College sure isn't what I remember

[Great-Kazoo]

Is therre anything that is not different today than it was in our youth?

Spelling ?

[Aloha_Shooter]

Re: relying on PCs and Mathcad, if I'm paying [not cheap amounts of money] for a college degree, I would expect to learn higher-level thought processes than how to manually calculate something a computer can do in 0.1 seconds. In the real world, nobody gives a **** if you can manually compute a Fourier transform.

Yes and no. I don't expect someone to calculate a Fourier transform manually but I want the to know the material well enough to recognize when the numbers coming out of the programs don't make sense. I see too many junior engineers these days that just trust outputs directly because it came from the computer. The process of actually doing the work yourself conveys learning and helps you understand when to trust your tools and understand their limitations.

[Irving]

Spelling ?

Werd!

[Fmedges]

Agreed. I've only been out less than a decade but while I do believe students and people in general are being brought up as emotionally weak, the shear amount of knowledge being taken in is actually more than before, it's just made easier via technology. They also focus on being a little more well rounded than in the past, and while I think that's all a waste of time, the fact is you have to cram knowledge in there that you'll never even use.

The interesting thing I see as someone who hires people is that since nearly everyone gets a degree these days, it's not the academics that set people apart, it's the social skills and how much you are involved with outside of school that separates the cream of the crop. I see a lot of great students get denied jobs because they lack good social skills. I don't think that was as much of a concern a few decades ago.

i was lucky enough to be able to switch careers to software development and you wouldn't believe how much emphasis is put on "being able to talk to other people". It's quite weird to be honest but people in my field struggle with this.

[Fmedges]

i took a cross country ski lesson yesterday at snow mountain ranch. the instructors were the cross country coaches from the University of Wyoming. In splitting the group up, the coach asked for those of us that "identified" as beginners to stand here, and those of us that "identified" as an intermediate to stand there.

That's college-speak for you. There's no shame involved in calling yourself a beginning cross country skier. or, that you have skied and wanted some more advanced tips. either you're a beginner, or you're not. There's no "identification" of this fact. what's next, if you're a beginner, but "identify" as a world class skier, they'll tailor a lesson to you?

There's actually no shame in anything anymore and I believe that stems a lot of the other societal problems these days.

[Fmedges]

Yes and no. I don't expect someone to calculate a Fourier transform manually but I want the to know the material well enough to recognize when the numbers coming out of the programs don't make sense. I see too many junior engineers these days that just trust outputs directly because it came from the computer. The process of actually doing the work yourself conveys learning and helps you understand when to trust your tools and understand their limitations.

The problem that I had in the engineering program hat I used to attend was that it was so disconnected from industry. Learning hand calculations are good to a point, but we never learned how to do it any other way. It's hard to teach to people going into industry when most professors are career students. I have other college gripes but that's a big one to me.

[Jeffrey Lebowski]

If we didn't coddle them into such weak and sensitive snowflakes, how else would we have millennials to bemoan in the workforce?

[CS1983]

Always fun when the generational factory makes fun of its own bad products. Whatever happened to pride in workmanship, Baby-Boomer generation? Aren't you happy with the result of your laissez-faire approach to life? What's wrong with moving away from the Classical Liberal Arts to liberalism and "art"? From the Trivium to triviality? From the parallel circuits of the Quadrivium to the convergence of ways L, G, B, T into the "born this way" loop (cue repetitive, thumping bass track)? You wanted to normalize deviance and then complain when deviance is normal. Reality dictates that it cannot be had both ways.

From Fr. Leonard Feeney's Magazine The Point, July 1952:

THOUGHTS TO ADD TO A HARVARD COMMENCEMENT

On June 19, Harvard College held its annual commencement exercises. On that day, the graduating class of 1952, having been presented with diplomas in testimony of four years of faithful discipleship, was spewed out into the world, to put into practice the lessons it had learned at Harvard.

A large part of this class of ’52, like all Harvard classes, will end up as alcoholics, drug-addicts, and suicides; but another large part, to some extent overlapping the first, will end up in the most influential positions in the country: as the officials and policy-makers in our government, as the writers of our books, and the editors of our newspapers, as the teachers of our children. All of these Harvard graduates, whoever and wherever they may be, can be relied upon to have this in common: they will all think, feel and act according to the prescribed Harvard pattern, which they will attempt to impose upon the rest of the world.

Harvard makes a great commotion about how it encourages freedom of opinions; and while it is true that Harvard allows its students the kind of freedom in choosing their intellectual diet that a farmer allows his hogs, still, no matter what variety of swill a student may feed his mind on during his four years, he comes out unmistakably branded with the same mark as every other Harvard student.

The reason for this is that Harvard is fundamentally mediocre. The only thing that distinguishes it from the rest of mediocrity is the influence it commands by reason of its wealth, power, and prestige. It is mediocrity organized and made effective. But it is mediocrity nonetheless. That is Harvard’s milieu, its climate, and it cannot get away from it. For the doctrines that Harvard has committed itself to teach are the doctrines that mediocrity has made and that it thrives on.

Whatever might lift a man out of the class of the mediocre Harvard teaches its students to avoid, by making it appear ridiculous or unimportant. It teaches them to be suspicious of greatness, fearful of courage, scornful of holiness. It teaches its students to revel in their second-rateness; it teaches them to be smug, complacent, and self-satisfied. It pretends to foster individuality, but the individuality of Harvard is the same in every individual. If a boy were ever to realize himself as a person, unique and to endure forever, he might revolt against this mediocrity, and so Harvard teaches him his insignificance. It tells him he is in existence by sheerest chance, helplessly determined by his environment, a descendant of apes, one of billions who have lived over billions of years on an unimportant planet of an unimportant universe, a structure of atoms accidentally gotten together, likely to be destroyed at any moment by the explosion of other atoms, and then to be gone forever.

Harvard is just as cheap and vulgar as any daily tabloid. It has a more refined vocabulary, but its interests are exactly the same. What the newspaper presents as a sensational bit of scandal, Harvard presents as a case history in psychology. As for Harvard’s pretenses to culture, they are as fraudulent as Hollywood’s. Harvard will teach its students to laugh at American millionaires who import castles from Italy in which to have their cocktail parties, or who hang Renaissance paintings on their walls to give their homes an air of refinement. But Harvard itself will import anything it has read about in history, in an effort to give the place a tone, and is blissfully unaware, as only an American bourgeois can be, of the grotesque contrasts that result. For instance, Soldier’s Field, where the Harvard band forms itself into big H’s while blaring “Wintergreen for President” and where the Harvard football team gets trounced by Yale, is modeled on the Roman Colosseum, where Christians once were martyred for their Faith.

The courses at Harvard, which the students refer to familiarly as ec, gov, phil, lit, etc., present either a hopelessly superficial survey of some subject, or else encourage the student to blind, intense specialization. “Sorry, that’s not my field,” is a frequently heard Harvard expression, offered as excuse for anything from not knowing the chemical structure of coal to not knowing that God has become man. The Harvard faculty includes such men as Pitirim Sorokin, a mad Russian who periodically, and in scarcely understandable English, assails the rest of the faculty and the world in general for their failure to adopt his sociological theories. Ernest Hooton is another Harvard teacher who receives great kudos. He is a somewhat simian anthropologist who, to amuse his friends, named his son Newton. Hooton’s task is to convince his students that all men originally descended from creatures like himself.

Probably the most representative of all Harvard teachers is the late F. O. Matthiessen, who was professor of History and Literature. He exemplified perfectly the kind of man Harvard likes to boast of and to hold up to its students for their admiration and imitation: he was literate, liberal, agnostic, and successful. But one night he took a room in a Boston hotel, wrote a note telling of his pique at the state of the world, and then stepped from his twelfth floor window.

Harvard had considered Matthiessen’s brains one of its most valuable assets, and it was upset to find them splashed vulgarly across a Boston pavement. To cover up for this disgrace, Harvard organized an association that would give perpetual honor to Matthiessen’s name and his ideas. The ultimate comment, however, the summing-up of both Matthiessen and Harvard, was provided by John Ciardi, an Italian apostate in the Harvard English department. Asked for a statement by the Boston newspapers the morning after Matthiessen’s suicide leap, Ciardi, striking a literary pose, remarked, “At times like these, one finds oneself on the edge of things.”

[Rucker61]

Colleges are a for profit institution that mandate the student be indoctrinated "learn" about 95% frivolous information for every 5% relevant to their career, including by requiring a great multitude of useless and unrelated "required" courses, and institutionalizing a bunch of frivolous electives. E.g. "Star wars, the force and you", all at a cost of thousands per student per semester. The college system is entirely focused around one thing, and it isn't education. It's money, money, money, money, money, money, and money, under the guise of education. Certain people in the system are paid tremendously, or is it outrageously well. It wouldn't be necessary for tuition to have disproportionately climbed...

Many people are unable to graduate college not because of any difficulty, but rather because of the simplicity and the moronic requirements that are unrelated to their lifegoals. If I was hiring someone, I wouldn't give two shits if they completed all their general education credits. I'd MUCH prefer that they actually spend their whole 2 or 4 years, you know, becoming educated in ways that benefit the workforce. This is why for instance graduating attorneys actually have very little legal experience with a juris doctorate and simply subsidize the rest of their education on the backs of innocent clients - who suffer their mistakes absent any recourse. Shouldn't it be far more important for doctors to spend their time beneficially studying medicine, lawyers beneficially studying law, and nobody forced to choose between useless toilet flushing of cash such as "tattoos, body piercing and adornment", "kanye vs everybody", "the american vacation", etc. http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/21/th...rses-for-2015/

Sadly, the ones that control those institutions have considerable motivation to force people (or especially parents) to pay for more, and more, and more useless bullshit. If someone has an engineering degree, I want to know they are a good engineer. I'd pull my hair out if I knew they spent 1/3 of their time at college studying things like weed cultivation and kanye west. PS: Our gov't recently made it illegal to verify that someone went to college or ever graduated. So whats the point in getting a damn degree anymore?

This, coming from a guy who graduated from Harvard, with a degree in smart-assery. Prove me wrong, I dare you.

My undergrad is in math, with a minor in history. Combining that with a full time job and ROTC requirements there wasn't a whole lotta time for frivolous classes. The only one I remember was Music Appreciation, and that's because we needed one fine arts class to graduate.

[Great-Kazoo]

i was lucky enough to be able to switch careers to software development and you wouldn't believe how much emphasis is put on "being able to talk to other people". It's quite weird to be honest but people in my field struggle with this.

texting, twitter & FC are a serious problem when you have the latest generation raised on social media. Can they SM 1/2 dozen people in 2 minutes, sure. can they have a coherent verbal conversation with co-workers and or the entire dept. Some can, some cannot break the bubble and understand there's more to life than cell ph or tablet.