Tag: education

The cost of superficial metrics

It’s no wonder that academia has been on the intellectual decline for decades. Publish or perish is a ludicrous way to judge people, especially when there is absolutely no quality control for publishing other than a mutual back-scratching system.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Furthermore, think about what sort of people are perfectly happy to spend their time jumping through stupid, irrelevant hoops in the place of doing anything substantial.  Credentialism and monolithic left-wing bias are not the only problems plaguing the intellectual world today.

On the other hand, Higgs does sound rather like a lazy, nasty old man, so perhaps getting rid of him after he published in 1964 paper wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

Wine and arrogance stop ADHD

It would appear that my descendants will never suffer from ADHD:

In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological–psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.

I suspect that another major difference is that the European schools are far less feminized than the American schools.  Most “ADHD” is little more than mothers and female teachers drugging little boys due to their inability to behave like little girls.

It’s not so much that the French schools are doing it right as the American schools are at war with human nature and the male sex. The lesson, as always, is this: sending children to a public school in America is child abuse.

Karl Denninger notes that all this drugging of young boys comes at a very real price to society as well: “The problem with our approach is that it not only doesn’t work it creates monsters.  Yes, statistically, it doesn’t create very many monsters.  But it does create some of
them and in fact the clinical trial data discloses quite-clearly that
these risks and their percentage of outcome numbers are known.”

Of course, from the perspective of society’s would-be masters, this is a bonus. Not only are the troublemakers turned into zombies, but the occasional pharma-psychological mishap creates political pressure for gun control. If they’re willing to see more than 9 percent of the school population chemically lobotomized, they’re obviously not going to lose any sleep over a much smaller number of cherubic kindergarteners or cheerleaders being gunned down.

Explaining the college bubble

Richard Cantillon explains some of the effects of the college bubble in An Essay on Economic Theory… in 1730.

The Labor of the Plowman is of Less Value than that of the Artisan

A LABORER’S SON, AT SEVEN to twelve years of age, begins to help his father either in keeping the herds, digging the ground, or in other sorts of country labor that require no art or skill.

If his father has him taught a trade, he loses his assistance during the time of his apprenticeship and is obligated to clothe him and to pay the expenses of his apprenticeship for many years. The son is thus dependent on his father and his labor brings in no advantage for several years. The [working] life of man is estimated at only 10 or 12 years, and as several are lost in learning a trade, most of which in England require seven years of apprenticeship, a plowman would never be willing to have a trade taught to his son if the artisans did not earn more than the plowmen.

Therefore, those who employ artisans or professionals must pay for their labor at a higher rate than for that of a plowman or common laborer. Their labor will necessarily be expensive in proportion to the time lost in learning the trade, and the cost and risk incurred in becoming proficient.

The professionals themselves do not make all their children learn their own trade: there would be too many of them for the needs of a city or a state and many would not find enough work. However, the work is naturally better paid than that of plowmen.

The key is in the second to last sentence. The problem that the USA and many other countries are facing is that they have encouraged too many young men, and far too many young women, to pursue college degrees, so there is now a massive surplus of degree-holders for the needs of the various nations where academic credentials have been subsidized and fetishized.

In a free and sustainable economy, the number of college students would be significantly reduced due to the combination of the cost and opportunity cost of a college education. But because demand has been artificially inflated by student loans, government grants, and the willingness of parents to go into debt on behalf of their children, the level of current malinvestment  in college education is extraordinarily high. The fact that student loan debt can no longer be legally discharged was the first indication that the education bubble had reached its terminal point of expansion.

Longer lifespans and longer working lives justify spending more time and money in acquiring professional skills than in Cantillon’s day, but not indefinite amounts of either. And unless the student acquires skills that increase the value of his labor during that time, the entire process is a waste of both.

The irony is that the average college student is probably less valuable than the unskilled plowman now, because while he still lacks any useful skills, he also is unwilling to work hard at anything he is actually capable of doing.

UPDATE: “In 2008 there was $730 billion of student loan debt outstanding, of
which the Federal government was responsible for $120 billion. Five
short years later there is $1.2 trillion of student loan debt outstanding
and the Federal government (aka YOU the taxpayer) is responsible for
$716 billion. Using my top notch math skills, I’ve determined that
student loan debt has risen by $470 billion, while Federal government
issuance of student loan debt has expanded by $600 billion.”

Women Ruin Everything: schoolboy edition

Fred Reed explains why women need to be removed from the business of publicly schooling boys and education should be segregated on the basis of sex:

The thrust of current social propaganda is that the sexes are identical in all important respects. They are not. The differences are great. It is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

First: By their nature, females are far more interested in social relationships than in academic substance. If you are a man, ask yourself how often you have serious intellectual discussions of politics, science, history, or society with women as compared to men. Seldom. Degrees and exceptions, yes. Still, seldom.

Second: Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence—neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous—over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating.

Third: Women prefer security to freedom, males freedom to security. In politics, this has ominous implications for civil liberties. In the schools this means that wrestling and dodge ball are violence, that tag might lead to a fall and scraped knees, that a little boy who draws a soldier with a rifle is a dangerous psychopath in the making. This is hysteria.

Fourth: “Therapy.” This disguised witchcraft is very much a subset of the female fascination with emotional relations. It allows them to talk endlessly about their feelings. Men would rather be crucified. Thus everything becomes a “disorder.” Among these absurdities are things ilke Intermittent Explosive Disorder (appropriately, IED), and Temper Irregulation Disorder. These disorders have only been discovered since women took over the schools….

Fifth: In the United States, women simply dislike men. Saying this causes eruptions of denials. If you believe these, I´d like you to meet my friend Daisy Lou the Tooth Fairy. Check the ranting of feminists, the endless portrayal on television of men as fools and swine, the punitive political correctness and the silly anti-rape fantasies on campus.

In the schools this hostility takes the form of the passive aggression behind the predatory niceness. “We´re boring him to death, keeping him miseable, and sending him for psychiatric reprogramming because we care so much about him.” Uh, yeah.

Now, I do believe women can effectively educate boys in one particular circumstance, which is homeschooling. A mother has a very different relationship with her son than a random 30 year-old woman who wants nothing more than for him to sit there in silence not disturbing her for 6 hours every day. I would personally favor a Federal ban on public education and tearing down the school buildings. But in the meantime, Fred’s recommendation is a rational step in the right direction.

The soft tyranny of the feminized public schools will come to an end sooner or later. And the sooner, the better. As for the lack of male teachers, men would be a lot more interested in teaching boys if they didn’t have to put up with a bureaucratic system that is built around union benefits, teaching credentials and insane theories of education that can’t match the results of methods that were used more than 2,400 years ago.

Mailvox: the wages of public school

MY writes about the problems her family is having with her niece:

I’m writing this on behalf of my sister, whom I’m very close to.  I have a niece who is giving her parents a great deal of grief lately. I debated writing this but I don’t think we could get a perspective like yours from anywhere else, if you would be so kind. X is 13 and on a fast track to making some very bad choices. She is very dependent on her friends and bends to peer pressure to a ridiculous degree. She does not socialize with her siblings unless forced to and is rude and distant.

A few weeks ago her dad asked to look through her iPad, something they randomly do from time to time. X refused and ran out of the room with it. When they finally got it from her my sister says she couldn’t figure out why X wanted to hide it as there was nothing incriminating on it. I told her I thought she erased things. We know this to be true now.

As punishment her parents took the iPad away. They caught X sneaking into their room at 3am, stealing it back. She is now indefinitely banned from her iPad.

A few nights ago my sister noticed her phone missing. On a hunch she decided to check X’s room after X fell asleep. She found the phone and a series of texts from a instant messenger site on it. The texts were to a couple people. One was a boy and of course, the text had a vulgar sexual nature to them. The boy was asking her if she twerked and X was flirting back with him. The other texts were to a girl, making plans to hang, and X noted that she had to make sure to call the friend on a land line so her parents wouldn’t get suspicious about her texting.  Another text was from a high school boy. I’m not sure what he said to her but this particular boy is known to have fathered a child by another middle school girl. So my sister puts the phone on her night stand and waits. X sneaks back in and takes the phone again back to her room. At this point mom and dad both get up to confront her. They go take the phone back and find not only has X erased the texts but she also took the app off the phone.

-My sister substitutes at the school X attends. Another mom who works there, mother of one of X’s friends, showed my sister a series of texts on her daughter’s phone from X. The texts were loaded with crude song lyrics, f-bombs, and the word “bitch” in all its uses.  The girlfriend did not use the vulgarities that X used.

-X has, obviously not taken any responsibility for her behavior. She claims the texts to the middle school boy about twerking were just jokes and she has never met the high school boy, etc. She can’t explain how the high school boy knows who she is. She is sulky, short-tempered, self-obsessed, entitled, and generally lazy at home.

My sister and her husband have gone through some major financial upheavals in the last 5 years. My brother-in-law now works for my dad but is not making enough yet for my sister to quit her job again. My sister is thinking of pulling them all out of school next year. I note this because my first response was to suggest pulling X out of school among other things. They have removed all the electronic toys from the house and store them at my dad’s office. They also took the door completely off her room.

They are a traditional family that regularly attends Latin mass and my sis is just stunned by this behavior. I am too honestly. None of the other three kids are like this. Her behavior is very self-destructive for her age. Short of pulling her out of school, how to you change a 13 year old’s character? How can they provide consequences in a way that will get a positive response instead of this nasty, passive aggressive sulking? How do you get a child this self-obsessed to stop focusing on herself and show empathy and affection for her family? What resources would you recommend?

It’s important to note that this sort of thing is always a possible consequence when children are abandoned to a public school environment. It’s not an inevitable consequence, to be sure, but there are always going to be those children who are, by character, more susceptible to it than others, regardless of their upbringing. I strongly favor homeschooling for all children, but especially for those with weak, easily-influenced characters.

My recommendation would be to pull X out of school immediately. The nature of the problem exhibited is serious enough to justify drastic action, especially in light of her blatant lying, stealing, and other Machiavellian actions. The other children can probably wait until next year if they are not showing any signs of similar behavior. But the school year has barely begun and there is a very good chance that X will get herself into trouble of one sort or another in the next eight months.

As SB pointed out, these problems aren’t something that started overnight. They are character problems, they are firmly implanted, and they will require a long period of boot camp-style attitude readjustment.So, in addition to pulling her out of school and the solid steps the parents have taken to deny her communications and privacy, they should rely upon the method proven to work by various militaries throughout the world. For the next six weeks, they should put her to work until she is too exhausted to find trouble.

By Christmastime, X should be an expert in grouting, deep-cleaning, and every surface in the house should be sparkling. And then there is a credible threat hanging over her head when the strictures are gradually relaxed; every time she is tempted, she’ll be weighing whether it is worth another six weeks of hard manual labor.

All socialization outside the house and parental supervision should be barred until further notice. X is a child, she is a dependent, and as long as her parents are legally liable for her actions, they have the right and the responsibility to prevent her from indulging in her short-sighted, self-destructive tendencies.

There are no guarantees, of course. Despite her parents’ best efforts, X may become an overweight mudshark with a meth habit and two abortions under her belt by the time she is 18. Or she may turn it around completely. Regardless, the probability is that if her parents don’t directly and forthrightly address the situation with consistency and resolve, she will destroy her life in one way or another. Unfortunately, some people are just naturally self-destructive.

One of the hardest things to accept as a parent is that we cannot make our children’s choices for them. What we can do is decide upon the primary influences upon them. In the case of the child who is greatly susceptible to peer pressure, the answer is straightforward: take care to ensure that her peers are positive influences rather than negative ones.

Homeschool Nazis

Matt Walsh points out the historical reality to anti-homeschoolers:

I’d like to treat you to a look at a few snippets of some emails I received yesterday, after a certain “controversial” segment on my show:

“I never realized you were so anti-education…”

“It figures that a teabagger would hate education so much…”

“….so it seems you would rather have a nation full of illiterates…”

“….I get tired of your anarchist propaganda…”

“I’m sure Hitler would be very proud of you…”

That last one — the obligatory “you’re as bad as Hitler!” charge — is especially ironic, considering the subject that prompted these responses: public education. Specifically, my belief that government education is an unmitigated disaster, and can only be remedied by more and more families deciding to remove government from the equation and educate their children themselves. That last emailer is, predictably, a proud product of public school. But you already knew that, in light of his hilarious historical ignorance.

Contrary to his claims, Hitler would not have been very “proud” of my pro-home school rhetoric. In fact, he would have been quite displeased. In fact, he probably would have expressed that displeasure in a manner which would have left no room for interpretation. That’s because Hitler actually outlawed home schooling (a law that’s still enforced in Germany today, and passionately endorsed by our own Justice Department). The Fuehrer was a huge proponent of public schooling — and that’s not an attempt to compare modern public school proponents to Nazis.

But, you know, if anyone comes close to mirroring the National Socialist Party on this particular subject, it obviously isn’t the home schooling folks…

The whole article is pretty good, as Matt goes on to explain how the public school system is working precisely as designed. The fact is that if you believe in public education, you are every bit as much a Nazi as someone who believes Jews should be oven-baked and every bit as much a Communist as someone who believes in the abolition of private property. Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx were both absolutely avid advocates of public education, in fact, “Free education for all children in government schools” is the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto.

Public school is systematic child abuse. It is that simple. Don’t ever be defensive about home schooling. When someone asks you why you homeschool, just tell them “public school is child abuse” and give them the opportunity to explain how and why that statement is incorrect. They will not be able to do so.

The cost of educating women

Not only have the proposed benefits manifestly failed to manifest themselves, but the opportunity cost of future generations has begun to become readily apparent everywhere from Europe to Asia. One wonders how low birth rates have to fall in civilized countries before the elites begin to realize that the Taliban may not, in fact, be the stupid ones with regards to this particular matter.

I address a recent article on the correlation between female education, the declining Japanese fertility rate, and the reported collapse of the collective Japanese interest in sex at Alpha Game:

Throughout this period Japan experienced a sharp decline in the total rate of fertility. After a sudden downswing in the early 1950s, the birthrate continuously declined until the mid-1980s, when it began to drop rapidly, and by 1997 it fell to 1.39. In light of these findings, it is plausible to suggest that there is a relationship between the increase in women’s access to a higher education and the decrease in the fertility rate.

As one commenter there noted, if Nicholas Kristof read the post, his head would probably explode. But there is no empirical evidence indicating that female education is societally beneficial, and there is an increasing amount of evidence that correlates it with a broad range of societal ills. The Japanese birthrate has continued to fall, hitting a historical low at 1.26 per woman in 2005. In 2012 the number of deaths exceeded births for a sixth straight year.

Far from being the 21st century superpower that my university professors taught that it was certain to become, it is a literally dying society.

No society that wishes to survive should convert all of its prospective mothers into worker drones any more than it should convert all of its prospective farmers into doctors or telephone sanitizers. Sure, it takes longer for a society to die out demographically than starve, but the end result is the same.

Just ask the Shakers, another equalitarian society that believed in the importance of educating women.

The end of the liberal arts major

The bottom is dropping out of their employment-of-last-resort:

Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.

It doesn’t require health insurance.

Don’t think of it as the enemy of baristas, insists Kevin Nater, CEO of the company that has produced this technological marvel. Think of it as an instrument people can use to create their ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for “out-of-home coffee drinkers”—Nater’s phrase—sick of an “inconsistent experience.”

Think of it as the future. Think of it as empowerment. Your coffee, your way, flawlessly, every time, no judgments. Four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup in a 16 oz. half-caff soy latte? Here it is, delivered to you precisely when your smartphone app said it would arrive, hot and fresh and indistinguishable from the last one you ordered.

In a common area at the University of Texas at Austin, the Briggo
coffee kiosk, covered in fake wood paneling and a touch screen and not
much else, takes up about as much space as a pair of phone booths. Its
external appearance was designed by award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar,
with the intention that it radiate authenticity and what Briggo says is
its commitment to making coffee that is the equal of what comes out of
any high-end coffee shop.

The kiosk at the university is the second version, the one that will
be rolling out across the country in locations that are still secret. It
needs just 50 square feet (4.6 sq m) of floor space, and it can be
dropped anywhere—an airport, a hospital, a company campus, a cafe with
tables and chairs and WiFi just like Starbucks. It’s manufactured in
Austin.

Inside, protected by stainless steel walls and a thicket of patents,
there is a secret, proprietary viscera of pipes, storage vessels,
heating instruments, robot arms and 250 or so sensors that together do
everything a human barista would do if only she had something like
perfect self-knowledge.

 Robo-baristas may be what finally pops the higher education bubble.

Mailvox: alternative credentials

ML’s experiences in computer programming have been similar to mine.

 Your posts regarding the college gender gap have been
fascinating.  I graduated in 2001 with a degree in computer science.  At
the time, our program had about ten women.  As it happens, two of them
happened to end up in a few of my upper division classes.  They were
both mediocre programmers at best.  From what I gathered they graduated
by hanging out in the lab and “collaborating” with the beta, gamma, and
omega males working on their own projects.

I went on to work at IBM for twelve years as a
software engineer.  By that time IBM had long been infected with the
diversity cancer and women in technology were vital to IBM’s success in
the global economy.  There were hundreds of women in my division and
while most of them were on the technical career track they worked mostly
as project managers or testers.  The women that started out in actual
software development positions did not last long.  They were frequently
promoted to management or moved to project management or test positions.

There were two notable exceptions.  In the mid to
late 80’s IBM experienced a shortage of software developers.  The
universities, typically lagging, had not yet created the programs to
educate programmers in sufficient numbers.  IBM decided it would offer
it’s semi-skilled workforce the opportunity to attend an in house
programming school.  Those that graduated were guaranteed promotions
from manufacturing and secretarial jobs to professional careers.  Since
IBM had a very large pool of candidates, it didn’t care about the
graduation rate.  The goal was to create functional programmers.  In
talking to the old timers I gather the program was very challenging.
 The only two competent female coders I came into contact with during my
time at IBM graduated from that program.  Both of these women were
exceptionally good, better than 90% of their male peers.  Even though
the program allowed women, graduating them was not mandatory.  In fact
women were not expected to graduate so those that did actually achieved
something meaningful.

You discuss alternative credentialing systems much
like IBMs old boot camp coming into existence.  How do you foresee these
systems withstanding the “need for diversity”.  Certainly no such
system would be successful at today’s diverse multicultural IBM.

There was one good female programmer at the small tech company of about 100 people where I worked for two years before starting my first game company. She was quite attractive too. But the other one spent years, literally years, finding creative ways to avoid doing anything at all. It was rather impressive in retrospect; I’m not even sure she knew how to program.

Diversity is a luxury item. The new credential systems spring up because there is a need for them, the old ones having been ruined by diversity, equality, and so forth. Whenever and wherever there is more need for actual performance than the pretense of it, people will find away to utilize them.

Au contraire, mon ami

I think Captain Capitalism read a bit too much into yesterday’s post in concluding the college credentialists got me:

A well written and charty-goodness post, but he still considers the education/college degree gap a “real” gap. There are two brief points I shall make as I’m trying to knock out a chapter per 4 days of my book:

1.  Women earn the majority of EASY DEGREES.  When it comes to engineering and anything that requires significant math men beat them at a ratio of 4:1. 
When it comes to Masters in Farting Unicorns and Doctorates in Feelings
with Minors in Oprah, yes, women dominate.  But for the stuff that
matters in the world, men by far outcompete women.

2.  Women are NOT going to be ahead in the world for this.  It is NOT a
good thing for women that they are earning the majority of degrees
because they are buying into a bubble.  It’s like having women
purchasing 70% of the housing in early 2007 and citing that as an
example of some kind of performance gap.

The college degree gap is real. The fact that the degrees are worthless is irrelevant. Captain Capitalism appears to have forgotten that I am not a credentialist, and moreover, I was one of the earliest commentators to point out the increasing irrelevance of the college degree. Consider what I wrote on the subject in 2004:

“The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago.
Beginning in the ’60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual
development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds
of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured
faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the
devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of
sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as
absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what’s really
going on in the world.”

I wrote a few more columns on the subject, and in the 2012 WND column entitled “Education is not an investment“, I pointed out five flaws in the various “return-on-investment” calculations used to justify college degrees, such as the failure to take student loan debt into account.

“The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501;
however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010
college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And
since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating
students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8
percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that
seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average
ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan
interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt
is $247,118.”

Ironically, one could build a solid case for a young man being better off financially by lending his $25,000 college fund to college students while going off and working instead of getting a degree, so long as he is able to earn more than $4,680 per year for the next 30 years in addition to collecting his federally guaranteed debt-tribute.

What Captain Capitalism failed to realize is that I don’t see the growing preponderance of women in higher education as evidence that women are going to run the world. To the contrary, I see it as evidence that higher education is in the late stages of collapse. Because women ruin everything. The final stage will be reached when Title IX is successfully applied to the STEM degrees, which is already federal law, and math and the hard sciences are sufficiently dumbed down to permit women to receive what is determined to be an equitable number of those degrees.

By that point, men will have likely created alternative systems to the university credentials that are as unpalatable to women as the universities once were, and successful businesses will be increasingly prone to utilize those systems. Some sort of online achievement-based system like those popular in the IT world would appear to be the likely candidate, especially as the availability of online degrees from prestigious institutions continues to increase. Once 50,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese are graduating with degrees from Harvard, its social cachet will plummet.