At some expensive colleges, the salaries of students 10 years after enrollment are bleak, and there is an earnings gender gap at every top university.
Source: Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data – The New York Times
I commented on the article, but I will be posting more comments about the data. Some of the examples of “professors” that I give on this site (See the category University Education Dumbs Down High School) are from a college that does very poorly in the new data. From my first perusal of the data, it appears to be at the TOP of 1,000 other “colleges”.
Here was my comment. (I added an additional comment on 9/14. See below.)
This data confirms what I have been trying to tell people for years. As a former math professor, I have seen these damaging results played out in the lives of young people for decades.
Let me outline what has been going on. (Specific cases, documents and stories that elucidate what I’m about to write can be found on my blog inside-higher-ed )
Step One: Government provides grants to produce many American PhD’s in fields like mine – math. Whether they do this for the threat of Russia (remember Sputnik?), or because “my kid’s calculus teacher can’t speak English”, it doesn’t matter. Step Two quickly follows.
Step Two: Unscrupulous professors – and institutions – give the government what they want. (Read an example of one on my blog. That PhD recipient couldn’t do a hard, but standard, calculus problem. There are other examples there,also.)
Step Three: These faux-PhD’s become “professors” at state regional schools, where they are in charge of teaching, among others, future teachers. (I don’t blame the faux-PhDs. They didn’t know what they were getting into.)
Step Five: High school gets dumbed down faster than college, so college degrees pay, on average, more than high school degrees by the same amount.
Step Six: Everyone has to go to college. Colleges become powerful and rich.
This must stop. It is destroying our future – socially, economically and politically.
Additional Comment added 9/14
I thought it important to add another observation to my previous comment. I don’t want anyone to think that it is just graduate students (at least those that professors don’t see as future brilliant mathematicians that will add to their own reputation) that are not educated as they should be. It’s also undergraduate students – aka “customers”.
Here is what David Riesman observed in 1980.
“…the “wants” of students to which competing institutions, departments, and individual faculty members cater are quite different from the “needs” of students…advantage can…be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions…the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends…”
(From “On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”, David Riesman,1980)
(To see just how that is done, see either my posts on content deflation, or “A Tale Out of School”, especially the accompanying documents to that story.)
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