I'm back to designing kitchens. I mostly write about other stuff that interests me
How to Make the Most of Your Higher Education – Megan McArdle.
I like a lot of the items listed.
I have to think about working for a year before going to college. There is no doubt that would be a good idea for some students. I can think of one in particular that might find how hard it is to make money and would then apply himself a little harder in college.
It’s a great article about colleges and universities.
A quote:
Because if there’s one group you’d pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.
Another one:
Imagine picking a thousand students at random from among our institutions of higher education. Now imagine unpicking everyone at one of US News‘ Top 100 liberal arts colleges or universities. You’d expel anyone from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT. Anyone from from Emory or Rice. Anyone from Vanderbilt, Clemson, Drexel. Anyone from the famously good state schools—UMass, Virginia, the California universities. After ejecting those students from your group, how many of the original thousand would be left?
About 900.
Again:
This vitiation of the diploma is Goodhart’s Law in action, where a socially useful metric becomes increasingly worthless, because the incentives pushing towards adulteration are larger than those pushing towards purity. This is not some bad thing that was done to us in the academy. We did this to ourselves, under the rubric of ordinary accreditation…
Finally:
In the academy, we’re fine with anything that lowers the cost of education. We love those kinds of changes. But when someone threatens to lower the price, well, then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.
Please do go read the whole thing. It really is on point with the problems in higher education.
Take a look at the depressing news:
I still wonder if we’re doing the Ace justice be “requiring” her to get a degree. She is the type of person that will benefit from one, and she will also get out of college debt free. I have two more years before the Deuce has to make his decision. He’s going to be an interesting case.
And it should give pause to everyone that thinks college is the answer for their problems. I should especially give student debtors more than a pause; something more akin to a full stop.
From The Fiscal Times, check out this chart:
I see this stuff all the time. The Ace is a freshman in college and the deuce is a sophomore in high school. I wonder if I’m guilty of parental malpractice by pushing them to college degrees. They will graduate with no student debt. At least I’m going to help them out there.
Reynold’s Law. This time from WRM;
The student loan system’s biggest victims are exactly the people policy makers most want to help: marginal students whose chances of finishing are not great.
Don’t let your kids borrow money for crappy degrees from crappy schools!
