"when you take away all of the stuff that has nothing to do with learning or connecting, you're gonna' be left with a breathtakingly overpriced product."

Some of us have been banging on about this for literally decades, but I guess if it takes a television personality to drive the message home, it's a good thing.

I wonder if the US go to a more European model where students live at home, and school is really for learning and not "the experience".

Sam Harris & Caitlin Flannagan talked about this on his podcast a few weeks ago, the first of her three recent appearances. She noted that one of the functions of the schoolhouse after industrialization was to keep kids busy while their parents earned dinner.

This time sump was gussied up with all the horrific little techniques we each remember so well.

I was about 8 years old when I realized that I was wasting about seven and a half hours a day waiting for other kids to finally start listening — or to articulate their failures of comprehension — as the teacher's lessons droned on, because we all had to be on the same page.

And I was about 8 years old and a day when I realized that there were kids in the class who were stalled by me in that identical pattern, if not for the identical lesson.

A couple of days ago, you posted an article from "The College Fix" about two female (presumably) heterosexual academics who basically infantalized all non-heterosexuals by suggesting that we should be "triggered" by the "microaggression" of heterosexuals who — gasp! — dared to use their heterosexual wedding pictures as a background during a Zoom-meeting.

I emailed them both and basically told them to fuck off. They don't speak for me and I have no problem with heterosexuals sharing their wedding pictures.

Hopefully, as more of us assert ourselves in the face of this patronizing bullshit, the snowflake culture of crystalline delicacy will die the horrible death it deserves.

"I only finished college because I know there's a prejudice against people who don't."

This is a big part of why college education has continued as it has.

As others have pointed out here as well - for years many have said that college is too expensive for what you get.

Except that those "credentials" are what a lot of it comes down to. Without that degree there are many doors that are closed to you. Certainly you could do many of the "college degree required" jobs without college. But, having a degree is used by many, too many, employers as a way of narrowing down the candidate pool.

What I hope to see a result of the pandemic is that online schools will be given more prestige than they are given now. Too many employers consider online degrees to be worthless. And it is true many of them are; but, the same can be said about brick & mortar schools as well. Many of them are useless too.

So, maybe with the stay at home order, more students will continue with their studies online and that will raise the view that many have about online learning.

For me college was a welcome change from high school.

In high school, you study 12 years of grammar, despite passing every year. In college, you pass the intro class and move on. You get to dive deeper into the subject than a high school teacher ever could.

In high school, your math or science teacher is also your PE teacher. In college, your teacher is dedicated to the study of the subject being taught and reasonably expert in it. You're no longer being taught by someone who's using someone else's 12-year-old notes to teach a subject in which he has very little knowledge.

In high school, the class moved at the pace of the slowest student. In college, the class moved at the professor's pace. Slow students had to study more on their own to keep up.

In high school, you're processed. In college, you're taught. At least, you used to be.

Now, does this mean I couldn't have made a decent living without going to college or grad school? No. But it means I did learn something from my time in both and am happy I went.

College should not be simply and only about making a living. It should be about getting an education. College is a chance to do a deep dive into a subject to gain expertise; a chance to learn from experts. Too many people, both in college and out, have forgotten that.

Nobody is guaranteed a living once they leave college - or trade school or even high school. You gain skills and/or expertise and sell your skillset on the open market, trading labor and smarts for money. If you're lucky or even mildly prescient, you've chosen well and have a skillset that is in demand. Perhaps you spent your time in college getting an education and will make your living with other skills you've gained.

The problem with that concept of college, Conan, is why should the federal government fund it? The main argument I've heard for federal student loans is that people need college degrees to get a 'good job'. So spending our tax dollars helping citizens to get better jobs makes sense (at least abstractly). Once you remove the job side of things this doesn't make sense anymore.

For that matter what is 'an education'? Because most people don't agree on that term anymore.

The price of college has gone up more than four times the rate of inflation. Pause on that fact for a while. Inflation far beyond that of health care! I was able to pay rent, books, and tuition with a total of $15,000 in loans during law school. I worked as a waitress to fund the rest of my living expenses. I got a job paying $15,000 dollars a year when I graduated. It was not a well-paying job for the time (early 80's) but the figures are still arresting. I only had to borrow the equivalent of my first year's salary to completely fund law school. To attend the same law school today, in the same building, getting the exact same lectures on the same basic information, would require me to borrow about $150,000. The salary I would earn at the same job (rural county prosecutor) would only be about $35k.

What has really ruined most universities is neither Covid-19 nor tuition price increases, but Social Justice Warriors and their ability and willingness to bring school operations to a halt until their outrageous demands are met.

If the traditional model of college has a future, it will be a niche market -- Hillsdale College and a couple of dozen religious schools, at most, if they learn to do without taxpayer funding. The rest of "higher education" is a racket and needs to disappear. Kudos to Mike Rowe for encouraging the switch.

As to what will replace the rest, Rowe's foundation is one of several answers. The skilled trades that he favors deserve to be reinvigorated. I see their loss of prestige up to now as reflecting not mere laziness, but an unwillingness to make long term commitments comparable to old-fashioned apprenticeship and stick to them. If that can be cured, maybe he'll do it.

But for the information industries, I expect to see more curated online "schools," designed to produce grads who can be counted on to get job assignments done remotely, to a timetable, despite all the distractions available both locally and online. That's an area where Covid-19 may speed up innovation.

1. The iceberg may melt. But the tip will remain. The ivy league and other high tier institutions will remain an informal, untrackable way for the elite to maintain itself. This is about club membership not achievement. And if even your "diversity" track skims the most intelligent students, people will still want to hire your grads for their native gifts/social connections, regardless of how suckily dumbed down and politicized the education becomes.

At least for a while.
And for the top tier schools it still works.

2.notice that the need for credentials is tightly linked to the rise of the public sector, regulation, and bureaucracy. It's probably also linked to lawsuit culture.

You can fix a bunch of college woes by publicizing a tactic apparently missed by many: pick the job before you pick the major.

Softheadedness in thinking your "woke" college subject is going to make you employable is what puts you in unrecoverable debt, exploited by every college pimp eager to get your loan $$.

My father, all my uncles, and my brother, all graduated college straight into a war. So we were doing the war thing as officers. Never used our majors from that day to....the next year, or forever, depending.
As far as I know, none of us ever used our major. As my father used to say, it shows you're trainable.
Talking to a prof about bias in education, I told him if he's pitching Project 1619 from the dais, he's getting 1619 back from me. I have a credit card for the sheepskin and a library card for education.

My father, all my uncles, and my brother, all graduated college straight into a war. So we were doing the war thing as officers. Never used our majors from that day to....the next year, or forever, depending.
As far as I know, none of us ever used our major. As my father used to say, it shows you're trainable.
Talking to a prof about bias in education, I told him if he's pitching Project 1619 from the dais, he's getting 1619 back from me. I have a credit card for the sheepskin and a library card for education.

I heard something today and immediately thought it was more applicable here.

The certification is the important part. This is like being asked for your drivers license and replying that you don't have one but do have the drivers booklet.