size-fits-all proposition.

Nobody's claiming it is. That's the point of "averages," which you seem to have missed.

Yes, you *can* make a good living without a degree. Nobody's claiming otherwise.
However, you have a much higher chance of making a better living WITH a degree. Period. Without one, especially in our economy, you are shut out completely from the highest-paying jobs. And for good reasons -- you don't have the skills or training you need to do them.

That kid and others seeing the societal construct of being degreed for what it is. In a lot of cases logically ridicules even though a lot people buy into it. The mantra of "go to college and you'll have it made" is breaking down.

If you are degreed in something that will pay well for what you are learning makes sense. Going to school to become an engineer, doctor, nurse etc. Then there are host of degrees which are not valued. For instance, by wife is an HR manager for a company which owns a number of hotels. The number of people applying with degrees for doing jobs like the front desk is alarming. This is a $15hr job at best, which a lot of the time is only part time.

For most of us the degree gets your first job, and after that its all work experience. Now there are a bunch of low paying jobs that require a 4 year degree and there is not the return on investment. Compare that with becoming an electrician in the Seattle area where you start out at over $20hr and in up in the mid $40s after 4 or 5 years. Plus all your training and schooling is free. If you want to learn about history or the humanities, you have the internet now. Why would you pay thousands for that as an adult. Plus that should have been taught effectively taught well in K-12. That is along time to come out only knowing how to read, know some math, and a little history. I felt like cattle being warehoused because it was so damn boring.

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> edit to add:
> I use the quadratic formula every single day.

.....for what ???


> And
> derivatives, integrals, and even (gasp!)
> geometry.

geometry comes into play (for most us) FAR more often than the (clumsy, ugly) quadratic formula, using a tape measure can be considered a form of geometric practice, I am saying that as somebody who knows just exactly what a derivative and integral is as well as the quadratic formula


Oh, BTW, a person can learn to do the quadratic formula WITH OUT going to college.


> When Billy (the guy with the "viral" FB post)
> needs to calculate the exponential decline of his
> future career without a degree, he won't be able
> to -- it's a quadratic equation :)

oh, yah, that "need"

thanks for pointing out just exactly how useful that the quadratic equation really is .....

Wow. His 4.0 didn't help him think this one through. Maybe college isn't for him, but his reasoning is lame.

Here are a few counterpoints:

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/billy-williams-fuck-college

It sounds to me like he was bored and disappointed by his first year and made faulty assumptions about the instruction that might follow. Let's assume he had 8 - 12 first-year instructors, and he now assigns that level of "old" material and experience of teachers to the next three years.

Someone needs to give him a virtual kick in the ass for wasting his 4.0 opportunities.

Many people have the idea that college should be a trade school where one learns a "job" then goes out to do that job the rest of their lives. I say Not So.

If I depended on what I learned in engineering school for my entire career I would still be designing vacuum tube amplifiers and such.

College should be preparation for the continued learning that must go on constantly to keep up with the world.

"College should be preparation for the continued learning that must go on constantly to keep up with the world."

Some people are able to do that without going to college. It's called "reading stuff" and "watching the news."

I think employers will eventually catch on that accreditation doesn't mean much anymore. The higher costs climb in these fiefdoms that double as intellectual ghettos, the more pressure there is to dumb down the curriculum to keep the masses paying.

There's an old adage: Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Same with hiring. A degree proves you can stick to a task and complete it. You're the lab rat who completed the maze. It's more a matter of risk management. If HR hires a non-degreed person and they don't work out, who gets in trouble?

Also, the kids being exploited today will be the hiring managers in a decade or two. I think good old fashioned resentment will fuel alternative education systems.

I agree that college has gotten ridiculously expensive in many cases. My feeling is that given the expense, kids and their families need to be very focused about what they want out of the experience. IMO gone are the days when you can just get a liberal arts degree and have no idea what you are going to do with it.

Canadian schools are still affordable. State governments have decided to force students to pay for the schools instead of viewing it as an investment in our economy. Ohio spends more on prisons than on universities.

The defunding of education is the scam. A college degree is still very valuable for the individual and for the economy. We just don't value investing in our country any more.

Axeldc makes an important point: the defunding of education is the scam. Students have been billed for the difference. When I went back in the 1960s, I went through for an MS, and was able to pay off student loans in two years. I work-study jobs grading papers, worked as a grad assistant, and had GI Bill for grad school.

As for the specific points:
1)printing $6 textbooks for $200
That is a scandal. I especially hated new editions of books created for no other reason than to kill the buy-back value of the older edition. Why would one need a revised edition of a calculus text every two to three years? Some schools and professors are rebelling, and putting out their own materials at cost. I expect electronic books will revolutionize and lower prices for textbooks, just like it has done for other print media, home sales, and stock commissions.

2)being taught by teachers who have never done any actual work in the field
That actually is a problem sometimes. Highly depends on the field. Still, the relevance of the hurdle you have to clear is not as important as the fact that you cleared it. In tech fields in particular, the challenges you will be facing in 15 years don't even exist right now. You need to develop general problem solving skills, not just solutions to specific problems right now.

3)learn the quadratic formula when kids should be learning how to do their taxes
This is not an either-or problem. They should be able to do both. The Babylonians had a very good algorithm for calculating the square root of two 3,500 years ago. Not only is the fact that they knew how to do that that many centuries ago amazing, the fact that they realized it was a problem worth solving is amazing. If you think the quadratic equation is a waste of time, you still haven't caught up with pre-literate Babylon. (Approximations to sqrt 2 were in some of their earliest written records)

4) costs have gone up 18x while wages only 5x in the past 40 years.
Costs of what? Wages for what work?

5)Engineers learning more in the first 30 days of work than in 5 years of college.
LOL. I'd say the first six months, but fair point. However, it was those five years of college that made it possible for them to learn a lot in those first weeks/months on the job. Try sticking some kid off the street in the engineering job.

I had had a job in digital signal processing. I could do the math, but never really understood why a Fourier transform worked, even if I could use the software. I took a Signals and Systems EE course. It was considered the weed out course for EE majors. I was in my fifties, calculus was decades in the past, but I had some nuts and bolts experience of where the course was headed. I also worked like a dog, because engineering students can be somewhat full of themselves, thinking the only reason to major in anything else is because you can't cut it as an engineer. Not complete nonsense, but still, it annoys.

I got the highest grade in the class by 5%. Professor was thrilled. I think students just figured I ruined the curve. I did take the course for credit. That and fear of being humiliated by a bunch of 20-year-olds was needed to get me to work that hard.

The aphorism that education is wasted on the young has some truth to it, but youth is wasted on the young too. That's kind of the way life works. Higher ed has its problems, and it is no guarantee of a successful career. But for a generally applicable way to get ahead, it's pretty good. Frankly, skilled trades are not bad careers either. My two cents

Go get an uneducated dentist to drill on your teeth. You might change your mind.

"Go get an uneducated dentist to drill on your teeth. You might change your mind."

A few years ago, one of the top dentists in my city, whom my wife and I had used for years, overanesthetized a teenage girl. She died, and the dentist lost his practice as a result. Point being, even educated professionals can make mistakes.

College is a scam when you don't do the math/homework up front and take responsibility for your investment plan.

Going to college to improve your career and earnings is like putting a missionary companionship in an apartment means more baptisms will come. On an aggregate scale its proven that on average that the more education/training a person gets then the better their career will go. Its also on an aggregate scale proven that the more areas/missionaries you throw into the work then the more baptisms that'll result. But on an individual basis it really depends on what the individuals involved do. If the missionaries spend all day in their apartments and never do any finding/teaching then of course they aren't going to get any extra baptisms. Likewise if a college student doesn't actually put in effort to learn skills/experiences that are useful and aligned with their career marketing and performance efforts along with market demands then they will not be successful.

Now one big point that the original author for this thread makes is that the cost of college has gone way up in the USA and far outpaced the rate of inflation & wage growth over the past 40 years. Thus its a much more dangerous investment choice for any teenager or young adult to blindly indenture themselves with exponentially-growing undefaultable student loans obligations without first doing some serious homework/analysis up front. There is plenty of blame to go around. But in the end it is them, not anyone else, who is stuck as the bagholder on all the debt. I feel for them as I was just 17 years old when I got my only student loan I ever took out. While on my mission I unknowingly defaulted as I didn't understand the forbearance process. It resulted in making me ineligible to get the best subsidized student loans for graduate school so I instead went out and worked in my field after graduation & never went back to graduate school at all.

Subsidized student loans allow universities to charge higher tuitions because while kids can't afford to pay for college, government-backed student loans allow them to afford to go.

If they couldn't get the loans, they wouldn't be able to afford the tuitions, and universities would go out of business unless they lowered the costs to a more affordable level.

Again, the free market is the answer.

What hie didn't factor into his numbers is the take-home pay of college graduates after student loan payments are made. I think that would tell a much different story on weekly earnings (net) vs. the gross he outlined above.

Still, he's right. Higher education itself is not a scam.

Doesn't mean kids aren't getting scammed, though :)

I think they also forget to tell kids that there are no safe spaces in the workplace, and student loan past due notices don't come with trigger warnings...

<< they forget to tell kids that there are no safe spaces in the workplace
that is very true. Young people have the illusion that they are getting into a wonderful dreamworld with their career. I use to hear when I was growing up that the less you make the harder you work. That's simply not true. All jobs are difficult. But kids think education is a sure ticket and it's not.

One of the other observations I've noticed in the past 25 years is that the facilities Utah colleges have drastically expanded. They spent billions on over the top infrastructure. Parking terraces, dome ceilings, expansive classrooms, stadium seating, elevators, research facilities (that are always empty), glass balustrades, mezzanines and catwalks, USU has a new recreational facility with swimming pools, spas, gyms. All luxury to young broke kids who don't need any of it.

USU has the best education department in the country (they boast) yet almost all their instructors have never spent a day in the public classroom? And yet they are supposedly the experts writing the curriculum.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2016 09:02PM by poopstone.

Now you're just whining. I live in downtown SLC. Pretty much every building downtown, cultural or office building that is under 30 years old fits the description you gave (glass, mezzanines,fancy lobbies, parking terraces, etc). All-A-Dollar stores are not the architectural paradigm for permanent university structures. Even LDS Inc puts up presentable college buildings, tightwads though they are.

Research facilities that are always empty - yeah, Utah has a real reputation for excessive spending on education. Spend a year sometime on a university budget committee. Not an easy task.

Your post does't have an off-topic warning; you resort to "because I said claims" without any facts to back them up, and this has very little, if anything, to do with recovery from Mormonism.

Personally, as a humanities teacher, I believe that there's a lot more value in my education than increased income potential.

My education has completely changed the way I experience the world and that would still be the case even if I could only find employment in the fast food industry.

That said, the way post-secondary education is structured in this country is unfair, irrational and completely broken.

Our Educational system's foundation is bullshit.


Education plays a foundational role in the life of an individual and society. It molds our perceptions, it gives us tools and useful knowledge we can draw upon to create a successful life. One of the ways our society stratifies itself is along the lines of education. The more education someone receives the more respected they are in their field, and by others in general. The message has been the more you learn the more you earn. The reality of this message seems to be breaking down. The mounting student loan debt, and high level of college educated under employed millennials should be an indicator that something isn't right.

Politicians keep banging the drum of more education. They don't give a shit about your kids’ education, it makes them sound better so you'll vote for them. Appealing to people’s desire to help children is always popular politically. Most of them are sending their kids to private schools. We need to spend more money on education is the common cry of the politician even though almost twice as much is spent on our schools than in other comparable countries. They come up with catchy programs "Common Core", or no "Child Left Behind".

These are nothing more than buzz words, and justification to create more bureaucracy, and funnel more money into private companies which lobby heavily to profit off this mess. According to just about every published study the academic aptitude of the US is low. I've seen ranges from 14th down to 27th spot. Either way that sucks, and throwing money at the problems seems not be working. Saying more education when the problem is likely qualitative rather than quantitative is not well thought out, problematic, and doesn't offer any sort of a remedy. How does putting more energy into any system that is qualitatively flawed going to produce better results? The results will be more of the same.

"Not too bright, folks. Not too fucking bright. But if you talk to one of them about this, if you isolate one of them, you sit 'em down rationally, you talk to 'em about the low IQ's and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions; right away they start talking about education. That's the big answer to everything: Education. They say, 'We need more money for education. We need more books, more teachers, more classrooms, more schools. We need more testing for the kids!' You say to 'em, 'Well, you know, we've tried all that and the kids still can't pass the tests'. They say, 'Aw, don't you worry about that, we're gonna lower the passing grades!' And that's what they do in a lot of these schools now, they lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody's happy; the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon, all you'll need to get into college is a fucking pencil! 'Gotta pencil? Get the fuck in there, it's physics!' Then everyone wonders why 17 other countries graduate more scientists than we do. Education!" -George Carlin

Prussian Education System

At this juncture, wouldn't it be prudent to get some background on this fucked up system everyone is complaining about? Notice how nobody really ever talks about the history of this system, and the influences behind its creation. With any broken system, you need to know its history to gain context and understanding. You don't go the doctor with liver failure, and leave out your history of hitting the bottle every day for years do you? I guess only if you want to deny the reality of history. So let’s head to Prussia in the 1800's to get some answers.

The first person we need to identify in the creation of this system was named Horace Mann. He is credited with the creation of America's public education system. He was a member of the US House of Representatives and served as an educator. In 1837, he became the head of the newly created Board of Education in Massachusetts where the establishment of the first public education system took place. At the time he was looking at various educational styles in the world and ran across the system used in Prussia which today is Germany. The Prussian government was very happy about their educational system because it had done so well fulfilling the government's purposes.

Mann and a few of his fellow educators traveled to Prussia to study their system. Upon return to the US they lobbied heavily to institute the Prussian system. For the next 30 years US dignitaries came to Germany and earned degrees. After returning home they started to staff all the major universities in the country. When Horace Mann became the Secretary of Education he promoted his new concept.

"The state is the father of children." -Horace Mann

It was the state's responsibility to ensure education was provided by the state for the child. A good idea, making sure children are educated, but how is education going to be defined? It's a very broad subject spanning all areas of thought and the accumulation of all human knowledge. After Massachusetts accepted the Prussian education system, it quickly spread throughout the whole country. Soon after the end of the Civil War, Horace Mann's sister Elizabeth Peabody, of the Peabody foundation, pushed the establishment of the Prussian system in the conquered South. By 1900 every American child grew up learning within the Prussian system.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein

Why the Prussian system you may be asking yourself? We already had the classical education system which produced most of the great thinkers for a couple thousand years. In the 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia was one of the first countries to introduce free and compulsory schooling. In 1806, after the Prussians were defeated by Napoleon they came to the conclusion the reason they lost the war was because Prussian solders were thinking for themselves and not following orders. Thinkers as we all know make horrible order followers. To make sure this didn't happen again a new system of education was created.

To be fair to the Prussians, it wasn't all about brainwashing, it also gave skills to the masses needed for early industrialization. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were all offered up, but in a strict format. This format taught duty, discipline, respect for authority, and the importance of following orders. The elites then went on to higher secondary education while the rest stayed in the working class. It was through this system they tried to create social obedience through indoctrination. Part of this indoctrination was being convinced that the King was just and the need for obedience was paramount. In truth the purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the Crown and have a pool of young men ready for military service and work within the state bureaucracy. To accomplish this it was necessary to kill any independent thinking. Prussian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the brains behind this new system of education. He's used John Locke's view, which most of us agree, that children's minds are a blank slate. Then introduced Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas on how we could write on that slate. Governing factors of the Prussian education system dictated what was going to be learned, what was going to be thought about, and how long to think about it.

"My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core." -Louis C.K.

In order to have a policy making a ruling class and a sub class it was believed that you had to remove people’s ability to make sense out of available information. In short, remove the ability to critically think. You may be thinking to yourself, WTF? This system wasn't set up for the good of the individual, but was developed for the good of the state and the ruling class. Interesting really how the average person is unaware of this history. Do you honestly think you'll get taught the history of the system designed to make you dumb, while actively making you dumb, from the dumbing down system itself? Of course not. Most teachers don't know the history. That's like a con man explaining his con while conning you while completely unaware that they are a con man. That's an analogy to make a point. I'm not calling teachers con men. For the most part they are wonderful people, and have been abused by the same system.

Research the Prussian education system apply, some Common Sense, and you'll come to the same conclusions. Read some work by John Taylor Gatto or Charlotte Iserbyt, both incredible educators and scholars. When this information settles in, you have a choice. Get pissed because there is a fair chance you and your kids could have been way smarter, or keep being stupid. Johann Fichte, the mastermind behind this system, had the following to say about schooling. Being pissed for the right reasons is never wrong. Just make sure your reasons are just.

"The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way, that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." -Johann Fichte

In 1807 when Napoleon occupied Berlin, Ficthe gave a series of speeches about the supremacy of the German people above all others. His words served as a catalyst to German nationalism and the Prussian education system. He also called out the Jews, saying that they were a state with in a state which would undermine the country. He openly spoke about needing to run the Jews out of Germany. His ideas had a very large influence on the rise of the Nazism. He also has been deemed the spiritual father of neo-Nazism. Wait! What? Yes, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. We may want to rethink the system offering up information into the minds of the young.

"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished. When the techniques has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen." Johann Fichte

Into this educational nightmare walks Wilhlm Maximiliam Wundt. In 1847, at the University of Leipzig he established the world's first psychological laboratory. Wundt held the belief that man is devoid of spirit and self-determination. Originally, education meant drawing out a person's innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, science, history, literature, and critical thinking etc. It was Wundt's belief that:

"Learning is the result of modifiability in the path of neural conduction... This situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the really influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurons, sequence in time, belongingness, and satisfying consequences" -The Leipzig Connection, Paolo Lionni.

During this time at Leipzig, study of the socialization of children rather than the development of intellect were emerging. The Prussian education system was divided into three groups. The elite which accounted for .5% who received the best education which produces people with the ability to think intellectually. About 5.5% received relschulen, and were somewhat taught how to think. The rest of the 94% went to school for dummies called volkschulen where they were taught harmony, obedience, following orders, and freedom from stressful thinking. In other words, schooling to be taught how to be stupid, submissive, and smart enough to do your job.
An important part of the system was to break the link between reading and thinking of the young child. If a child becomes too knowledgeable and capable of thinking independently they are going to start asking a lot of questions. Nothing is more terrifying to the ruling class than people who think. In the volkschulen (school for dummies), the method of teaching was to divide whole ideas into smaller subjects which did not exist prior to that time. The subjects were further broken down into periods of time during the day. With appropriate variation, no one would really know what was going on. In a sense, it compartmentalized people’s minds to the extent they don't trust their own judgment. You see this when people can’t follow conversations. A perfect example of this can be heard on the Adam and Drew Show, when Dr. Drew struggles to keep up with Adam’s logic in the formulation of ideas. It also destroys the ability to see reality and how everything has natural flow of cause and effect. Instead everything looks chaotic with no real understanding, and always reliant upon experts or authority.

Most of the compulsory schooling laws were passed by the year 1900, and all of the PhD’s in America were trained in Prussia who were now in charge of this new educational system. This new government project destroyed the community one room schoolhouse. Community ties to the schooling of their own children was replaced by educational boards dictating policy.
One of the reason's the self-appointed elites brought back the Prussian system was to create a non-thinking class of workers to staff the growing industrial revolution. In 1776, 85% of people were reasonably educated and had independent livelihoods. By 1840 the percentage was still high around 70%. The ability to learn and go out on your own had to be broken so factory labor would be available. The more dependent the people, the more labor would be available for working in factories owned by the elite. This is one of major reasons why the elite of the day paid for the establishment of this style of schooling. The other reason, keep people dumb so they don't understand how bad they are getting screwed. It's fascinating to look at the educational books which were used prior to the Prussian system, and how see extremely literate people were.

This new model of schooling was quickly picked up and underwritten by the elite families of the US via their philanthropic organizations. The Rockefellers, Carnegies, Whitney, Peabody, and Ford families all took part in spreading this form of education throughout the country. In 1902, John D. Rockefeller created the General Education Board.
At the cost of $129 million, the General Education Board provided major funding for schools across the nation and was very influential in shaping the current school system. A year later in 1905, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded and worked in step with the Rockefeller General Education Board. In 1913, Frederick T. Gates, Director of Charity for the Rockefeller Foundation, wrote the following in The Country School of Tomorrow, Occasional Papers Number 1.

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply." -Fredrick T. Gates

This philanthropic involvement in education was nothing more than an attempt to mold society and minds of the people of this country. Add to the equation vast wealth, control of monetary policy, a large portion of the press, and politicians pretty much all areas of life where controls by a very small elite. In 1914, the National Education Association (NEA) Alarmed by the Activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. At an annual meeting in St. Paul Minnesota, a resolution was passed by the Normal School Section of the NEA. An excerpt stated:

“We view with alarm the activity of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and universities.”

The starting point of most of this education is traced back to the University of Chicago and financing directly from the Rockefeller family. How long as a nation of people can we coast off the genius of people who lived a couple hundred years ago? Now we have the elite's calling all the shots, and an uninformed public. We have reached peak stupid. Grown-ass-adults dying from falling off cliffs, running into traffic, or being shot dead from breaking into someone's house while playing Pokemon Go. Prussian education system worked great!

Most people do not know we have been using the educational system developed by the same dude who's considered the grand-pappy of Nazism. Historians reflect that one of the biggest reasons of the rise of the Third Reich was the fact that the German people had been bread from birth to respect authority above all else and accept it without question. Just like here in America, this is called Blind Patriotism. If all over America has been raised in a system adopted by pre-Nazi Germany to dismantle critical thought how's this going to go play out for us? The indicators of where we are heading are being manifest politically, socially, and economically. Now, people who champion the Constitution are now being called radicals. When in fact, our government has gone so far from the Constitution is the root of most of our problems. One of the best lines from Norm MacDonald was on David Lettermen when he was talking about Hitler. "You know, with Hitler the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him. There's nothing redeeming about the guy. How on earth on earth did these Germans like follow this lunatic you know and they're like oh he was an incredible public speaker you know? He could hypnotize you with his public speaking and then I see him and he's like (screaming in harsh German tones) and I'm like what? That's not my idea of a silver tongued devil." In truth they had been molded by their educational system to accept Hitler without too many people questioning or opposing. Even Hitler knew this when he stated, "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think."

"I was on this German talk show and this woman said to me: "Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?" and I said: "Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?" -Robin Williams

Noam Chomsky one of the predominate scholars and minds alive today described education as follows.

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”

The effect of this educational system creates a scarcity of people able to critically think, and produces educated dumbasses. Now, the elites in our society do not subject their children to this brain damaging system. They get sent to private schools which emulate the classical education system of learning which we will get into later. We get the Common Core, or more accurately the "Commoners Core". The education for the common folk, or the peasants' education. It is the new model of the volkshulen (folks school) from 150 years ago. This education system is like a Volkswagen Bug, you replace the wheels, change the upholstery, and give it some add-ons and say wonderful things about it. It’s still a bug, and will never be a Porsche.

Obviously the system isn't working. Education policy written and enforced by people who haven't spent any real time in the classroom working with children doesn't make any sense. This top down directed methodology doesn't work for a simple reason, dictatorships make people miserable. Regardless of what you want to believe this is an example of living in a society that is veering to tyranny. When power is taken from the hands of the parents, teachers, and students and given to the state without any real input from those doing the teaching is dictating. Dictate is the root word for dictatorship. This education strangle hold funnels billions of tax dollars to publishers such as Pearson and McGraw Hill who’s board of directors are entangled in the highest levels of government and elite think tanks which govern US policy. The lobbying that takes place is immense. Due to this standardized teaching hell, there is an issue with what "experts" call "non-cognitive skills."
Policy makers and educators are scrambling to figure out
what to do. These skills consist of persistence, self-discipline, focus, confidence, teamwork, organization, seeking help, staying on task and so on. What needs to be recognized is that the lack of these qualities are inherent in, and deliberately engineered into the Prussian education system from its inception. Whoever coined this phrase "non-cognitive skills" should be hit in their cognition free brain. Cognition comes from the Latin word “cogn”, which means learn or know. Today cognition means the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, or senses.

What's being described as "non-cognitive skills" are the basic traits of being a thinking human being. There is nothing "non-cognitive" about it, it’s all cognition. Your heart beating, digesting food, or your hair growing is non-cognitive. Maybe they could get somewhere in fixing the problem if they called the problem what it is, human thinking skills. Non-cognition is the cause of the fucking problem in the first place! While we’re are at it lets call something else it is not, cancer from here on out will be known as non-cancer. Let’s go full retard and change all word meanings we don’t like to different words because it makes us feel better, and maybe the problems will magically disappear…
"But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that! That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right! You know something? They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that! You know what they want? They want Obedient Workers - Obedient Workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it." -George Carlin

So where do we go from here you may ask? Where can we turn? How were smart people educated before this piece of shit Prussian system got rammed down our throats? The founding fathers were pretty damn smart, how were they educated? Those Greeks and Romans were pretty damn smart too. How were they educated? The Renaissance artists and scholars, how about them? They were products of the Classical Education System.

Eloquent post.

Amen.

And that, folks, is why there are over 2 million of us here in the US homeschooling our kids.

And yes, there will be some crazies among us including the hyper-religious and the anti-social segments, but there were those types in public school too.

But of the homeschooling folks I've met, most of us left corporate careers to stay home, make do with one income, move to a less-expensive area, and take pay-cuts and extra part-time work to be able to give our kids a world-class Classical Education.

Just this last week, my 14 yr old read and annotated the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and Roosevelt's Speech advocating for entrance into WWII. Do I know what she's going to do with it yet? Heck no, but it's soooooooo much more worthwhile than watching her go through the drivel of a public school 9th grade curriculum in our state here.

It's possible, but it's a ---h-e-l-l--- of a lot of work for mom and dad. Praying (hoping, wishing, etc) it's worth it.

It seems the Prussian system must have been very impressionable to the start of TSSC too; I see a LOT of similarities.

You probably know of this book then. If a student can digest and absorb what's in this work they will have tools to navigate life in my opinion.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0967967503/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=4963999744&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=t&ref=pd_sl_9tp6maj058_e

Good for you.

The title of the book is "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric"

I've actually been a fan of the Quadrivium. Many people hate math, and even take a perverse pride in admitting/bragging that they are terrible at it, which is why they went into a liberal arts field.

The irony is that four of the traditional liberal arts were mathematical, and even logic in the Trivium is pretty closely related to mathematics.

The quadrivium consists of:
geometry
number theory
music theory
astronomy (celestial mechanics)

And now "a liberal arts degree" is code for "no math".

D'oh!

I hear you, BoJ.

The math phobia runs deep. Often a liberal arts degree represents training in how to bullshit other people into believing something that you want them too. That can be a useful skill, but it's strayed far from it classical origins.

Liberal arts majors often claim that their education has provided them with critical thinking skills. That may be true from in qualitative sense, but is certainly not true in a quantitative sense. Learning how to do something qualitatively is good initial training, but to be truly educated, eventually one has to be able to think critically in a quantitative manner as well.

Thank you "thinking". Great post.

Common Core math is an attempt to imitate how math instruction is delivered in Asia (Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc.) since currently the Asian countries are getting the best math scores in the world. The U.S. really is looking at how other countries do things in an effort to compete.

I don't know how CCM is doing among average kids. I work with inner-city low income kids, and my observation is that while they are making *some* gains in deeper understanding of math principles, a lot of kids are also turning off to math because CCM is so colossally boring.

Here's where "thinking" gets it wrong:
While it's true that Horace Mann, secretary of education for Massachusetts in 1837, adopted features of the Prussian school system, there's no evidence that he did so with a nationalist, pre-Nazi agenda of dumbing down future citizens (in fact, Mann wrote about education as a way to create an informed citizenry, not a dumb one). His reforms included normal schools for better teacher training, age-graded classrooms, lecture-style teaching then used in European universities, and access to the same curriculum for all students.
Fichte, a philosopher, was never involved with the Prussian school system, although he did some private tutoring from 1784-88 after dropping out of the University of Leipzig. He was quickly fired from a second tutoring job in Warsaw in 1791. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena from 1794-99, at Erlangen from 1805-07, and in 1810 took a post at the new University of Berlin. He was appointed rector in 1811, but resigned in 1812. Never an educational reformer, he is mostly known for transcendental idealism. He was not an influence on the Prussian school system or on Horace Mann.
It's also untrue that "all of the PhD’s in America were trained in Prussia who were now in charge of this new educational system. This new government project destroyed the community one room schoolhouse. Community ties to the schooling of their own children was replaced by educational boards dictating policy."
Population growth, the shift from a rural agrarian economy to an urbanized, industrial/tech economy, and the availability of better resources, facilities, and teachers all contributed to the shift from one-room schoolhouses to larger public and private schools.
For a more accurate history of public education in America, read Joel Spring's "American Education" or Alan S. Canestrari's "Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings." For a short but informative debunking of many of the errors in the post, visit: http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

While Horace Mann's plan may not have been to diabolically make people stupid, it was definitely to make people more useful to the government. People who think normally make unruly subjects, and more complaint to systems of governance. Even if the systems are horrible. We see examples of this throughout history.

"Fichte, a philosopher, was never involved with the Prussian school system." I'm not sure how this is true. After the end of the war he gave a series of address to the German people in 1807 that were very popular. These speeches devised a way to socially engineer a powerful and developed state. Included in these ideas was how to educate. His ideas gave birth to the Prussian system. Regardless of weather or not we are aware most of society and the way people think, and developments in history are rooted in philosophical thought of dead men.

Maybe not all (probably shouldn't have said all), but most were trained in the new system in Prussia who were in charge of rolling out the new system via University of Chicago. Social sculpting has been going on for years via education. Just look at the crazy social justice warriors and the political correctness word police happening on college campuses. People like to act like stuff just happens without causal reasons.

While I agree bigger schools or facilities are would be needed as populations increase. However, the qualitative method of education didn't need to change fundamentally.

I work on a college campus every day and attend conferences at many others (and have done so for many years). I've yet to see "the crazy social justice warriors and the political correctness word police" on any campus.
What we do on college campuses: teach critical thinking skills and information literacy, history, the classics, philosophy, maths, the scientific method, composition, rhetorical skills, and extensive training in whatever discipline students are majoring in.
We teach them to think, question, learn independently for their entire lives, and NOT be obedient workers.
If by "social justice warriors" you mean people who believe that higher education is the engine of social mobility and an inflexible class system based on low education and wealth inequality is wrong, why yes, you'll find many of that persuasion on any campus you care to visit.

The big gift from my undergraduate education was in critical thinking skills. It is a gift that has served me well my entire life. I was also exposed to a world of ideas that I would not have been exposed to otherwise. My high school was very advanced for the time (many Harvard professors sent their kids there,) but it paled in comparison to the wealth of information offered by my college classes.

My college education also strengthened my writing skills. Every course without exception (okay, maybe ballet and skiing,) required a minimum of two researched and footnoted papers, and often more. I was shocked to find out years later that some people had gotten through college having never written a paper. To me, that is an inferior education.

What bothers me is how badly costs have escalated. Back in my day, you could attend a respected state university without breaking the bank. Nowadays I would not lay out the cost for a college education without having a firm idea of how it could help me economically. That was not always the case.

What I am referring to are stories such as these coming out of universities. Maybe your campus is better than what is reported in the news. From safe spaces to microaggressions to calling for the heads of faculty this is nuts.

How much critical thinking can be done when opposing viewpoints are silenced?

http://time.com/4530197/college-free-speech-zone/


Even comedians do not like going to universities because jokes are now off limits.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/


There is obviously a problem when people are getting fired for presenting opinions a group of people do not like. This is censorship. This is not a hallmark of a free and open society.

Oh, meh. I went to one of our country's most liberal universities (I chose it specifically for that reason,) and even there, conservatives had a voice and were not afraid of using it. A good college campus is an idea factory where all can speak freely. That is the heart of a liberal arts education.

You might be right about that wit respect to Higher Education.

RandyJ and thinking, maybe it is lower education (1st thru 12th) that is the scam.

Who was it that said as an 18 year old high school senior one week you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom and the next week you're supposed to decide what to do for the rest of your life - ?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2016 09:22PM by thingsithink.

Well it's very well documented that the educated workforce of today isn't doing nearly as well as did their parents a generation ago, or two generations ago.

The incomes continue to decline regardless of what degrees someone has.

There isn't as much of the pie to go around. Or the one that is is already divvied up and again, the concentration of wealth has only increased in the top upper class, while dropping out in the middle.

With or without a college degree, it is very difficult to get a leg up in this economy.

What a degree does, particularly if it's in a technical or critical shortage area is provide job security for those who are talented enough to be able to attain such degrees. That is the only way for someone of a lower class to work their way up the ladder, unless of course as RandyJ pointed out there are the rare exceptions who get by by the skin of their teeth, without an advanced degree.

The professions for the most part demand advanced degrees.

education pays more than it costs.

It seems that people think of education as something like doing three things

1) educate for job skills
2) educate for general awareness/understanding of the world around us
3) spiritually/mentally improving the thought processes

Unfortunately, of 1), there really isn't a high enough percentage of the time spent on it that is actually useful in a job. There is a disconnect between the skills acquired and the skills used.

Of 2), I found much of science, history and social studies that I was taught to be driven by agendas and myopic, and so I had to reeducate myself in many areas here, so much of it was wasted time.

Of 3), many aspects of school life in K-12 and higher were spiritually and mentally depressing. I feel actually being something like an apprentice under a mentor in a real job during teenage years would have been more spiritually and mentally engaging and invigorating than sitting behind a desk spouting things back to a teacher with no real world application in view. If I don't even remember 90% of what I spouted, it was time wasted. My brain decided it was useless information and tossed it out, because I have never needed it, because it didn't actually make sense in the real world.

Your #3 is something I've thought about for years. I think the process we learn is under appreciated in our system. It's forced categorization memorization and formal logic is not taught. Deep thinking and imagination have not room to grow. As a result we get a bunch of surface level thinkers and people like Trump and Hillary running as president. Deep thinkers would see this looks just like the road to ruin. Hyper-dumb never ends well.

Too bad Billy didn't stay in college long enough to learn about anecdotal evidence.

Back in the day, our parents and grandparents had to move to where the jobs were. These days people want to keep their butts planted where they have lived all their lives and want the jobs to come to them.

So when the factory or the military base or the mine or whatever closes up shop, especially if those jobs went overseas, they want to do nothing but cry about all the jobs being gone. They don't want to move, they don't want to retrain, Can't blame them, nobody does. But in the meantime, there are companies like the one I work for that have to put a lot into partnering with technical colleges to train people for well-paying jobs that are essential to their business and can't be outsourced overseas that don't require a college degree for all the reasons stated above. They need people with a particular set of skills.

I also see a lot of jobs in the same company that require college degrees--just because they can. There are an overabundance of college graduates who will jump and entry-level or higher jobs with a stable company that has good benefits. Most of those positions require degrees in the business fields. No, a 4-year degree is not necessarily needed for the job, but why not require it when the field is ripe and easily harvested. Not so with the mechanical jobs--they can't be that picky.

Since 2004, I've been teaching in community colleges. I've got a BS and two MS degrees, and nearly 30 years of work experience in my subject in many different areas.

Most of my students are health-care-track: nursing, dental hygiene, nutrition, physical therapy, etc. Others are working toward a traditional degree, but are saving money by taking the first year or two at the community college before transferring to a state university.

Last year our department started phasing out the printed textbook, replacing it with a home-grown computer-based/powerpoint version. This process is now complete, but it's too early to tell how well it will work out. I might have some doubts, but that decision is beyond my pay grade.

Even before that, the school bookstore would rent you a text for the semester at considerably less than the purchase price. Just don't write in it.

So it looks to me like many of the concerns mentioned in the original post are being addressed, at least in some limited areas....

Having a college education opens more doors,but acquiring and developing marketable skills is where the greater potential for higher pay.. there are lots of blue collar millionaires out there without college degrees...

Many courses are available online for free from major institutions like MIT and Harvard. http://mooc.org

The times, they are a-changing. Once you get your foot in the door, you could use these to carve out a niche at the company or try entrepreneurship.

From an article on the characteristics of American millionaires:

------
* As a group, we are fairly well educated. Only about one in five are not college graduates. Many of us hold advanced degrees. Eighteen percent have master's degrees, 8 percent law degrees, 6 percent medical degrees, and 6 percent Ph.D.s.

* Only 17 percent of us or our spouses ever attended a private elementary or private high school. But 55 percent of our children are currently attending or have attended private schools.

* As a group, we believe that education is extremely important for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. We spend heavily for the educations of our offspring.

-----

So 80% of US millionaires have a college degree. How about that.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-millionaire.html

If you hired someone for a secretary's position and the person didn't know how to read or write, how long do you think it would take them to learn how to do the job? A degree only makes you trainable in most cases.

Three quarters in to my Elecreical Engineering degree program, I noticed that I was often having technical discussions with professors and classmates that I knew my family and friends wouldn't even begin to understand if they were there listening. My first day on the job, I was asked to do tasks that no high school graduate would even understand the language of, much less to actually complete the tasks. I am an Engineer who hates Algebra. I am weak at it. I had to get tutoring for it in college because it just didn't seem learnable the way my brain works. Yet after beating my head on the wall with it for a few years, I can struggle through it enough now to solve problems in an electrical circuit that require algebra. In the parts of Engineering that I excel at, college was like a wonderful daily download of new information in to my head for three years. I'll never forget the night in class when the lightbulb went off in my head, and I finally understood everything involved in using transistors and resistors as a basis to create thought processes in a computer. Without college, none of those senarious would have happened.

Don't sell yourself short. You can't even compete for the best jobs without a college degree. You have to be able to speak their language to them upon your first contact with them. Employers know well not to even talk to those people who lack the required degree (secretary example above) for their industry. Self Employment can be financially brutal and extremely competitive since a majority of those people don't have any degrees and are too smart to work for minimum wage. Some people get lucky and do well without a college degree. But those odds are low.

I loved trigenometry. It came easy to me. Most of the class was failing it half way through the quarter. Most of my classmates weren't even turning in the homework assignments. A school administrator came in and spoke to the class. He said "there are two phrases. If you learn either of these phrases and learn it well, you'll never have to deal with this trigenometry stuff in your careers". At that point, everyone in the room was all ears as he continued. "The first phrase is, will that be paper or plastic? The second phrase is would you like fries with that?" Either one he said, would work.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2016 10:22PM by azsteve.

If your manager makes $200K to $500K per year, then you probably make $100K or more per year. In that case, your manager didn't get where he is by listening to salesmen.

If your manager listens to salesmen who often sell products that he doesn't really need, then he probably makes less than $50K per year. In that case, you'll never make more than 30K per year working for him.

Thank gawd! I didn't even need algebra to solve that problem.

......you probably did not use the quadratic equation to come to that (math related) conclusion either.......

Why do so many employers demand that job applicants have a degree?

Because damn good salesmen for the education industry told them that they needed people with degrees.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/30/2016 10:14PM by matt.