Back when National Review first allowed comments on their posts, they would post all sorts of things in their group blog. Readers would respond to all of it. For example, when they were looking for a receptionist, they posted the job on the blog. Hilariously, one of the requirements was a four-year degree. Why anyone with a college degree would take a receptionist job was a mystery, but an even bigger mystery was why National Review would require it. The comments on it were the best things posted that week.
Of course, Rich Lowry was not really thinking about the requirements of the job when he posted it. What he wanted was someone from his world, the world where everyone goes off to college and sends their kids off to college. In other words, he was signalling to potential applicants that he did not want Rosie from the neighborhood, who likes to file her nails while on the phone. Instead, he wanted a young white girl fresh out of college, who just needed a job while she sorted out what she was going to do with her life.
That is, in many ways, what a college degree has become since the 60’s. It tells potential employers things about yourself that they could never ask and that would never show up on the CV. For example, if you went to a private college, it means you most likely were raised in an upper middle-class family. If you went to the satellite campus of the state university, it probably means you came from the lower ranks and you were not a great student. These are the sort of subtle clues that are reflected in the education section.
Of course, attending an elite university is the big flashing neon sign on a person’s resume, which is why entrance is super-competitive. It’s also why it is not difficult to graduate from one of these colleges. The graduation rates at these colleges are near 100%, even for athletes. Compare that to Ranger School, where 60% fail the first time. Yet, if you have the former on your CV, it counts for more than if you have the latter. The people hiring for elite positions care much more about what the former says about the applicant.
This is why a few years ago the elites started to panic over the influx of foreign students into elite colleges. The competition for these slots was already tough. Having to compete with the children of foreign ruling classes would make the process even more difficult for the children of Cloud People. Of course, this is why Harvard, and most likely the other elite colleges, discriminate against Asians. The elite is for whites and Jews, with a sprinkling of diversity to spice it up to allow the elite to pretend they like diversity.
This “problem” with the elite colleges has been an excuse for the ConservoCons to shriek “hypocrite” at their Progressive masters, but it is actually a good thing that the people in charge are fine with racial discrimination. At the minimum, it suggests they still have the will to survive. It also reminds us that they are not bound by their own rules when defending their privileges. No ruling class in human history has peacefully agreed to step aside based on the logic of their own rules. They always have to be removed by force.
At the other end of the spectrum, colleges that serve the hoi polloi have been struggling with a different set of problems. A diploma from State U is about practical things like getting a job and bargaining for a salary. In fact, it really only matters for the first decade after graduation. After that, the work history is what counts. The great bust-out that is the American public college system has reached a terminus and enrollments are now starting to drop, as people figure out the return is not always worth the investment.
As a result, the public universities in America are slowly beginning to change. One remedy has been to import foreign students, who will pay full rate. This actually started with small private colleges like Boston University in the 1980’s. They figured out that Japanese kids would come to Boston, pay tuition in cash, as long as they were not required to study too hard. For state colleges, there is the added benefit of being able to charge full rate, rather than the discounted rate for in-state students. That and it counts for diversity points.
Of course, like every business fighting a revenue drop, cost cutting is on the table. In America, much of college is just an extension of high school. Look at the requirements of college fifty years ago and compare them to now. Then there are the frivolous things like gender studies or communication arts. Pretty much everything in the core curriculum of a modern college should be tackled in high school. The rest should be discarded. That’s why we see colleges dropping large chunks of their current offerings.
There is something else going on that speaks to the larger issues looming over the North American Economic Zone. Members of the High Moral Council are starting to drop the college requirement for new hires. What this tells us is the elite are beginning to set fire to the bridges over the river that separates them from us. The positions in the Cloud will require passing through one of the monasteries to be properly vetted. In the future, the Dirt People will have to sort out their status system within their favelas.
It also opens the door to further polluting the standards that reflect biological reality. By dropping the college requirement, the companies are free to hire the black over the white, the female over the male. After all, without anything close to an objective standard, the latest moral fads handed down from on high are the default filter. It also makes the diversity tax explicit. Companies will be expected to hit their vibrancy quotas, because they will not have the excuse that they cannot find qualified non-white candidates.
I think part of it is an unintentional by-product of the Poz. Red pilled parents are waking up to the whole “Studies” clusterfuck of brainwashing and usury. I have a number of middle class friends with high school age children. The parental fixation on “going to college” of “getting into a good school” is much less frenzied that I recall from 15 years ago when my oldest was school shopping. (U of F for the little party hound). One of my friends who is a partner at a construction law firm in SC, is sending his son to HVAC school… Read more »
The guy who replaced my hot water heater made 120K in 2017. He works hard. The hours are often long, It is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. But, he has a nice house, a boat and likes to work on his corvette. He works for someone, but he has thought about starting his own shop once his kids are a bit older.
I bet he gets paid a fair amount in cash too. Ahhhhh, cash. I miss getting a healthy chunk of my income in cash.
Friend of mine owns and HVAC contractor and has brought in smart kids from the “vibrant” city where his shop is located on work study for years. Most turn down FT offers to go to college because that’s what they are told to do. Now he has them coming back after figuring out the “studies” degree qualifies them to mix lattes for rich people. Sudden $100k as a skilled journeyman and the ability to get a job anywhere you choose to live—instantly—seems like a great deal. Plus there are those loans….
The guy who works on my furnace (among many other things) is me. I attempted the engineering degree but found I was not smart enough to stare at spreadsheets but quite smart at understanding how things work. So I went into machining and make a good dollar at it because my company struggles to find people qualified in basic machining skills.
Probably would test extremely high on visio-spatial capability.
Im not so sure how that would work, given that he is an employee. If he averaged 50 hours a week over 48 weeks he would need to be pulling 50.00 /hr wages. Are wages that high in America? In Canada our journeyman rate has hovered around 32.00 to 36.00 /hr for a period of years. I had my own shop till ’16 when things went south and now on salary at 34.00/hr based on a 44 hr week. I am just curious, I know things have stagnated here and also have heard crazy crazy rumours of a better economy… Read more »
The “better economy” thing can be misleading. The “economy” can be defined as the market capitalization of domestic-ish entities, which benefits those who own them, but that does not necessarily mean Joe Wageearner is any better off. Most studies show real wages are pretty flat (if not declining), and jobs added are overwhelmingly of the dead-end service industry variety (telemarketing, yay!). Which is why the tariff war, suggested by Pat Buchanan decades ago, is needed and freaks the elites.
The Trades again. As if all that is needed to save the white Millennial from cultural dispossession is some hand work and some money. All I see tradesmen doing is building and supplying the palaces of their liberal and foreign overlords. It maybe a lot of money right now but that won’t last much longer. The big push for teh trades is really FOMO. But the West was lost when they abandoned their cultural heritage to progressives in the university. High school children used to learn Latin and read Caesar and Circero, now all they are worried about are job… Read more »
You’re wasting your time arguing for the liberal arts here. Never mind that they are our cultural inheritance, only science and vocational training fly with this crowd. You can learn that trifling stuff online on your own time.
Do you even read what I post? Almost all of it would fit neatly into the definition of liberal arts. I very carefully avoid posting about STEM-related topics too much.
You two need to evaluate your priors.
Ha! My wife and I are the opposite.
“You sure you want to go to college? You sure don’t seem to like high school. How about you work construction for your uncle and decide if you wouldn’t prefer a trade?”
Regular conversation with the kid.
If he doesn’t mind heights and isn’t afraid of electricity have him look into becoming a Lineman…It’s a job that is recession proof and is for the most part one of the highest paying jobs in whatever location you’re at…I’m already pushing 200k right now and some that I work with are at 250 right now but I like my time off so I take a lot of comp time for my overtime…More young men that want the money, adventure, and women need to look into it… Especially those who are Alt Right…
Sounds good to me.
Had my son graduate from HS this summer and I’d say nearly three quarters of his buddies are choosing a trade school over traditional college. Of course, everyone was asking where’s your next stop all summer. My son got a kick out of replying “Fort Benning – I wanted to do something hard and get paid, rather than something easy and pay through the nose for the privilege.”
Have him become a Lineman then he can do something hard but get paid really well…And the added benefit of not having to fight in any bankers wars…
I’m dyslexic and was forced to be right handed, instead of left handed. My youth was a nightmare and job prospects bleak. Over the years I have taught myself building, wiring, plumbing, timber falling, animal husbandry, light automotive, hydraulics, and a dozen other skills because I could not find/afford professional help. I feel sorry for the stooges with only a masters degree.
We have pulled all children out school, once in class, then homeschool, now no school. We travel and take vacations and adventures and invest time with each other, loving each other, creating memories with one another, and oh what an invaluable education it has been will continue to be. When they get to the age to take the High School exams they will be ready, in the meantime its all about family, memories, love, and God. – Happy Family
As a family, we’re kind of in a sweet spot for college right now. Enrollments are down. And they’re not just having trouble finding students, they’re having trouble finding QUALITY students. Kids who will actually have a chance to finish what they start, and who do not need massive government subsidies to do it. We’ve played our cards pretty well in terms of school, grades, test scores, etc. Does my oldest have enough punch to slug her way into a so-called ‘elite’ school? Remains to be seen. I give her a 30% chance based on what I’ve read. But that’s… Read more »
“A starter house, nice car, and is currently traveling around Europe.” My mother was a failure at 24; at 21 she walked away from a full college scholarship in 1942 to marry some guy, a college dropout himself (from medical school, to enlist – like that’s an excuse) who spent three years in the Pacific, to spawn four boys and maintain a home. She made my life easy as a kid because she knew all the answers to my homework questions, as she made dinner or ironed dad’s shirts, and she was one hell of a bridge player. Her ‘starter… Read more »
OT, I never figured out proper contract bridge, and I tried; it’s just that my “teachers” – mom and dad – would go into full nuclear mode whenever they differed on how to bid. It was like they weren’t just arguing about bridge – some philosophical difference was in play, and all I knew was that I was doomed to play euchre, since cards didn’t interest me all that much anyway.
Call me traumatized by these arguments over whether to bid clubs, or no-trump, or whatever. We’re all victims. We all have a claim.
P. N.;
I’d say your mother is *not* a failure. Mine had a similar story to yours and, in retrospect, made life pretty good for my sibs and me.
“Call no man poor who has a Godly mother.” A. Lincoln.
UMass Boston seems to be doing pretty good, but that’s the legacy of Billy Bulger. He really got money flowing into the place but it was an embarrassment for Mitt Romney with Bulger’s Infamous brother and all He was finally forced out but not before getting a nice severance package and retirement. Nice going mittens ! Funny story, Chinese kid got caught doing a 100 mph with his Maserati in the Back Bay down some side street. The next day showed up on campus driving the same white Maserati !!! Tell guys all the time now forget college. Pay for… Read more »
Higher status people do distance sports. Marathons, bike races. Lower status pump iron, prisoners…
Sort of.
Lower class whites do enjoy more physically demanding activities like MMA, boxing, shooting, weight lifting. You know the manly stuff.
But there is a lot of cross over on these and other activities. Lots of upper class men realize looking like a dried out stickman isn’t a selling point. They realize men should look strong and healthy. Running and biking won’t cut it.
The college degree as primarily a signal is the basic premise of Bryan Caplan’s book “The Case Against Education”. It was startling how little graduates retain from their “education” but an awful lot of jobs require the four year degree, regardless of the actual educational value of said degree. The book is kind of a yawner in places but the first few chapters and last chapter are worth reading even though Caplan is a pretty generic ivory tower libertarian.
Ok, this has all been said at length by your sailers and derbs, and I think I may have said it here a while back, but the education bubble had its roots in race and disparate impact. It goes back to a relatively small Supreme Court case in 1972 which found that employers cannot use a test to rank applicants if the test does not directly deal with the subject matter that the employee prospective will need in his work. (Disparate impact= a different hiring percentage by race based on a biased test). They formerly gave little general knowledge tests… Read more »
Believe it or not, before it got entirely Chosenated to death, Harvard used to serve important, maybe even vital, functions. It was a functioning reservoir or repository for the cultural and genetic substance of a key strain of America’s founding species — sort of a cultural sperm bank. It was a reliable grooming ground for certain strata of necessary elites who actually performed necessary functions. And it was a vital hot-house for growing unusual but vital specimens, genuine American weirdos like James Agee or Frank O’Hara or Edward Gorey. It used to have a weird, eccentric, unmistakeable electrical energy, you… Read more »
Reminds me of my favorite line from The Good Shepard, spoken unironically by Matt Damon, who played the Intel WASP:
Joseph Palmi: “Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition; even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?”
Edward Wilson: “The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”
I wish this were still the case.
Well, your sentiment is not misplaced, but my point is broader than simple WASP nostalgia. The top 10 or 15 universities in America have an understood mandate to cultivate future American elites. Some elites spring up spontaneously through innovation and risk-taking, but some have to be cultivated, for the sake of sociopolitical and cultural continuity. And besides, you can’t innovate a mandarinate, by definition. The top schools used to have understood sub-functions in this game (MIT and CalTech cultivate tech leaders, but that’s not what I mean by elites): Stanford, Yale and the other lesser Ivies cultivate competent top-level worker… Read more »
Good point. Personally, I would much rather have the old WASP elite than what we have now. Whatever chachet Harvard retains comes from its white-shoe WASP associations, not from some sweating, striving Indian swot.
Of course, more institutions than just colleges and universities have overplayed their hand. Most organized religions in lands of European heritage have become similarly corrupted.
“Vatican Teams with WCC to Push Immigration, Condemn ‘Populist Nationalism’”
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/09/19/vatican-teams-with-wcc-to-push-immigration-condemn-populist-nationalism/
Interesting that some places that have deep Catholic roots, like Hungary and Poland, have been ignoring this kind of lunacy for quite a while.
Also, many Protestant churches outside of the traditional “mainline” denominations want nothing to do with the World Council of Churches. Or the National Council of Churches. I imagine things like this are part of the reason.
Great post; the American college system and its discontents, in its current dilapidated state (and the reasons for its sorry condition) is of course matter for a book-length study. Many of the more visible reasons are of course well-known to the wiseguys at sites like this, but there’s lots more iceberg under the water line. I’m reminded of two jokes. At the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-five” there’s a bit where two guys are sitting on an airplane, reading magazines. GUY ONE: It says here that in thirty years there’ll be nine billion people on the planet. GUY TWO: I… Read more »
Boston University is actually quite large. Were you thinking about Boston College, which is smaller but still decent-sized?
For a private college, sure. When Silber took over, he changed the place from a local commuter school to a global university. A key part of that was bringing thousands of Japanese students in the 80’s. There used to be a swanky apartment building right at Packard’s Corner. It was full of young Japanese. The garage underneath looked like a luxury car lot.
One indicator of the on-going decline of the Ivy League is the ratio of graduates going into academic careers and government work as opposed to the private sector economy. My understanding is that something like 70% of the recent Ivy League graduates are now going into either academia or government service. 30 years ago, this was something like 30-40%
I think Stanford is experiencing a similar trend as well.
I suspect that even the cloud people elites are beginning to figure out just how badly decayed the academic standards of our universities have become. I suspect they are starting to distance themselves from the slow-motion disaster the university system is turning into.
Z Man; Crushing the Prog. parallel economy must be a firm long term goal. The U system is an obvious target of opportunity. Their costs are largely fixed, making them vulnerable any revenue downturn. Academic tenure greatly limits their ability to cut costs. They have loaded themselves up with lots of tenured SJW faculty that detract from actual customer value (i.e. providing an education). Aside from STEM fields they have only their proxy personnel screening value left. So that must be a point of attack. How_? One way would be to set up a system of certification by voluntary testing… Read more »
My understanding is that ever since griggs v duke the tests have to directly match the job requirements. I believe it goes further to say that the job couldn’t be accomplished in any other way other than by what is tested. The standard is, of course, determined case by case by the judiciary. This is how we ended up with female firemen.
That is my understanding as well. You say the job requires “physical fitness,” but that won’t cut it. So you have to specify “must be able to run 50 yards in 15 seconds while carrying 50 lbs on your back.” But that means no women can do it, which is ispo facto “discrimination,” so now we have to pretend that firemen don’t have to run 50 yards in 15 seconds with 50 lbs of gear — maybe they can ask the four-alarm blaze about its feelings or something. “Begging the question” is the heart and soul of American jurisprudence.
Mcloed; You’re right about the court case. However, under my proposal, the companies are not giving the tests, just using the results. People of any age would take the certification exams voluntarily. But they’d be foolish not to do so and avoid $ 1/4 mil in debt. Any business would be foolish not to use the free employee screening if it were structured properly, but they don’t have to. It would have to be a political initiative, of course: Possibly just enabling legislation plus start-up money. Once established it would have the usual eternal life of any govt. program. I… Read more »
I take it Progressives aren’t pestering Mexican restaurants to hire more Asian bartenders.
“Companies will be expected to hit their vibrancy quotas, because they will not have the excuse that they cannot find qualified non-white candidates.” I was at my favorite Irish pub. The bartenders have always been hot, white girls. I walk in the other night and the new bartender is a beast from the Section 8 down the street. She is fat and wearing gray ghetto-yoga pants and a skimpy spaghetti string top that exposes her plumpy arms. In other words, she looked like she’d overslept on the couch, realized she’s late for work, and just walked out the door in… Read more »
What city are you in?
The restaurant press has been complaining about “labor shortages” for years now. The reality is that youth labor participation has been trending down thanks to the higher ed racket, and employers preference for adult immigrants versus teenage locals.
There’s a saying that as the economy gets better, wait staff gets uglier.
Ahhhh, Zman knocks it out of the park with this little literary analytical masterpiece – perfectly spiced with some HUMOR. Kudos, Z!
The primary value of high-end college (e.g., the Ivy’s) is the sorting function. This the hardest part of attending one of them is getting in. To make the course of study difficult would likely prove counter-productive to the brand. This is an entirely different model that Big State U which can be thought of as Easy To Get In, Hard To Get Out, if only because admissions has a political component to it (when Johnny doesn’t get into State U. but some out-of-State kid does, expect State Representative to hear about it). Of course, State U. loves, loves, loves that… Read more »
If dropping the degree requirement results in more young white women spending their twenties getting married and having babies instead of wasting four of their most precious reproductive years in college, this will be a good thing.
A great way to help out the Third World would be to establish gender studies programs in every African educational institute. The population bomb would be defused. We can even help them out by having our underemployed Ph.D. graduates teach there.
I am trying to imagine the look on the African men’s faces, when the women in their neighborhood go all first-world feminist on them. Thanks for the laugh.
South Africa has a First-World feminist superstructure built on top of a Third World patriarchal foundation. It leads to very strange occurrences, as the liberal court system produced many prog friendly decisions years ahead of the West, but yet a former President was an open polygamist and probably a rapist. Black fertility is notably smaller than in other African countries, though still higher than US blacks. But given the frequency of HIV infection, at least 1/4 of blacks are infected, it’s a shock to our standards that their society isn’t in petrified fear. Perfect example of high time preference.
I’ll fund the plane tickets
Fred Reed had a great essay on college now and then.
https://fredoneverything.org/college-then-and-now-letter-to-a-bright-young-woman/
One of the major promoters of the idea of universal college education was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill of Rights). It was a huge boon to the education industry, and a big factor in the rise of educationalism/credentialism. Remedial college courses became established as a thing, and the idea of using the college degree as a job applicant filter became common. The major airlines, for example, established college degree requirement for pilot applicants. There were lots of multi engine qualified pilots with high school educations in the applicant pool and the college credential was a quick way… Read more »
The conventional wisdom about the GI Bill is that it was unvarnished wonderfulness. At least part of it was to keep returning vets out of the workforce for a bit. My dad benefitted- he was a smart guy with a HS education- never would have gone to the ‘U’ if not for the GI Bill. In that sense it did give some guys who were “college material” the opportunity to go. On the other hand my best friend’s dad went back to his job at Ma Bell after the war- and did just fine. He, too was a smart guy,… Read more »
That’s just the thing — the GI Bill was, maybe not consciously but certainly in effect, an “idle hands” measure. You’ve got some guy with a high school degree who’s 25 years old, with 35 missions under his belt in a multi-engine bomber. Umm, yeah, that guy’s qualified to be a civilian airline pilot. They’re not worried he can’t fly the plane; they’re worried he’ll start taking evasive action on approach to the airport just for the hell of it. Similarly, a sergeant who led a squad of Marines on Iwo Jima has all the “leadership qualities” you’ll ever need,… Read more »
I have always wondered if the WW2 veteran’s benefits allowed the dads in the ‘50s to support a middle class lifestyle while running low-margin businesses such as dry cleaners, gas stations and low-end restaurants. We knock the blue collar jobs that cannot support a family without help. Maybe it was always so, but the veterans benefits made up the difference. Perhaps someone who knows more than I can shed light.
Is it possible to share some guest commentary with you from “the belly of the beast” in elite academic institutions and my dealings with National Review?
Post away. Just don’t reveal too much about yourself, unless you don’t care about who knows.
One of the more bizarre things about the otherwise Historically WASP University I went to is the continuous effort by core curriculum staff to abolish themselves. There was nearly a relentless drive to waterdown and remove classes that have been mandatory for a least 200-300 years by the very professors taught to hire them. In fact my Art Humanity professor decided against retirement with her husband just because she couldnt trust the new professors to teach art properly. I have stacks of stories like this. As someone who is also into dissident politics I took history classes on the Roman… Read more »
I would love to get a look at the accounting ledgers of an Ivy league or other prestigious private school. They used to cost a fraction of their current tuition and pay for a full stable of tenured professors. Where did all the money go?
I know a lot of it went to other types of “administrators” who are little more than glorified RA’s – but get paid as full-time professionals.
Drake –
When I think of corporate or academic America I realize our welfare system is much larger. There’s people who perform repetitive, low effort tasks very regularly at institutions like that. The US pays the equivalent of a second military budget in voluntary welfare payments to blacks and Hispanics on the national level. Add in a Historically WASP University, which exclusively, actively hires “locals” and that’s where your money goes.
Being in proximity of the National Review I’ll occasionally go to their events from time to time, usually whenever Victor Davis Hanson is in town. For as bad a shitlibs tend to be, this crowd is much worse – generally uninterested in dirt people like myself with my dirt mannerisms. At least shitlibs make efforts to be consistent. All around the room were the scions of the National Review commentators dressed in the same manner acting whip-smart and wonderfully precocious. In one event there was a young couple, clearly from money. The Male was a FBI agent. I’ve never seen… Read more »
@ Expensively Educated Re: “There’s something interesting I notice about cloud people like that – they almost exclusively bicycle or do triathalons as their physical activity. Rarely you meet a guy who lifts, let alone MMA or grapple.” Your observation is perfectly consistent with the traits of the cloud people, especially the neo-con/neo-Wilsonian faction of it. Those members of the cloud always clamoring for yet another pointless and unnecessary war in Trashcanistan. My point is that the cloud people go to great lengths not to get dirt under their carefully-manicured fingernails, let alone dirt – or blood – on their… Read more »
@Expensively-Educated It sounds like we’ve had many similar experiences. I’d love to hear more about your interactions with NR.
My private college was a White/Asian oasis next to a poor, gang-ridden black ghetto. The cops and security people could easily play the color-coded “you don’t belong here” game when the gang bangers started coming across the railroad tracks into town. Now, with all the new vibrancy on campus and the trends of the times, that sort of enforcement is out the window. Guess what comes next? No doubt it will be blamed on the attitudes of the occasional white conservative males on campus, who must be behind it all. I worked the dining halls on campus, to help pay… Read more »
I went to USC too! Fight On
Actually, my campus was next to the booming metropolis of Pomona, north and east. But basically the same deal as SC, neighborhood-wise. Passed on a great warehousing night job in Compton. I was afraid my car would break down on the way home from work at 2 a.m. and I would get jumped.
Stag or Hen? I was on campus last fall. The SJW rot in full. Banners draped from the dorms with the typical appeals and complaints. But most kids seemed to shrug it off – just have to phone it in or else you are a target. White males in particular. I stopped financially supporting after the vibrants tantrumed a few years back and the Pres took a knee. They have $ for a staff of diversity and inclusion brownshirts so they don’t need mine. Sad, the place used to be one of the last great liberal arts meets practical skills… Read more »
The companies and colleges that seek out vibrancy are going to get what they are asking for, good and hard. Stand back and let them go at it.
In my fantasy right-wing takeover, Harvard and the other ivy league universities get bulldozed. I’m just not sure what I would build on the site. Perhaps a munition factory.
That’s one item on the agenda Walt Bismarck forgot:
https://vimeo.com/200293678
There’s a certain quintet of books about white revolution in the Pacific Northwest in which my alma mater in Portland, OR is burned to the ground. I smiled.
“Pretty much everything in the core curriculum of a modern college should be tackled in high school.” That was the real inflection point, when community colleges started pitching themselves as University-lite. Colleges were happy to let kids take their first two years at the local CC, because they’d come in certified competent in stuff they should’ve been getting, but weren’t, in high school. But a) kids didn’t learn it in CC, either, thanks largely to “diversity” crap, and more importantly b) parents started using the transitive property of equality — if English / History / Math 101 at the local… Read more »
I think it depends on where you are. From my understanding, it was completely normal to have trigonometry and maybe even some algebra in college in the system of our parents—people over 70. Now no top 50, or even top 100, Idk, college would deign to teach anything lower than calculus. The problem is the proliferation of lower colleges and unserious majors, your x studies. So college has essentially become what high school was in our parents’ gen. You have to think about what school they went to, what was the major, correlate with standardized tests, etc.
I’m closer to 80 than 70, and my freshman math was diff calc and analytic geometry. Of course, I was a STEM major, so I have no idea what the LA schools did for math. It wouldn’t surprise me that ED and Business majors started at long division.
Once again, the reality of the modern University experience is much worse than you have indicated in this post. More than half of course offerings (most of which are now mandatory for graduation) are either junk science or overt social indoctrination masquerading as core education. The essential function of these institutions is to warehouse adolescents during their hormonal years and infect minds with Progressive dogma. They are factories for debt slaves with hive-minds, a thirst for dependence, and a skill set founded on an arrogant sense of entitlement.
Tom;
This is particularly true if those students in the mandatory courses are required to buy the major prof’s $100 book.
Tom, are you a fellow toiler in the groves of academe? I’m retired now, thank god, but I was there recently, and oh lord, it’s so much worse than that. I have been asked by students, in all seriousness, if the Industrial Revolution was before or after the Renaissance. They have no idea the dates, or even the century, of the Civil War. They can’t recognize a silhouette map of Europe. When I started teaching oh so many years ago, I used to joke that the day some college kid asks me if the bad guys in those WWII video… Read more »
The one bit that I’m not sure about is companies preferring to hire blacks over whites. They do hire blacks, of course, but they do it because they have to. They might feel good about it, but they also know that the blacks will be less productive. What they actually prefer is (dot) Indians to whites and Mexicans to blacks.
It partly depends if we are talking about F500 class corporations, or just your ordinary small/medium business. The former are led by elite MBA grads eager to virtue signal and punish white conservatives. The latter benefit from something called the “Work Opportunity Tax Credit” where hiring someone from the underclass results in a subsidy. Large corporations also use this, but it only impacts those like retail that employ large numbers of low skill workers.
The WOTC is a missing piece of the puzzle that explains how so many employers like Amazon and Walmart have welfare dependent employees. The leading cause is that they had kids they couldn’t afford to. A single unmarried individual is normally barred from any welfare program. But a business is encouraged to seek out as many underclass employees as they can to get the tax credit. At the same time, the tax credit is one-time, so an employer is given a perverse incentive to be high turnover.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/03/21/book-review-after-civil-rights-racial-realism-new-american-workplace/
Employers seem to prefer pliable Hispanics, and less pliable-but more productive Asians, partly because they have lower rates of drug usage. Prog civil rights organizations have been campaigning to remove employer drug testing and criminal background checks.
Blacks are also seen as a liability threat for drug use, crime and discrimination lawsuits. Whites are seen as lazy, quick to complain, and the likeliest to organize a union (the loss of working class Jews is a little known reason why labor unions are less effective today).
A regressive wrote a book about admission to Ivy League universities, documenting that AA was not just for brown and black people, but for people who could afford a donation to the university – the size of which ran from $20,000 to $1,000,000, depending on the university. The key, like with AA, is ‘holistic’ admission criteria, allowing them to boost desirables with deficient SAT scores. Daniel Golden: The Price of Admission. Be advised that this is no page turner, rather than a long list of concrete examples, naming names and figures. Would I buy a used car from these people?… Read more »
Yes, a big donation can buy you into almost anywhere in the Ivy League, including the grad schools and law schools. This has been true for a very long time, and reportedly, via the grape vine, includes some very famous politicians, including ex-Presidents….
The numbers to get on a special track, shepherded by the Office of Development, are a lot higher than that now. It’s several $M at the top schools. I see Golden’s book is from 2007, so he might have been right back then.
When the college bubble breaks the Podunk State U’s won’t be first. There are a lot of small private colleges, especially in the Midwest that are in serious trouble. My oldest went to a medium-sized Jesuit school in a medium-sized Midwestern city- it’ll be around for awhile. The other two went to small Midwestern liberal arts schools- mainly to play lacrosse (many small schools have added lax to get their male numbers up). The Jesuits, commies though they are, did a pretty good job with #1, The edumacation the younger two got, however, washed VERY lightly over both- they are… Read more »
And I know, the question is in all of your minds- why did you let them? Why did you spend the money? I don’t really have an answer for you. I like college lax, I guess!
My wife is high up in the college mafia- a caporegime, I’d say. Her “family” has a good brand- it won’t be the first to go, and we’ll be retired when it does.
I’ve read some studies that say 25% of New England small colleges are on the verge of bankruptcy. This was true in the 1970’s, but then the credit boom saved them. I do know some private colleges learned from that experience. Boston College is a rather famous example. It was on the verge of collapse in the 70’s. They say Doug Flutie saved the school, but in reality good management saved the school. Since then, they include operating costs in capital plans. That means they not only endow the building, they endow the maintenance of it. This is the model… Read more »
Most of the ivies are now hedge funds with a college attached to them. Harvard’s endowment is $35B. Yales’s is $25B. Stanford and Princeton are both around $22B.
It’s beyond ludicrous that they can operate with a tax-free, non-profit status.
Yes. Breaking this scam up is an ideal point of attack on one of the prog parallel economy’s centers of gravity. Specifically, all one has to do is change tax law for tax exempt foundations so that they must work like RMD’s for 401k’s.* For example, make the mandatory payout rate significantly exceed the net rate of return in the securities markets, say 10% from the current rate, which is 5% IIRC. Using the reverse ‘rule of 72’, they’re cut in half in 15 years.** Pretty easy to justify, politically: ‘It’s time they paid their ‘fair share’ just like everybody… Read more »
“A hedge fund with a college attached…” So true! Students are just there to make things look busy.
Good management, partly by taking advantage of the Doug Flutie phenomenon. BC repositioned itself from a local, almost commuter school for Irish and Italian kids to a national university.
I would not be surprised if the “New England in the Midwest” liberal arts colleges my two younger boys went to are out of business in 15-20 years.
Oberlin is in a world of hurt right now. All that publicity was not kind. And it doesn’t take many parents like me that don’t qualify for aid to say, “no son/daughter I,\m not paying for that” to put a serious dent in the numbers. My back of the envelope math on University of Missouri was that the decline in enrollment t was biased toward out of state “cash cows”.
I spent a good chunk of the summer looking at colleges with my son. He’s a okay (not great) student with high SAT scores – and has a college fund from his grandparents that means he can graduate without debt from anywhere he goes. He’s also a pretty good linebacker and a conservative kid. – Some schools rubbed him the wrong way with their Social Justice blather and won’t be getting an application. – Being a medium-large kid (6’0″ 200 lbs) who plays sports and lifts religiously, he looks like a freak next to the average mushy teenagers on the… Read more »
Funny you mention. The distribution of physiques among young males is no longer normal. It’s like a dumbbell now. At one are clustered these frail looking Eloi. At the other end are clustered the athletic types. The Eloi end is much larger than the athletic end. It seems to me that in my youth, most people were clustered in the middle, in a normal distribution. The athletic types were less common, but the spaghetti armed wimps were much less common than today.
I could simply be mis-remembering though. Or, I just never noticed the wimps back in my youth.
There are still a lot of farm-boys where we live now – who generally look like those of us who were clustered in the middle. The college tours only seemed to have the ends of the dumbell – with more of the skinny or pudgy wimps.
Brother I’m telling you get him into being a Lineman…He would love it and would be thanking you the rest of your life…
“According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of Americans age 17 to 24 are ineligible to join the military, primarily because they are too overweight or too poorly educated, or they have a record of serious crime or drug abuse.”
You want to destroy a country? Because here is how you destroy a country…
https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2018/07/18/commentary-heres-why-fighting-youth-obesity-is-a-matter-of-national-security/
I must admit, I have little patience for out of shape young males. I just don’t understand why someone in the 20’s would accept being soft and flabby.
Having seen a lot of college kids, recently and up close, I can tell you that the soyboy physique is very common. The guys who lift are really jacked compared to when I was a young lad, but these are a very small minority. The girls are mostly skinny-fat — they’re not obese yet, praise be to Allah and His gift of youthful metabolism, but it’s not for lack of trying. My most recent employer had fitness centers, plural, and they all look like that high tech gym where Ivan Drago worked out, but it seemed to be mostly girls… Read more »
Before some injuries took me off the road, I’d do a three mile run every morning before/after work. I’d run past one of those gyms with a million hi-tech treadmills and stationary bikes and big glass windows. I’d see all of these people looking out at me with puzzled looks. The girls looked nice in their yoga pants, but the boys always looked like they would faint if they got a flat tire.
Prepare to be disturbed. This appears to be in Sweden or maybe Norway.
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/taint-nothin-but-a-low-t-thang/
For the last year I’ve lived close to a cluster of hipster coffee shops/retail outlets/restaurants in Costa Mesa, CA. Caters mostly to the 20s crowd I suppose, and let me tell you, the SoyBoy quotient is off the charts. I’m 60 and I’m more buffed than most of them. When I was their age I wanted to be in shape…..to get laid.
https://www.thecampsite.com/
http://www.thelab.com/
I have a theory that the feminization and gaying of the US military isnt reversible in the near term because we lack manpower so badly.
My youngest, who just graduated, said that his Midwestern liberal arts college was divided into athletes (boys and girls) and NARPS- Non-Athletic Regular People
Why oh why would you subject him to a Liberal Arts college…
See previous comment…
I grew up on a farm in the 1950s and early 1960s. The difference between the physiques of farm and city guys was surprising even back then. It’s astounding now.
L;
Yeah, that was true even in the mid ’60s when I went in for my draft physical. Once the leather biker jackets came off it was noodle arms everywhere for the city guys. Anybody who just worked summers and exercised a little or played intramural the rest of the year was a stud by comparison.
I think it’s worse today than it was when I was in high school back in the early 80’s.
Today though there seems to be awful lot of very frail males. Look at the executives in the Google video. Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Bezos, etc. They are all very small and weak males.
What I don’t get is why they let themselves look like a extra from a sci-fi movie. Is it a cultural or fashion thing for urban males to look so weak? Where is their self-respect?
To answer your question, yes, it is a deliberately cultivated look in the tech sector. I live in SF (“Tech Nerd Central” as I call it) and it’s hard not to laugh at the thousands of young males walking around the Financial District and the so-called “Design District” south of Market Street who all have small weak bodies, wear geek-themed clothing and are proud to emphasize their “nerdiness” and “geek quotient.” I kid you not there are males aged 23-39 here who brag on how urbane and non-threatening they are. And of course, that means they are easy victims for… Read more »
Just finished the third application process in four years. Second the “freak” comment. #1 is a Div I swimmer, the third just signed for tennis and the middle one just likes to do stuff like run half marathons for shits and giggles. But where they would have been pretty normal when I was growing up—today they seem like 3 deviation outliers. You are smart to pay attention to “atmosphere” at the schools. Middle one started at my alma mater (the private Big-10 school). Loved engineering—the political crap drove him out of his mind—far worse than anything I remembered. Re-applied to… Read more »
Deep unprovable intuition: the debt of college is part of the General Rot. People who are financially independent have more pride and self-respect. Those qualities lead people to Our Thing. Having a house’s worth of debt on your head when you graduate leads you more in the direction of the submissive, trampled-down bugmen. Imagine how many more guys Our Thing would have if men were earning for themselves straightaway when young instead of paying off debt. I remember a character in an old James Clavell novel (“Noble House”) working for “screw you money”–enough money that you don’t have to dance… Read more »
More of our guys need to go into the trades…Get out of that damn office environment that is sucking the life out of them along with their balls…Do a job where you are outside battling the elements it builds character and the women flock to you…Start being a man…
Look at the requirements of college fifty years ago and compare them to now.
Hell…look at the requirements of HIGH SCHOOL fifty years ago and compare…
The graduation requirements of high schools in 1880 exceeded those of college a century later. There is a reason they were called high schools. Many, or most, public school teachers of today could not pass an eighth grade graduation test from 1880. There is no reason for most kids to school beyond eighth grade. Fourteen is a good age to start work and begin a real education, and sixteen is a terrible age to spend your days in pointless, or worse, environments becoming jaded and slack.
Amen on that by the time I was 14 I was ready to quit school and start working full time…I hated the mundane dreary pointless school life…I wanted action and adventure…I already spent my summers running heavy equipment and working around men…It sucked having to go back and deal with the pettiness and grade school shit dealing with teenagers…
Worked as a butcher and meatcutter at 15, while I went to high school half time. They allowed that back in the day, if you had a job. Going to a preppy college was a real culture shock, like being back in high school 24/7. I took work gigs on and off campus to retain my sanity.
I think quite a few of our problems stem from parenting and the lack of making their kids work…
I teach high school… and I agree 100%!
When our son got tired of working in retail sales he went back to community college and learned how to do something that is actually useful. Now he is a welder with a paid-off car, a bank account, and no student loan debt. There are numerous things one can do with an associate degree that pay a living wage. A lot of companies will assist employees with college, so that AA can get you in the door at a place that will give you significant help with expenses for continuing education. (Boeing comes to mind for me.)
Skilled machinists and technicians at Boeing in Seattle are union workers who can easily make over $100k after a few years work and can retire in their 50s with a full pension. Of course, you have to live in Seattle, which is now as expensive as SoCal.
There is going to be a massive retirement wave of skilled machinists and technicians at Boeing in the next 10 years and they are scrambling to replace these workers. If your son has skills he should definitely apply.
“No ruling class in human history has peacefully agreed to step aside based on the logic of their own rules. They always have to be removed by force.”
I don’t know…the WASPs are looking a good bet.
You called it, Babe Ruthless. The achievement, creativity and even Glory that was Western Civilization is being destroyed by the self-hating Protestant “ethic” which is now measured by vibrancy, diversity and in how many ways society can hobble whites in every aspect.
Never underestimate the self loathing of Protestant missionaries.
Read Somerset Maugham’s ‘Rain’.
Yeah. Gotta rely on homos to know what’s really going on. Sarc/
Companies used to give tests to job applicants to make sure they had general reading comprehension and writing skills, and other job-specific skills. I remember being asked to solve certain programming puzzles when interviewing for computer programming jobs in the 1970s.
But that sort of testing was eventually found by the government to be wacist, so companies began requiring college diplomas as a proxy for basic job skills. It became a requirement for almost any job, by reflex. It helped drive up college enrollment, and costs.
I guess the new criteria will be, “non-white skin pigmentation”.
The cloud people depend on government jobs or regulations for their sustenance. A government that is 200 trillion in debt and long term liabilities. What happened to Rome’s elite after the collapse (aside from the ones that folded themselves in to the Church of Rome)? I am reminded of the movie Casablanca where the upper crust of Europe was waiting tables and bar-tending.
I am reminded of the movie Casablanca where the upper crust of Europe was waiting tables and bar-tending.
That’s what happened after the Soviet Union broke down, except most of them drove taxis.
When the Vandal chief, Genseric, sacked Rome in 455, he carried away back to North Africa a significant number of the Roman aristocracy…where they were sold as slaves. Few were ransomed.
I plan to use an NPR radio host as my footstool.
As Rome was collapsing, there were the Roman equivalent of preppers, who saw the writing on the wall, the decay, the debt, etc. and left. These were not small movements and they were not refugees; they took their wealth, knowledge and goods north and established the lake cultures of northern Italy and Switzerland.
It is alleged that the origin of the Arthurian legends pre-dating King Alfred, were Roman Britons who with superior Roman techology in Britannia, were able to rule while Rome itself was falling.