Allowing Rich kids in. THISSSSSSS!!!! is what it was always about.
It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt.
There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide, environment/global warming, vast increase in higher ed/healthcare/housing relative to inflation).
Anyway, in this case, I still am trying to gauge if my fondness for the general institution of higher education circa late 1990s was actually still somewhat deserved at the time and it has _truly_ fallen apart in the next 25-30 years, or if it was this bad for the last 40-50 (I can argue there's a good chance it was a great institution in the 1960s fresh after post-WWII investment in higher ed by the gubberment).
Anyone have thoughts? I personally think it is ACTUALLY worse, that the rise of the huge administrator/MBAs in higher ed has led to do-anything-for-a-buck, and it REALLY is this bad.
Signs that it actually is bad:
- the stupendous rise in cost / that little student loan crisis we have
- the stupendous rise in Div I coaching salaries and facilities
- the amount of frivolous facilities built
- the rise of the minimum wage adjunct professor
- the decline of import of tenure (revenue/publishing/research is now everything)
- the decline of humanities. I still as a science guy look down at them, but they are historically important (as in over 1000s of years) to educational institutions.
- grade inflation, it is pay for degree even in some Ivies it appears now
> There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
This is so true. When I was younger I thought "oh what a cynical thought, I should cheer up and be less gloomy". Now I realize I was right. The sheer amount of waste arising from badly managed orgs with wrong incentives is just enormous. This is why we don't have flying cars and teleporters.
If you consider that universities these days let in a lot more people, it's inevitable that the academic level is lower. Back in the day someone doing a phd had a reasonable chance of becoming a professor. Now there's so many people the university is not really for producing knowledge, that's just a side business to giving a stamp of approval to your average middle class kid who is not gonna be doing research.
No one wants to tell children they aren’t good enough but it’s much better than worsening the quality of everyone’s education. Especially when they don’t even want to be there. We should have never put so much emphasis on getting everyone a college degree.
Let me tell you a tale from when I was going to college.
The school I was attending decided in my last year that it was no longer doing "need-blind" admissions. There was a minor uproar, but of course it went through.
So... you're saying the school will preferentially let in richer students to the organization if they can? You know, two applications being allegedly equal?
I leave it as an exercise to the reader how much objectivity on "equal applications" when one of the students basically is 10x richer (and parents that might donate), when you have to see how well affirmative action with "equal applications" has worked to get minorities into white collar jobs.
Of course what the college was doing was probably formalizing what it was doing anyway. Why would it do that?
Ohhhh,,, right, lets do way more egregious pay-for-admission that "pick the richer between equals". Right.
Then a decade later, I noticed all these chinese nationals on universitites, and the students said they were a bit of a headache because they were so obnoxiously rich.
Oh! The colleges figured out how to kill two birds with one stone: a rich foreigner is a minority AND rich! So they would coddle these scions as much as possible.
It amazes me how corrupt higher education is now. It is AMAZINGLY corrupt.
There is this thing with getting old (I'm in late 40s now) where you think the world is going to hell, but really what is happening is that you are figuring out EXACTLY how fucked up everything is.
However, sometimes things really are going to hell (increasing rich/poor divide, environment/global warming, vast increase in higher ed/healthcare/housing relative to inflation).
Anyway, in this case, I still am trying to gauge if my fondness for the general institution of higher education circa late 1990s was actually still somewhat deserved at the time and it has _truly_ fallen apart in the next 25-30 years, or if it was this bad for the last 40-50 (I can argue there's a good chance it was a great institution in the 1960s fresh after post-WWII investment in higher ed by the gubberment).
Anyone have thoughts? I personally think it is ACTUALLY worse, that the rise of the huge administrator/MBAs in higher ed has led to do-anything-for-a-buck, and it REALLY is this bad.
Signs that it actually is bad:
- the stupendous rise in cost / that little student loan crisis we have
- the stupendous rise in Div I coaching salaries and facilities
- the amount of frivolous facilities built
- the rise of the minimum wage adjunct professor
- the decline of import of tenure (revenue/publishing/research is now everything)
- the decline of humanities. I still as a science guy look down at them, but they are historically important (as in over 1000s of years) to educational institutions.
- grade inflation, it is pay for degree even in some Ivies it appears now