On 01/25/2013 04:51 PM, Daniel C. wrote: > On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 6:31 PM, Michael Torrie<[email protected]> wrote: >> <offtopic><philosophicalrant> >> All that said, and this is now firmly off-topic, I've come to believe >> the old story of the man telling his kids, you get an education so you >> don't have to dig ditches like I do, is ultimately harming our society >> irreparably. We need ditches dug. We need cars built, we need food. We >> need truck drivers. We need someone to call the cable internet service >> is out, or when a device needs warranty service. Work is a good thing. >> I'm not sure our society has been well served by the focus on a >> knowledge economy (though we need programmers and sysadmins for sure!) >> at the expense of an economy that creates products and goods. >> </philosophicalrant></offtopic> > You're essentially describing the situation that has culminated in > hipsters on food stamps and the Occupy movement. An entire generation > of kids were told to get a degree if they didn't want to flip burgers, > and now that they have degrees and the jobs they were promised aren't > materializing they're being told "Well, don't be too proud to flip > burgers." hipsters on food stamps, yes, but what I've seen of Occupy, I'd be surprised to see a GED out of most of them.
> It's tempting to blame them for getting degrees in useless crap (which > is pretty much where I would put any non-STEM, non-service (i.e. > lawyer, doctor, etc.) degree) but they didn't ask to be duped into > taking out loans and wasting four years of their lives based on a lie > that was believed by everyone and is still believed by many. One of our best sysops graduated with a degree in philosophy. I won't mention he also got 4 minors (math, computer science, logic, and English). > Also I think I might be a bad person for being more curious about what > the cultural outcome of this generational angst, shock and rage will > be than I am compassionate toward the people who are suffering through > it right now. > You and me both brother. I'm hoping the disappearance of the middle class will mean the middle becomes the lower-upper class. I'll admit, that could just be wishful thinking on my part. The good news is, my last estimate of college expense for my son came out at about $120k, tuition only, in the next 10 years. So I don't think this problem of plowing out BS of BS degrees will last much longer. Maybe that's why we have all these Internet video degree programs popping up. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
