Just woke up. Good replies to my post yesterday, but I've got to move house today. I'll try to crack the toughest nuts before I start.
...College degrees being accessible to people of all income brackets does not in any way necessitate them becoming meaningless.
Depends what you really mean here. You're deliberately hedging by using the word "accessibility." But it's not a matter of accessibility itself, but rather the increasingly universal
possession of college degrees by people that are not particularly studious in temperament. That necessitates a steep drop in value.
Accessibility was always there even in the 1960s, but the interest rates were higher, or parents had to save up money from your childhood, or you had work hard yourself and save up a few years after high-school before applying to college, so people had to take a searing self-assessment after high-school and decide if they were
really the bookish sort or not. Other good alternatives existed, because it was quite respectable to decide you weren't scholastically-minded. You could still get entry-level positions and prove your merit with elbow-grease. Life then didn't require less intelligence. Office work wasn't simpler back then; pressing a button on a copy machine whose internal workings you don't understand isn't a sign that office workers need to be smarter today. It's all the same. But now we need degrees, because if you don't, some nameless drone in HR throws out your resume, thinking "Everyone else has a degree. This must be a drug-user!"
When easy government-backed loans flooded the market, everyone could get a degree with little prior planning and sacrifice. So they did. There was a influx of money into education. Schools rushed to get their cut by enlarging their student bodies irrespective of true academic potential, by creating potemkin degree programs that didn't really signify a rigorous education in critical thinking, and by raising tuition and fees. As the saying goes, "Don't leave money on the table!" Anyone with an easy student loan eventually found an edifice of learning somewhere willing to rubberstamp their application and sheepskin their four years of partying.
Now, everyone is assumed to have a college degree for even an entry-level position. No one can prove themselves by elbow grease and raw merit. Degrees are not merit, but they have suffocated merit.
And really, my point was precisely that you are not better than other people because you have a college degree. College degrees are common, and common things are not valued. There are blue-collar guys doing trades that are valued for their practical skills, and they make more money with much less debt than many college-educated office-workers. That's not unfair, either.
The fact that college degrees no longer reflect as much as they should on a person's merit is an independant problem (as is the lack of jobs caused by the financial crisis).
These trends were building a long time. I hope by referencing the financial crisis you aren't struggling to imply that tuition inflation just began in 2008, or that HR offices weren't awash in dime-a-dozen resumes from college graduates before the crash. Careless granting of loans causes bubbles. Easy housing loans caused a housing bubble. Easy student loans caused an education bubble.
This all happened due to government-backed loans flooding the respective markets.
Just a note, your examples could be construed as quite sexist.
Or, to avoid mincing words: the examples are clearly sexist. Sexism of the "Nice" Guy variety.
Careful. That word can lose its value just like everything else, if it becomes too common.
This is a dumb tangent. It would be better if we could concentrate on the over-arcing concepts rather than doing this dance. You can't deny human nature. Women want the most successful 20% of men, not the least successful 20%. Are you really going to argue otherwise? I'm here to describe human nature, not pass value judgments on it. Women selecting the best men is one of the social pressures that empowers evolution.
What I'm saying is that this is just one of the many things that will seamlessly reposition itself as you try to make everyone equal. People will always find a way to score how they're better than other people, whether through more money or correcter beliefs and politics. If you can charge someone else with sexism, for example, you can feel better than him. That's just a competition to be more correct. Competition changes form. Humanity continues down its contentious path.
This is the end result of the '60s war on poverty. Our poor live better than other nation's poor, but they're still poor and suffer the condescension of their "betters" and are firmly on the low rung of the social hierarchy.
Now, my dad was an orphan living with his grandmother during the 1950s and 1960s. He lived on gubbamint cheese. Everyone was getting basic requirements before we launched a quixotic war on poverty, and everyone should get basic requirements. Government has a sensible role to play at the margins. But when you try to wipe out inequality itself, when you try to eliminate the very things that had shadowed humanity through all its history, it will eventually go pear-shaped in the most unpredictable ways.
That's why you take your time and nip around the edges. The central problem facing humanity is that human nature is not pretty. Let's contain that, rather than quixotically trying to eradicate it.
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Topic: Occupying Wallstreet (Read 297054 times)