re: #110 freetoken

Well, this baby boomer tries to tell kids today that the whole education game is designed to profit from young people’s’ gullibility of believing what the you-have-to-go-to-college crowd tells them.

That graph ought to tell that poster that the demand for college is being pushed too high. Compare to food prices, where production more or less has kept up to demand.

Artificially inflating demand for college by enticing otherwise not-well-prepared-academically students to still go to college just drives up the costs.

The whole textbook scam is just one example of how young people are exploited.

Turning college into a job-prep-machine is the antithesis of the old idea of a “liberal education”.

It’s also a way for corporations to, once again, transfer what ought to be their own costs (of training employees) onto the society at large.

What saddens me most is the selfish, self-centered academic elite who hold the executive positions in higher education, who really don’t give a damn about a truly liberal education but who want to create bureaucracies to perpetuate their own careers.

We often pick on the know-nothings (now apparently in control of the GOP) for their anti-knowledge stances, but I don’t really see many of the supposed progressives standing on much higher ground, at least when it comes to telling the truth about “education”.

I gotta agree with you on how higher education heads love to spend money on stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with what they’re central mission is supposed to be: educating kids.

And then some of the classes that they require are just so full of shit, it’s painful. It seems pretty clear to me (I’m working on a post-baccalaureate certificate in accounting) that half the time they’re just chasing whatever the latest fad is.

Of course, higher education isn’t the only one doing this: My local school board loves to blow money on buildings that look like some kind of Art Deco or Post-Modernist museum piece instead of worrying about functionality (and COST!).