re: #282 quickjustice

From Publisher’s Weekly, reviewing Murray’s “Real Education”:

“Murray […] argues that there are only a limited number of academically gifted people and these are America’s future leaders, that only this elite can enjoy college productively and that the nongifted shouldn’t be channeled by their high school counselors into training for that college chimera, which wouldn’t make them happy anyway. […]

When I was growing up, the only education required to become a bank teller was a high school diploma. Then they started asking for the “maturity certificate” (an additional examination required to enter college —- Belgian universities in those days only had entrance exams for engineering, the 50%+ flunking rate in the freshman year was then as now the de facto entrance exam).
High schools reacted by basically giving the maturity certificate to any high school graduate, no questions asked. Then banks started asking for what in the USA you call an associate’s degree.
Now they’re up to asking for college degrees for a position that basically just requires the three Rs and some common sense. Being a bank teller has not become that much more complex.

I thought I had gotten pretty lousy high school education. Then I went to graduate school in the USA, met products of the US public school system, and could not believe how little they knew about anything outside the field of their college major. (The Murray argument for compressing a 12-year ES+MS+HS education into 10 years was made more than a decade ago by Newt Gingrich: he said 12-year high school was basically “subsidizing dating”.)

The brutal truth is that “college education for all” will:
(a) basically be a massive rent-seeking scheme for universities (and the New Class elements employed there)
(b) do a disservice to those who are not able to benefit from it
(c) will debase the “diploma coin” to the extent that employers will start insisting on advanced (m.sc. or Ph.D.) degrees instead of 4-year college degrees (in the hard sciences we’re basically there already), or that large corporations will start developing their in-house “post-college remedial programs” (this is starting already)
(d) will result in even more unemployable graduates in “Luftgeschaeften” such as postmodern literature studies, and not necessarily more in the demanding science and engineering subjects in which a shortage of graduates is developing.