Guest Post by Martin Armstrong
I have warned that 2015.75 was the peak in government and the two many industries that government subsidizes has created the decay within our American society reducing disposable income – healthcare and education. Degrees I have warned are really worthless. About 60% of graduates cannot find employment in the degree they have paid for. Both education and healthcare have become the greatest violation of consumer laws to date, and nobody does anything about it. Hospitals are growing trying to put out of business the private local general practitioner aided by the lawyers driving up legal claims enticing people to file suits as if this is a lottery or casino to get rich quick.
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Ernst & Young has been one of the top graduate recruiters in the UK and USA. They have announced the firm will be removing the degree classification from its entry criteria, saying there is “no evidence” that success at university correlates with achievement in later life. The best education has ALWAYS been an apprenticeship – not some university course taught by someone who has never practiced what they teach.
In ancient Rome, at between nine and twelve years of age, boys from affluent families would leave their basic education behind and take up study with a grammaticus, who was a teacher that refined his students’ writing and speaking skills. They would be versed in the art of poetic analysis and taught them Greek if they did not yet know it. They would be taught logic and how to think. By this point, lower class boys would already be working as apprentices. If someone wanted to be a sculptor, he would apply to be an apprentice at a sculptor shop. Girls, both rich and poor, would be focused on making themselves attractive brides and, subsequently, capable mothers. It was the women who often ran the household.
We still have trade schools, which are regarded as less than university. Yet, our education in university was supposed to follow the Roman model of apprentice for the lower class and higher education for the upper class. But somehow, university moved beyond grammaticus and pretended to prepare someone for a skill, which the Roman system did not seek to accomplish – merely refine the character of the student.
Even economics at its beginning under Adam Smith was regarded as part of moral philosophy. Economics was not taught as a subject by itself until 1901. Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877 – 1959) was an English economist who built the school of economics at the University of Cambridge. Pigou trained and influenced many Cambridge economic graduates who then taught economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics but was especially teaching welfare economics for this was still moral philosophy. However, Pigou also included Business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output.
Worse still, education has been indeed hijacked by the left and they have been hard at work indoctrinating the youth. As Nigel Farage points out, thousands of youth and are in London protesting that Donald Trump will visit Britain calling him a fascist, which I serious doubt they even understand what fascism really is. Fascists generally believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Ironically, these people claiming Trump is fascist are themselves fascists for they will not accept any democratic process and insist that only their point of view is valid and any disagreement should be outlawed. The Attorney General under Obama admitted she was looking into criminally prosecuting anyone who denied Global Warming. Even the United Nations banned anyone from disagreeing with their position on Global Warming, which is fascist behavior. So the real fascists are the one’s protesting and calling Trump a fascist. Very interesting to say the least.
It simply may be far better to hire people who are not indoctrinated moving forward for there is no evidence that a degree indeed means one is more qualified for a position than not. Then you may be better off hiring people who have not been brainwashed by the extreme left teaching in schools. At the very least, it is time for some schools to promote normal education VOID of leftist indoctrination.
“They have announced the firm will be removing the degree classification from its entry criteria, saying there is “no evidence” that success at university correlates with achievement in later life.”
No fucking shit Sherlock?!
I see it everyday. RCG’s hired on without clue one on how to do a goddamned thing. Managers hired straight from college with a some stupid paper saying they have a management degree. Yet can’t manage to count their fucking balls (or tits) twice and get the same number.
Once upon a time not too long ago we hired a mix of RCG’s and ex-military types. “Educated” RCG’s with lots of theories but no fucking experience and experienced former techs rates from the military who knew how to get shit done, can follow instructions, and make decent managers if given the chance.
I guess the pendulum is beginning to swing back to sanity in hiring practices.
Quick story.
A friend of mine owns a high-end remodeling company. One of his employees has a degree in biology and does a mix of office/tech stuff completely unrelated and makes about $20 per hour, plus benefits at 28 years of age. He’s not really happy doing it, but it pays better than the job he left working at a zoo in his field making about $13 an hour.
A 20-year-old friend of my oldest son worked with me on the farm two years ago after high school. He was a very hard worker, diligent and had an aptitude for working with his hands. I convinced him to attend a tech school to study carpentry for a year and he graduated and took a job with the company I mentioned earlier making $35 an hour plus benefits and he loves his job. In a few years he’ll probably become a project manager and double his current income.
The first guy is still paying off his college loans, can’t find work in his field that pays the kind of wages a man can start a family with and makes roughly half of what a guy with no degree and no debt is making that’s eight years younger.
Part of the problem with colleges- and yes, I will exclude medical schools and engineering degrees, but for the vast majority these degrees are sought by people who have just left childhood. 18 year olds deciding what they are going to do FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES and committing to the four years and 100K debt to that end is one of the most nonsensical propositions I have ever encountered in my life. College- other than for the most gifted- is something that should be done LATER in life, long after all the hard parts of growing up are behind them and they’ve accrued a wide variety of skill sets that have real value in the world. Going from 13 years of school as a child to four more years of school as an immature young adult is a recipe for mistakes and failure plus the added debt.
It is a foolish proposition in purely economic terms, it lacks common sense (unless your common sense tells you it’s a great way to dodge adult responsibilities and engage in partying and fornicating as a lifestyle) and it RARELY leads to a lifetime spent in an adult level field.
That poor twenty-eight-year-old who wanted to work with zoo animals in high school is far more concerned with getting married and buying a home and having children right now than playing with tiger cubs and the closest he can get to the first dream is working at something he is barely qualified to do because the dream job aspiration of an 18-year-old was never a reality, it was an adolescent fantasy. Nobody working at a zoo is making anything close to grown up money because it isn’t a job for grown-ups, it’s a job for idealistic sub-adults.
College degrees benefit the colleges and the people that work there. They benefit the government by lowering the number of adults in the workforce and thus making our employment stats look better. They feed people into the debt cycle at the beginning of their adult lives training them to expect debt as an integral part of adulthood and it helps to indoctrinate them further into the State Religion of secular progressivism. Only a slim minority of people who attend colleges fresh out of high school will successfully leverage the experience into a net plus long term. Rarely have a I met people in the same field as 40 something adults that they received their degree in as 20 something grads, almost never for those younger.
Got a friend who is just about fifty who works at the buffalo ny zoo. He started out shoveling lion shit when he was fifteen. Still shovels lion shit. Makes around 20 an hour plus or minus. Happy though. You should see how well vegetables grow in lion shit. Next. When I was eighteen a friend of mines older brother graduated UB after five years and started painting houses with me. That settled my mind on college right then. He was 23 fresh out of college working for me on my crew, and he couldnt be taught to tie a knot correctly for his safety line. Later in life I noticed that engineering students also were incapable of following instructions on tieing figure 8 knots. Not a hard knot to follow when someone leaves you an 8 on a bite of rope.
I will let you in on a fact about engineering students. There are broadly two types. The first type are tinkerers; kids that built model airplanes, repaired their own bicycles and later cars, and took shop in high school as well as physics. The second type are the whiz kids who are gifted at math and the sciences, but don’t know which end of the hammer to use.
When I was in engineering school (I went a bit later in life), I was one of a very few of the former. The majority of folks were the latter.
I run into the math whiz engineers all the time in industry. By the time they have been in their chosen profession for a while, most of them have ended up as low or mid-level managers, or sales people.
My son the Mech Eng is one of the math whizzes you describe; he came to his team with the ability to look at certain proposed solutions and know whether they were theoretically even possible or not. He’s learning the practical as he goes along (or visits customer sites in the middle of nowhere.) He passed his PE a few months ago and nears his 7th anniversary for starting his career.
No doubt that “book smarts” must be leavened by experience. The wise person pushes his aptitudes as far as they’ll go, and then recognizes when a different set of aptitudes needs to be added to produce the necessary output, right?
Intelligent parents help their kids avoid mistakes the parents made. I made sure my sons had 1) identified their aptitudes, 2) researched occupations that valued employees with those aptitudes, 3) picked an occupation they thought they could stomach and 4) found the cheapest, fastest way to obtain entry qualifications and placed in the top 5% of those doing so.
All three went to college. All three attended the lowest-cost alternative available (inclusive of scholarships.) All three treated college NOT as an all-expenses-paid extension of adolescence but as a DEADLY SERIOUS period of preparation for the next stage of their lives.
All three (millennials)
1. are very, very well employed.
2. married to nice girls
3. own houses (well, they have mortgages like everyone else)
4. two of the three have kids.
5. the two with kids’ wives are STAY AT HOME mothers, despite having college degrees; both quit jobs that paid more than child-care would cost, but both families chose to RAISE THEIR OWN KIDS rather than farm it out to strangers.
Why did this work?
1. My sons are extremely bright; not geniuses, but judging from their lives (“Life is an IQ test”) they’re >140, and possible are 150+ while still retaining normal P2P social skills. What worked for my kids would not work for people whose kids are more typical.
2. My kids were all gifted in math, which lends itself to STEM education and STEM occupations. Liberal Arts degrees are worthless. College is neither a place to learn how to think (LibArts) nor universally an occupational preparation track (except for a few, narrow areas like engineering. Even Comp Sci “college” is, at best, a way to hone the mind—like mathematics—for the conceptual work of software production. The actual classes in Comp Sci are, according to my sons, irrelevant.)
Kids who don’t “get” math are really unlikely to find STEM coursework surmountable, and I question whether they’ll enjoy STEM occupations, and Not Every Kid Likes Math. (I didn’t.)
3. My wife and I (with four college degrees between us) knew how college “works.” Unlike the millennials whose parents didn’t go to college, we knew well in advance what the traps were, and we steered them around those.
The “Dominant Narrative” drives everything. Blank Slate (The Cult of Holy Homogeneous Diversity) drives the folly that “everyone can go to college.” A massive con-artist industry arose to cater to this idiocy, proving that on a scale we can’t imagine, a Fool and His Money Are (Still) Soon Parted.
My kids were quite literally the smartest people in their (large) high school. That’s not a boast, it’s a recognition of reality. Unless your kid is one of the smartest in his or her class (1 in 200-500 or more), sending him or her to college had better be a very, very calculated decision with VERY specific goals, benchmarks and expectations.
Getting another Mass Coms degree better not be one of them.
If your sons are >140 or 150+ IQ, then yes they are geniuses. Those scores would put them in the 99.56 to 99.96 percentile in the US.
I disagree. I think the term “genius” is radically overused.
Every high school with 2500 kids has at least one kid who will top out between 145-150. The Triple Nine Society is 1-in-1000, or 99.9th percentile, which is around 146 depending on your test.
Big Wiff. That plus a dollar gets you a cup of coffee at McD’s.
So no, my sons are very bright Not-geniuses. I’m proud of them, but they are within the normal spectrum of people who surround us. They’re doing “big things” in their jobs, but there are others like them everywhere. If you want genius, look to some polymath with an eidetic memory who conquers new thresholds in multiple disciplines. That’s genius.
Genius level is 160 and above. 145-150 is nothing unusual, actually.
It is true for me. Left behind my degree. Luckily back then student loans didn’t result in a lifetime of soul crushing debt. These days though students are told to follow their dreams and save the world instead.
Easy in some ways to see why…
What is included in a degree in “healthcare”?
I don’t know of any Doctors, Nurses, or other medical professionals that are unemployed.
As a recovering Pharmaceutical Rep, I knew quite a cross-section of docs. I’ll never forget the conversation with a guy who was laid off; he said the reason he became a doctor was that he figured he’d never be out of a job.
Then he was.
Tale of two doctors:
Albert got a BS in Chemistry from Northwestern and his MD from University of Illinois, took an Internal Medicine residency at Rush-Pres. St. Lukes and at 31 years of age is looking for his first job. He has accumulated $500,000 in debt.
Achmed got his college, through medical school, in Iran, Iraq, Syria, India, or Pakistan. He’s bright and did well enough to pass the Internal Medicine Boards (just barely) and applies to participate in the H1-B system for the USA. He has ZERO debt.
Both of them apply to Kaiser Permanente in LA County. Which one can afford to be paid less, and still maintain the “lifestyle” of a physician? BTW, because the salary of an Internist is well above the $60,000 threshold for the H1-B program, Kaiser need not offer the job to a US citizen.
Yes, there are doctors NOW that are unemployed.
Can we imagine what happens, though, when Uncle Sam can’t borrow half-a-trillion dollars a year (or more) to pay for all that Medicare/Medicaid?
Beating my favorite drum: Those who think this 50 year fantasy can go on forever are delusional. Rates are already rising; debt-rollover is already becoming more costly. Too many people are already dependent on an unsustainable demand-supply model for medical services.
In coming decades, legions of doctors, nurses, x-ray techs, physical therapists and pharmacists will inevitably be laid off, and the thick walls of “credentialing” erected in recent decades to isolate occupations from entry (thus driving up incomes for those inside them) will trap those laid-off people in a choice between unemployment and low-wage work where they compete with and labor beside those who have no college education at all.
Trust me, this is an ugly future.
Why do I see so many articles like this?
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2016/04/20/why-u-s-doctor-shortage-is-getting-worse.html
It’s BULLSHIT.
Toss enough $ at any market (money demand) and you get attempts to supply to meet that. I wager 80% of medical services today are consumed by hypochondriacs and people with Munchhausen’s Syndrome. You simply have no idea how much of medical care is consumed by “Frequent Flyers,” people who are basically addicted to seeing the doctor and getting one procedure or pill after another.
When Uncle Sam throws $ at weapons of war, we’re surrounded by enemies itching to invade. When he throws $ at the medical-industrial-complex, we are awash in people needed MOAR, MOAR, MOAR doctoring (and thus need an infinite supply of doctors to provide it.)
It never ceases to amaze me how such obvious things are inscrutable to the Ph.D.’s who study, accountants who analyze and the reporters who yap about this baloney.
So high unemployment among medical professionals is being caused by too much consumption of their services?
In most industries it works the opposite of that.
Is Anonymous Newspeak for illiterate?
Not much unemployment among docs now.
Much unemployment coming among docs in future.
Can I distill this more for you?
That’s exactly my point.
Go back to the subject post where I questioned why degrees in “healthcare” being worthless because they don’t provide employment as the article seems to be claiming..
“Why do I see so many articles like this?”
Probably because you read fucking Fox news. Duh.
You will…..
To HSF. Finish level and furniture carpentry always amazes me. I am pretty sure that there is no amount of training that would suffice to make me employable in that field.
I assume all the victims studies majors end up in make work type jobs in the government or in HR annoying the people adding value. The most annoying probably end up continuing the cycle by teaching the next crop of victims studies majors. I suppose their real job is to be reliable votes for more government power.
I would add accounting and some of the other more practical business related majors as useful. I see a lot of ads for accounting jobs.
Joinery is an art form. Without the talent for it, it’s impossible to learn. Really gifted finish carpenters can cope a profile freehand to fit a corner that’s out of square, while someone who has been taught to bisect an angle will make a sloppy joint and call it good enough.
That’s the difference between having talent and having a certificate from s class.
The real world will leave the university system of plunder behind. Government, foundations and NGO’s will stay in the system. Sooner or later the real world will triumph over the incompetent inefficient .
I miss AWD right now.
The real world is variable, unpredictable and chaotic.
When you go to college for four years to get a degree, you are wagering. You are wagering:
(1) There won’t be a worldwide recession when you graduate that leaves you unemployed because NO ONE is hiring in your field, or really, any field. Nowadays you are taking on massive debt on a bet.
(2) There won’t be an oversupply in your field, that makes you one of thousands trying for one of hundreds of jobs available. Professional sports is ALWAYS like this, with the added bonus that you can have a career-ending injury at any time! And there are always competitors who are trying to take you out rather than having to guard / stop / compete with you.
(3) There won’t be an economy / industry-changing breakthrough that makes your field irrelevant / unprofitable / unrewarding while you are in school. A well-meaning friend told Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” that he would be successful in “plastics”. How many people worldwide can make a living with plastics? How many “environmental engineers” do we really need? If Donald Trump cuts back the EPA by 15% (measured in budgetary spending), how many government drones will become unnecessary? Same question after abolishing DOEd? DOEn? DHHS?
(4) There won’t be a societal awakening that abolishes the perception that your field is worthwhile. I think that “studies” degrees, “interdisciplinary” degrees and “social work” degrees are really going to be vulnerable to this for a few decades. And if the Crunch happens (loss of faith in the currency, leading to systemic failures) then these kinds of degrees may well lose all utility.
College isn’t for everyone. Anyone who wants to should be able to try, however; and nationwide statistics (broken down by institution) should be available in high schools to tell youngsters that getting a degree in Early Asian Pottery and Fabrics from Mill Creek Community College in Mill Creek, Arizona is a one-way ticket to the unemployment line.
the problem is, lots of young people start college with one expectation, get disillusioned and then switch to an easier major.
The number of STEM freshmen falls, the number of COMMS seniors rises. Of course, incurring five figures in debt to discover this is a huge part of the problem.
Financialization is a disaster. Only the wise avoid it.
A supreme court decision (Griggs v. Duke Power) was instrumental in making the “college degree” the gatekeeper for justifying employment decisions.
Previous to this decision, aptitude tests and other means to consider suitability were used to select good candidates for employment.
The Griggs v. Duke Power decision outlawed the use of aptitude and other tests as there was “disparate impact” on (certain) minorities.
Hence, the college degree has become the standard by which job applicants are judged…