[David]

Student debt bankrupting a generation.

Two million Canadians have student loans. That debt is worth about $20 billion

http://www.vancouversun.com/bu.....story.html

[Bugs]

It's probably too simple, but the article says the woman that serves as the heart-rending example of a blameless victim, ran up a debt of $60,000 studying linguistics.

Ask yourself: if you had a master's degree in linguistics -- Noam Chomsky's field -- where would you look for work? What did she think she was going to do? Well, she was going to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science ... anyone know what that is?

She was going to work in a university, because there is nowhere else. The thing is -- these programs require a few dozen students to be teaching assistants for the undergrads. Otherwise, the professors would have to do it, and, you know -- they're really too busy to do that.

This is the situation in all our major universities. The great bulk of the teaching -- the answering questions, the marking of papers, etc -- falls on the shoulders of students/teaching assistants, who were themselves undergrads the previous year ... or maybe two years before. They get paid about $12,000 a year.

And let's not even think about the academic standards they maintain.

The truth is -- there will never be any jobs in the field for most of the teaching assistants/masters students. It's like an academic pyramid, a ponzi scheme, because the institution requires teaching assistants to function, but there are no jobs for the recipients of advanced degrees.

It's happening all over the place.

The professors get paid around $100,000 a year, and they pretend to do research. In fact, they have a four hour week. Some of them, of course, actually do some research, but check out the research papers that are published by university professors -- and ask yourself -- who cares? Most of the academic hacks in Canadian universities will publish maybe half a dozen articles over their career.

Part of the scam is a cover story, in the form of new social theories which discard the notion of Truth as simply the ideologies created by oppressive institutions ... in a way, they claim scholarship is obsolete, that it's purpose is a fiction. You know, the dead white males thing.

What's the economic value of all this activity? Because, as social policy, education has to have a social value. What has happened is that government pays the biggest part of the bill. Bear in mind, Ms. Lake's $60,000 is only her third of the costs. The government has paid an additional large sum to keep her from doing something useful.

This is one example of something I labour to get across to the Blogging Tories. In each institution, the form it takes is different, but the great majority of our institutions have been taken over by this sloth. They have become corrupt and decadent -- not corrupt in the sense the professors take money or sex for grades, but that there is a kind of conspiracy to eat up public resources to no useful purpose.

The article also mentions the Rae Review ... one of the ways Bob Rae was making a parasite of himself when otherwise unemployed -- oops, being a lawyer -- was to help keep the bubble afloat. He claimed, for example, that the university graduate will earn $1,000,000 more than someone without a degree. Wonder what they paid him to say that?

This is a little preçis of what is in it: http://www3.sympatico.ca/dylan.reid/raereview.html

This is a big issue. It's a different kind of decadence, but similar forms of it affect our courts, our police, social work, education, and all kinds of state-subsidized education, particularly where government is the major employer. This article is just the tip of the iceberg.

[hamiltonguyo]

Actually voice recognition software is big business.

[Bugs]

I never saw any reference to software in her plan ... and she can't find a job in what the government has spend a lot of money preparing her for.

In any case, she's an instance that illustrates a general situation. It's a lot worse in the US, where top university tuitions are $40,000+ a year.

[cosmostein]

My advice is to actually research employment in your field before you commit to whatever field of study you opt to take.

I can't count the amount of floor-mates I had in first year university who were getting BA's, it must have been 55 - 60% of the floor.

It was also amazing the amount of deer in the headlights looks you would get when you asked them what they were studying followed by "and what are you going to do with that when you are done?"

I feel little pity for these kids.
I opted for a degree in a field where there was employment, and actual gainful employment. Rather then determining what to take in University because it was something "I enjoyed" I opted for something that would get me paid.

These kids are spending tens of thousands of dollars to major in hobbies, then cry the blues when they can't find work in Fine Art History.

That isn't societies fault.

[Willg]

Unfortunate, but true Cosmo.

I wonder what percentage though of university programs result in a BA designation though.

p.s. declaring bankruptcy does not discharge someone from their student loan debt.

[cosmostein]

[Hasdrubal]

It starts at the high school level with no or little education on what lies after they graduate with their grade 12 (grade levels vary on province) diploma's. Maybe a life skills type class should be implemented to tell how it is, what really goes on & not to discourage them to go to college. They need to be educated on the risks which means that despite taking classes hoping to live better then your parents you may end up in a worse situation as there are no guarantees that you will avoid doing custodian services instead of what you studied (eg. lawyer). Also student loans are not the only debt traps that lie forward, what about the hungry creditors looking to make you a slave & to keep you from buying that car you want & that house?

[hamiltonguyo]

The biggest problem I've found is a lack of career services at Universities. While at McMaster there's a very active Science Career and Cooperative Education centre, there is a complete lack of anything similar for Humanities or Social Sciences.

I think a University education is valuable, but for any degree other than a professional degree, the intended outcome is not job training but being a trained scholar. What we need more of is post-graduate diplomas and joint college-university programs that integrate job training with undergraduate education. By the way, this applies to the Sciences as well.

As for graduate students existing only to serve as TA's, you are completely out of touch. Recently we had a strike at McMaster because the Graduate TA's wanted their jobs guaranteed for more than 2 or 4 years (for Masters and PhD students respectively) if it took them longer to do their degrees. If the University only wanted these students as a source of cheap teaching they wouldn't limit the length. In fact Grad TA's are overpaid both in their hourly wage and (for the most part) in the number of hours actually worked. When Universities want cheap TA's they hire undergrads.

You are also drastically incorrect about how much a prof actually works. If a prof taught one course (and did nothing else), and kept everything exactly the same each year and did none of their own marking then they MIGHT be able to work only 4 hours a week (3 hours lectures, 1 hour office hours/answering emails from students) I can tell you that a prof actually does far more than that just teaching a course and that when you add in research it grows a lot. Someone who complains that a prof only publishes as "handful" of papers during their lifetime obviously does not understand research and the time it takes to complete publishable work in many fields.

[hamiltonguyo]

[Bugs]

I think Cosmo misreads the problem. The idea is, (it once worked) that the BA provided the skills of scholarship, and developed habits of logical thinking and literacy that could be useful in a broad range of (particularly administative) duties.

You know what happens with specialized education of the sort Cosmo suggests?

The address a practical need. They gear up, and set up programmes. Students flood in, particularly if these programmes actually lead to jobs. A decade later, the whole field is saturated. Think of computer nerds, as an example.

Not only that, by the time the technology gets into a programme, it is likely already outdated, and the kids hacking in their basements know more about it than the text-book writers put out ... or are allowed to put into print. Twenty years ago, a background in IT was a ticket to ride ... now, they're a dime a dozen.

It's same with the non-technical part of computers -- using the software. By the time the students graduate, the software has changed, or is about to.

Part of the problem is this proliferation of specialties leaves the core behind. In other words, they cease to educate in the old-fashioned sense. I would ask Cosmo -- how much of Hobbes did he read? How about Locke? How about Adam Smith? Those are the foundation thinkers in our culture.

Or, in more modern times, how much Darwin? Freud? Marx? Or any of the other giant figures of the 19th century? How much of the moderns? Who even knows what our intellectual history is, what has been happening in science, art, and literature in the 20th century?

I don't mean to embarrass, but if the typical student hasn't read any of this, in what sense has (s)he an education? What (s)he has is more akin to training, is it not? True, there's no bucks in Darwin, or any of this stuff ... directly. Just a better understanding, and ability to contextualize our own lives, and to be better citizens, parents, and community members.

I say this only to urge us to face reality. The modern student thinks Hip Hop is 'culture'. They think anybody can be an artist if they have round-nosed scissors. If you challenge them, they pout ... and think you're a bully because they think you're attacking their 'self-esteem'. Standards have been lowered to such a point that literally (almost) anybody can get a university degree. And it shows.

Now whole educational programmes are linked to a small number of employers, or fields of service ... all the parts of education that have a cultural significance beyond knowing the difference between 'lifo' and 'fifo', or some other narrow and merely technical item of expertise.

The education systems of North America has been hollowed out. The young woman in the article, that is our example -- well, not so young -- has been encouraged to make a huge investment in some field that she felt would repay that investment -- but she's been lied to. No less a figure than Bob Rae has pimped the idea that education always increases productivity. This isn't a rare event. It's common, particularly amongst the ones who think that, after 16 years of public education, they at last have an opportunity to learn the real stuff ... they get scammed, pure and simple. Now, universities are pretty much stuck, like any Ponzi scheme, with hiring their own students, lest the bubble burst. Once, this was taken as the sure sign of intellectual inbreeding.

Meantime, the costs spiral upwards. Remember, for every dollar these students spend on education, the public spends two!

This is a huge waste. The problem is that not only is the education, itself, of little value, but also that it ruins people for honest labour. I haven't even touched the ideological role that education now plays. But how much can you stand, on a nice sunny day?

[cosmostein]

[Bugs]

I don't mean to pick on you, Cosmo -- but your argument makes it sound as if it's simply a matter of which choice someone makes for their 'major' ... and while that may be part of the picture, it is only a small part of the problem.

You don't say how long ago you graduated, or what field, and this also makes a difference. Put it this way -- the employment edge that a degree gives someone has been deteriorating since the 1960ies, and probably before. I don't say that your personal strategy can't work -- but that the chances that it will are growing smaller and smaller all the time.

Many degrees are how tied to government employment and funding practices. For example, the amount of money a social worker agency will get is often contingent on having MSW's on staff, etc. A BSW (Batchelor of Social Work) gets you in the door, in a kind of probationary status, but you really need a MSW to go up the ladder in that profession -- all of which is paid for with public money, from one level or another.

What is the material benefit of a Masters of Social Work, substantively? Well, it does get the holder into a smaller pool of applicants for jobs, but what does it do for society? The course itself is mostly a lot of ideology and learning about the bureaucracy. None of it stands muster as 'education' as understood fourty years ago.

It's the same with anything the government funds. It has led to something called 'credentialism'. Gone are the days when a working guy could come off the farm, and master a trade by working at it, then go into supervision, and maybe start his own business. Now (s)he needs the credential, and the credential allows him/her to short-circuit the 'mastering the trade' part. University grads enter the labour force at the bottom levels of supervision.

Access to credentials -- certainly the best of them -- are subject to racial and gender quotas. At an official level, such things are denied, of course -- but do you really think you could take a profession like Pharmacy, and turn it from a male-dominated field, to a female-dominated field, in a decade without quotas in the recruitment of people into the field? Or medicine? When these 'equalization' programmes started, how many women do you think took the courses necessary to prepare one to be a pharmacist? (Anyone who doubts me can get on google and check it out -- StatsCan monitors these things.)

I know how uncomfortable it makes people ... sorry.

Credentials now limit job mobility, rather than serve it. It's another kind of 'closed shop' which reserves the best jobs in the economy for university graduates -- regardless (or despite) their lack of merit or experience.

It's tied to the ideologies that teem on campuses -- those that characterize white males as oppressors, and exclude them from full participation in their societies under the terms that were once normal when it could be assumed that these men would be the sole-support of families. Now it's the other folks 'turn' ...

White, Canadian born males are now the most under-represented group in higher education, very likely. When I went to university, the student body was about 2/3rds male. Now it's reversed -- but the number of students with visible minority backgrounds is easily half of those males. The white kids are hanging around down on Queen Street, hoping to get into a band.

To get an idea of how bad credentialism is -- Ryerson University (and, no doubt, others) offers courses in how to be a barista at premium coffee shoppes. If I remember correctly, the programme requires about 10 courses, at about $240 each, for a certificate, and you can do them all in a year -- but if the programme is successful, soon someone will need this course to be a barista ... and how screwed up is that? Serving coffee used to be a part-time job. It's the same will mall-guards, and a bunch of these part-time jobs. Even a taxi-driver needs to invest a couple of $thousand in courses to get a license.

Of course, you are thinking of higher up the educational food-chain, but it is essentially the same there.

This is a complex subject, but, trust me -- all the trends are in the wrong direction, and it has very serious consequences for our society. It diverts people into the wrong occupational areas, for one thing, and cuts down on the free market allocation of labour resources. The trades aren't exempted, although there are other gate-keepers there as well -- notably, trade unions and ethnic prejudices. In Toronto, it is certainly the case that if a project needs a carpenter, they aren't likely to hire the Canadian kid who shows up, eager to learn -- they'll get their sister's brother-in-law's son, from Portugal, illegally. Don't kid yourself about how prevalent this is.

You say " ... The fact that the correct education adds to your earning potential is not even something that can be questioned." That's just wrong. You add the word 'correct' to rule out the cases where it doesn't work out that way ... which is kind of a cheat. There are few courses of study, outside the professional schools, which are 'correct' by your definition, and just try to get into Teachers College if you are a Canadian-born white male (unless your major is math).

It's the same in Law School, though it's hard to know what does qualify one for Law School ... save a lust for power without responsibility. Medicine offers a better example. Did medical schools suddenly discovered a mother lode of female students, fluent in organic chemistry and anatomy, so that they could 'balance' the highly male-dominated field in less than 15 years? Or did they suspend merit in favour of quotas?

I'll go with quotas.

[cosmostein]

[Bugs]

When I made reference to 'picking' on you, I just didn't want to make it personal. The way individuals make decisions is their business, in my book, but you were putting yourself forward as showing the right way to do it -- which I don't much disagree with, except that you underestimate (imo) how decadent the system is.

My point is that it isn't delivering on the promise of education. The institutions do what institutions always do when they have a source of public money, and a glittering mandate to 'improve' people. They get all puffed up on their own importance and spend the money on themselves, while demanding more money ...

You essentially concede that half the graduates of universities are not seeing a great economic benefit, in personal terms. You blame the individuals for not all signing up for whatever course is 'hot' at the moment. First of all, who does what you did? Most people rely on guidance teachers, and handouts from educational institutions. When there are few jobs anywhere, what do you sign up for? I guess that's why they have Law Schools.

You don't address the fact that many of these courses -- if they meet the demand -- quickly flood their markets. If a growing number of student followed your choices, for instance, it wouldn't be a solution very long.

In any case, what information are the losing half acting upon? Sure, people who take Theology realize there isn't likely going to be an economic benefit to them -- but how about business school undergrads? What are the current crop of grads of those institutions getting, as work, these days? I don't have statistics, but I think that many of them would fail our test.

Besides, Cosmo, the promise is -- university grads will make towards $1,000,000 more in their lifetimes. You concede that half of them don't even recoup their investment. The $million figure is often used to encourage people to continue their educations, and such a bastion as Bob Rae assumed to be true in his review of education.

The real truth is, in many case, these students would have been better advised to go into plumbing.

But there is another angle on this, which is more my point of view. What is the added value of these expensively educated people in the economy? How much will the normal university grad make productivity rise? Where's the social benefit? Is it worth the loss of competent plumbers?

If university degrees weren't the ticket of entry for many public sector jobs, as well as the state-regulated monopolies ... how much real economic value would they have for individuals? This is the issue of 'credentialism', where a scrap of paper is taken as a job qualification. It acts chiefly as a barrier to people working their way up job hierarchies, keeping the workers from entering supervisory levels of the economy. For many, that's the real individual benefit of education.

It acts as a social-class gatekeeper for big sectors of the job market, rather than providing a real economic benefit to the society. And that's my point -- or at least one of them. That's my point about barista education -- if the normal pattern continues, an educational certificate will be necessary for what was, once, a great part-time job for the right person.

And what is the social benefit of using racial and sexual quotas? What about the throw-aways? What happens to them in the process?

=======================================

These worthless degrees are less the responsibility of students than they are of educational administrators, in my view. You distort my point. I say that the general arts grad is following what was once a useful course of study, but it produced useful generalists.

Now, the student that is 'finding himself' is deflected away from these 'hard subjects' -- hard understood as involving some reading -- into a mush of crap. They really aren't very literate, they don't have much of a grasp of mathematics, and they know nothing of history or other traditional cores. They are just empty.

They don't read Marx, either. (A little joke -- but true. If you want to disarm some radical rant, quote a bit of Das Kapital back at them. Personally, I like this... "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness." They go, "Huh?", but they know it sounds like Marx, and they stand, confused, like a deer in the headlights.)

There are still islands of relative excellence in universities -- though not many in Canada. But the trend is clear. Look at the institution, Cosmo, and you will see what I mean ...