We've simply made a college degree a proxy for the intelligence or aptitude test. We can't do that anymore, because it's unfair.

Funny, but the NBA demands an aptitude for basketball and nobody has a problem with that, even though there is a disparate impact on older, shorter, slower, not very athletic white males like me.

I'm sorry, I just can't get into this equality binge. As a former boss phrased it "the average human has one breast and one testicle." Those weren't his exact words.

I'd hate a world where everyone was like me.

"He now explodes the fallacy of how colleges will supposedly stamp out middle class people one after the next ..."

At first, I read "stamp out" in the sense of "obliterate."

Says the Instapundit: "This is a simple case of inflation: When you artificially pump up the supply of something (whether it's currency or diplomas), the value drops. The reason why a bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that the government decided that as many people as possible should have bachelor's degrees."

Exactly, and if you've decided that as many people as possible should have bachelor's degrees, than you have, by default, decided that everyone is capable of earning one. And if you've decided that, you're pretty much stuck developing degree programs even the less-capable students can pass through without much trouble. So now you're selling an inferior product, and for all the expense, nobody's being educated.

As Reynolds likes to point out, if something can't go on, it won't. What will be interesting is watching what develops and becomes popular and useful in place of the standard "college education," and how much resistance these new models encounter.

This article makes a lot of sense. Also, higher education began focusing on a lot of areas (like "gender studies") that left graduates no more employable than they would be without a degree. It's basically 4 years wasted.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/editorial.php?page=articles/uss-education-bubble&ppref=TBP428ED1211A

I know this linked article doesn't exactly stay on topic, but I read it last week and thought it appropriate to the multiple discussions on the degree subject in general.

http://news.yahoo.com/colleges-defend-humanities-amid-tight-budgets-172113559.html

This is a simple case of inflation: When you artificially pump up the supply of something (whether it's currency or diplomas), the value drops. The reason why a bachelor's degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that the government decided that as many people as possible should have bachelor's degrees.

A contributing factor here is that the quality of High School education has fallen dramatically, among public schools. Many students spend the first two years of college learning what they should have by 12th grade. Schools have had to lower their requirements, and expectations, to accommodate a much less educated student. And what motivated the decline in HS education was the desire to see as many people as possible obtain a HS diploma.

There was an interesting article linked to on drudge about a week ago regarding Obama abandoning "working class" white males outright:
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/the-future-of-the-obama-coalition/

"Working class" is defined as white males without a diploma but also white males not working in a unionized, government job.

Surprisingly, many of the best paid white males are those who got their HS degree and then went to auto repair school. $100 an hour!!! Same thing with plumbers. Or electrical installation. Or A/C. I saw a great job posted on Dulles International Airport for someone to fix the A/C for $90K a year.

According to this random webpage I found on the net in a google search (therefor, it MUST be true, as everything on the internet is true, except if I disagree with it) increasing education does increase GNP.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-factors-affect-gnp-growth.htm

I know. I know.

My mom sent me this via fwd email. I thought it interesting.
-------------------

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895...

Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina, KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie,''play,' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
8.. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last..
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks
And by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena , Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

"It's basically 4 years wasted.

Well, not wasted. You get out of college extremely able to demonize men."

Astute observation, Amy!

Further on the gender point, we should note that the primary drivers of this "bubble" are the women who have flooded into college at the end of the feminist whip. Men, who are more likely to study STEM subjects, are now attending college in record numbers -- but they have been dwarfed by the influx of women devoting themselves to useless majors like women's studies, communications, sociology, etc.

Yeah, we do, or will, live in a "woman's nation." Welcome to the decline of civilization and the worship of mediocrity.

>>"And what motivated the decline in HS education was the desire to see as many people as possible obtain a HS diploma."

I find it interesting that this statement implies that there is a choice in getting a HS diploma. I don't know Jim's age, but I'm a Gen Y (nearly 30, eek!), and for my generation, I don't think there was a choice of whether you got a diploma or not. If you didn't go to school, your parents got fined, arrested, or various other punishments. You weren't allowed to drop out (to my knowledge - I've heard that you could if you were a certain age and your parents signed papers, but I've never verified it). If you were kept back in a grade too long, you were given "social promotion", which is basically saying "you're too old to be in 3rd grade, so on you go to fourth, even though you can't pass the test!". The only way you actually didn't get your diploma was if you were Special Ed (my brother was given a diploma worth less than the paper it was printed on) or if you simply disappeared from the system.

To me and my generation, a HS diploma is a given. And that's why it, too, has degraded in value. Because there are plenty of HS grads with 3rd grade reading levels, getting passed on through the system without proving they can do the work. And that's what is happening to colleges as well. College, for me, was a test in stamina and Bullshittery. I only ever had one teacher challenge my skills, and I was thoroughly disappointed that she only did so at the end of the course essay. I would love to go back in time and try my hand at university in the 50's. I wonder if I could've made the cut back then.

Geography (Time, one hour)
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

And here I thought that due to the gulf current the atlantic was warmer then the pacific in the northen hemisphere

To me and my generation, a HS diploma is a given

My highschools validictorian wrote a history paper on Pocohantas that read like the Disney movie

@cornerdaemon we're basically acknowledging the same thing. It's my impression that the dilution of HS educated predated that of College education, but was driven by the same philosophy. This was the idea that rigorous work and standards are somehow 'oppressive' and so should be put aside in pursuit of other social imperatives.

"We've simply made a college degree a proxy for the intelligence or aptitude test. We can't do that anymore, because it's unfair."

Also, it doesn't work very well. There are way too many schools and students who are aware of it and game it. This has a lot to do with the growth of faux degree programs.

"Also, higher education began focusing on a lot of areas (like "gender studies") that left graduates no more employable than they would be without a degree. "

Actually, a lot of them are less employable. Some of those degrees are "do not hire" flags to employers.

"I don't think there was a choice of whether you got a diploma or not. If you didn't go to school, your parents got fined, arrested, or various other punishments. "

In Alabama at least, it is still legal to drop out at 16. However, the school systems make it as difficult as they can, because every dropout costs them federal money. So yes, social promotions are the rule; what's happening to college degrees now is what already happened to high school diplomas in the 1960s and '70s. I've had more than one employer of working-class people tell me that they actually prefer to hire people who have a G.E.D. over a regular diploma, because the only people who get a G.E.D. are the people who make an effort to get one.

"And here I thought that due to the gulf current the Atlantic was warmer than the Pacific in the northern hemisphere"

Take a look at this big-ass iceberg in Conception Bay, Newfoundland, lujlp:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21096258@N05/2537871244/

That's south of 48 degrees North, the same latitude as Seattle. There haven't been any icebergs in Puget Sound since the Ice Age. Once it gets past Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream tends to flow eastwards, away from North America and towards Europe (North Atlantic Drift). Meanwhile, the Baffin Current & Labrador Current bring icy water & icebergs straight from the Arctic south past Newfoundland. The Aleutian Current & the California Current on the Pacific coast aren't as cold, because they don't come straight from the Arctic.

If you ever get a chance, read the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. You will constantly see references to our (and other countries) current conditions drawn out to their logical conclusions.

That is everything from education, to the welfare state and entitlements, etc.

Cousin Dave,

I might not have been clear. The aptitude tests I am talking about are ones formerly given by companies to new hires, and very much like the tests still used by the Armed Forces.

The Armed Forces one had a section on a made-up language. There are no native speakers. The language doesn't exist outside of the test. The purpose is to measure how well you can pick up a foreign language. How do you game that? Even the Esperanto zealots had no advantage. You learn languages quickly, slowly, or not at all - which is good to know before sending someone to a language school for a year or more.

Another was a computer programming test given by an insurance company. It involved writing a computer program in COBOL with no references, just a description of what the program was supposed to do.

I don't think you can game that - you either can or cannot write COBOL, and I was told later that what they really wanted to see was how you approached the problem and how you organized your code. (They were looking for people who did things in an easily understood fashion since teams of people maintained and changed the programs.)

The Supreme Court, in their wisdon, decided that these aptitude tests were unfair, because too many minorities did poorly on them. Like me at basketball, but nobody's listening so I'm stuck in IT.

>>"@cornerdaemon we're basically acknowledging the same thing."

Oh, yes, I didn't mean to sound disagreeable if I did. I just honestly never considered a HS diploma as optional growing up. So I wanted to comment on how that's an early warning bell as to what's going to happen to Bachelor's degrees. And, I expect, to Masters degrees, because quite a few people I know are going back to school for that, too. And, of course, professional students.

MarkD, sorry for being unclear... what I was talking about is employers relying on college degrees as a marker for aptitude, since they aren't allowed to administer aptitude tests. That's what colleges are gaming, by awarding degrees that don't signify anything other than that the student paid them a lot of money. They've become very expensive diploma mills.

Corner... I never considered a Bachelor's optional. I considered a Masters optional... depending on whether or not I wanted to be a slacker. I think we've already been there a decade or two!