Is college worth it?

One of those subjects that interests me a great deal, is whether a college degree is "necessary" or not. Lately, as the price of (even a mediocre) education skyrockets, the question is a getting a new and respectful hearing. Megan McArdle's in-depth Newsweek article on the topic, has prompted extensive discussion.

I am one who has often had my jobs supplanted by college grads. Frequently, these kids couldn't even decently proofread their own ad copy. I have trained college grad after college grad, many as dumb as dirt. It seems they are getting dumber, too... I think this is probably because the actual value of a degree is less than it used to be. I have trained numerous college grads who barely made it through (sometimes taking much longer than four years to do so), but by God, they had that almighty sacred CREDENTIAL that meant they should make more than I do; never mind that they couldn't even answer a customer's simple questions. (One college grad argued with me that there was no such thing as vitamin B-5. Really.) The dimwitted arrogance of "I have a degree and you don't; so I know everything and you know nothing," is worthy of a whole separate post. I collect such stories. Another big problem with college degrees is that the holder of said degree seems to believe that IQ points were magically bestowed when the degree was conferred... which is more proof of stupidity.

I am also one who has lied on occasion (especially in the pre-digital era) and claimed a college degree I don't have. It never seemed to make any real difference in anything an employer expected me to do. Such unnecessary college degrees (say, among video store clerks) are simply about gate-keeping; making sure that People Like Us are the only people in the break-room. The fact that I was easily able to pass as People Like Them, would suggest that it's the (apparent) fact of the degree, nothing tangible that is learned in the actual process of obtaining one.

From McArdle's piece:

Unsurprisingly those 18-year-olds often don’t look quite so hard at the education they’re getting. In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend so much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, [writer/economist Bryan] Caplan says, is that they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible.

True. Learning itself often seems to be beside the point.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been reading some 'complicated' (but not really), obscure or arcane book (i.e. Jean Paul Sartre) and have been asked by the resident college grad in my office (accompanied by furrowed brow): "Are you reading that for a class?" The idea that one actually reads something "difficult" for oneself, for pleasure, is utterly foreign to them. Sometimes, when I reply "no"--the puzzlement is evident, and they continue, dumbfounded: "Then why are you reading it?" I hardly know what to say. (Tellingly, it is usually the 'uneducated' redneck in the office who giggles, at this point.) They usually punctuate these questions with, "All of that is behind me now! Whew!" or some other amazing comment, expressing relief that they will never have to READ A REAL BOOK again. (Wow, wasn't that shit HARD?) Some have proudly bragged to me they got through their entire college years without actually finishing a single one. I have never doubted it.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to read on Brad DeLong's blog (check the comments), that questioning the nature of COLLEGE UBER ALLES is now regarded as a conservative viewpoint. As Tim Gunn would say, this worries me. Back in the 60s/70s, liberals and radicals made this argument first, offering the common-sense observation that working and living in the real world--as well as a variety of interesting 'learning experiences' (this era marked the birth of that now-common expression)--also conferred 'an education.' I wasn't aware that questioning authority is now up to the right wing. (And how depressing is that?) Are liberals-on-the-coasts THAT out of touch with the situation on-the-ground? Do they interact with college grads from schools that never expected them to do math without calculators, or spell without spellcheck? I don't think they have.

More proof of the disconnect between elite liberals and the great working-class unwashed... and that makes me uneasy.

~*~

Further, there is the increasing importance of teacher evaluations, and whether they are a good or bad thing for education. What does it mean that students now determine whether a teacher stays employed? Is this an education worth paying big bucks for, one that has been "voted on"?

In the New York Times, former Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer writes:

Student evaluations are a poor indicator of professor performance. The good news is that college students often reward instructors who teach well. The bad news is that students often conflate good instruction with pleasant ambience and low expectations. As a result they also reward instructors who grade easily, require little work, are glib and chatty, wear nice clothes, and are physically attractive. It’s generally impossible to separate all these factors in an evaluation. Plus, students will penalize demanding professors or professors who have given them a bad grade, regardless of the quality of instruction that a professor provides. In the end, deans and tenure committees are using bad data to evaluate professor performance, while professors feel pressure to grade easier and reduce workloads to receive higher evaluations.

In the mid-90s, I had a short-term temp-job processing teacher evaluations for a technical college. I fed the evaluations with the penciled-in answer-dots into a "reader" (which often spit them right back out at me... just like when you stick your dollar in the vending machine and it spits it back for having a crease in it) ... and then made pie charts on a Model-T-Ford-like-Mac, breaking down the teacher-ratings from the students: Excellent, Good, Fair, Below Average, Sucks. Then I deciphered the written gibberish from the students ("I like Mrs X, she is hot!", "Mrs X needs to stop talking about her cat all the time, some of us HATE CATS!" etc etc) and typed it up separately. Then I stapled the pie charts to the comments. (Yes, it was Model-T level stuff, indeed, but I remember thinking how high-tech the pie charts were!)

And do I need to tell you, how many times the teachers came sneaking in, asking WHO I was working on? ("Have you reached the computer/engineering/CAD department yet?") If I answered that I was working on their department, their eyes would go boinnnngggg (like a Tex Avery cartoon) and they would frenetically rifle through the papers (that I had carefully separated into piles, of course, causing me hours of extra work) looking for their own students' names and replies. My skinny, ADHD-supervisor would attempt to circumvent this extracurricular activity, keeping the door open from her adjacent office (where she liked to listen to Aerosmith) and bust them when they did this... scurrying in and shooing them away like kindergartners, reminding them of rules, rules, rules: YOU ARE BREAKING THEM. They didn't care. They did it virtually every day I had the job. (Some departments, I could see, were far more nervous than others; the nursing department was impervious and never showed up a single time.) The rifling of my careful piles of papers continued, and since my supervisor could SEE that this was not MY fault, I often got paid overtime.

I finally got the message, loud and clear, that their jobs were at stake. One teacher started groaning as he looked at his pie chart, his mortgage payment obviously hanging in the balance. One of them asked me if there was any way to fudge the replies, which I pretended I hadn't heard, just as skinny-supervisor bounded through the door and banished him from the room.

I remember a short, stolen conversation with one such crestfallen teacher, as I whispered (Aerosmith momentarily drowning us out) that his pie chart looked okay to me. He whispered back, shaking his head, that OKAY/FAIR was not good enough, you had to have blah-de-blah percent of GOODS... FAIR does not cut it. (I remember being surprised, since I am the product of a lifetime of FAIR public school teachers, and I still know every single one of my state capitals.)

What does this mean, that the opinions of students now dictate whether college instructors get to keep their jobs? (Even in a field like AUTOMOBILE ENGINE MECHANICS?!?)

Might this lead to getting softer and softer on the students?

And take note, this was at the dawn of the online era. "Rate My Professors" and other such sites that rate instructors publicly (and anonymously) had not even been invented yet.

~*~

In today's economy, we now have the sordid spectacle of employers demanding that bartenders and appliance-salesman have college degrees. As a result, we have a class of people who used to self-select out of college and go to work in factories, choosing to trudge through the torture of college, simply to avoid becoming unemployable. Since there are no longer any factory jobs in the USA, such a person is now at loose ends, and preyed upon by all the fake colleges promising a college credential during TV commercials. (Since these particular working-class folks haven't already been hanging out with the college-set, as I have, they are not quite aware that all college degrees are not equal, and some are barely regarded as real degrees at all.)

College is a racket, straight up. The costs are rising, and increasingly staggering. People graduate and can't find work. Worse, due to the magical degree in their hands, they think a job is promised to them. Thus, when they do get work, they expect it to be a certain KIND of work--the exalted occupations promised on the glowing TV commercials. When expected to mop floors with the rest of us, they are unexpectedly indignant: I didn't spend four years in college for this! they fume. As a matter of fact, you did. You did it to get hired, and now you are hired... now, mop.

I know, you didn't read Twelfth Night and go into six-figure debt to push a mop, and do you now see how ridiculous that was?

Will Bill O'Reilly be held accountable for hate speech against Dr Tiller?

As you have probably heard by now, late-term abortion provider Dr George Tiller was shot and murdered yesterday while attending church in Wichita, Kansas.

Church. Shot him in church.

As I commented on the Feministe thread, not even the mafia does hits in church.

If you would like to send condolences, the Feminist Majority will forward them to Dr Tiller's family.

~*~

There is much fascinating and intense commentary in the wake of Dr Tiller's murder, signaling deep moral confusion about the subject of abortion, at least here in the USA. I recommend Jill's Feministe thread about the kinds of late-term abortions Dr Tiller performed; these were usually medical emergencies. Also recommended is Heart's post on the Quiverfull connection. (I knew there had to be one.)

Meanwhile, we have William Saletan at Slate, who asks the loaded (pardon expression) question: Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?

To me, Tiller was brave. His work makes me want to puke. But so does combat, the kind where guts are spilled and people choke on their own blood. I like to think I love my country and would fight for it. But I doubt I have the stomach to pull the trigger, much less put my life on the line.

Several years ago, I went to a conference of abortionists. Some of the late-term providers were there. A row of tables displayed forceps for sale. They started small and got bigger and bigger. Walking along the row, you could ask yourself: Would I use these forceps? How about those? Where would I stop?

The people who do late-term abortions are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing. There's you, and then there are the people who work in the clinics. And then there are the people who use the forceps. And then there are the people who use the forceps nobody else will use. At the end of the line, there's George Tiller.

Now he's gone. Who will pick up his forceps?

Tiller's murder is different from all previous murders of abortion providers. If you kill an ordinary abortionist, somebody else will step in. But if you kill the guy at the end of the line, some of his patients won't be able to find an alternative. You will have directly prevented abortions.

That seems to be what Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, had in mind.

Megan McArdle writes in The Atlantic:

Imagine a future in which the moral consensus has changed, and our grandchildren regard abortion the way we regard slavery. Who will the hero of history be: Tiller, or his murderer? At the very least, they'll be conflicted, the way we are about John Brown.

I was waiting for someone to mention John Brown. They always do, on both the right and the left. His moral certainty haunts us.

McArdle continues:

We accept that when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders--had Tiller whipped out a gun at an elementary school, we would now be applauding his murderer's actions. In this case, the law was powerless because the law supported late-term abortions. Moreover, that law had been ruled outside the normal political process by the Supreme Court. If you think that someone is committing hundreds of gruesome murders a year, and that the law cannot touch him, what is the moral action? To shrug? Is that what you think of ordinary Germans who ignored Nazi crimes? Is it really much of an excuse to say that, well, most of your neighbors didn't seem to mind, so you concluded it must be all right? We are not morally required to obey an unjust law. In fact, when the death of innocents is involved, we are required to defy it.

As I say, I think their moral intuition is incorrect. The fact that conception and birth are the easiest bright lines to draw does not make either of them the correct one. Tiller's killer is a murderer, and whether or not he deserves the lengthy jail sentence he will get, society needs him in jail for its own protection.

Still, I am shocked to see so many liberals today saying that the correct response is, essentially, doubling down. Make the law more friendly to abortion! Show the fundies who's boss! You know what fixes terrorism? Bitch slap those bastards until they understand that we'll never compromise!

Well, it sure worked in Iraq. I think Afghanistan's going pretty well, too, right?

Using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes does not seem to be very effective in getting them to eschew violence. In fact, it seems to be a very good way of getting more violence. Possibly because those fringes have often turned to violence precisely because they feel that the political process has been closed off to them.

Indeed, I think it is notable that this happened after Obama's election, at a time the rightwing feels beleaguered. According to most statistics I have seen, the actual number of abortions is decreasing. Thus, this terrorist act was not about a situation that is progressively worsening... in pro-life terms, the situation is IMPROVING.

Therefore, we can conclude the real catalyst was a feeling of hopelessness on the part of the anti-abortion movement; the sentiment that they have "lost" the battle for good.

Strategically, this motivation is very different from that of John Brown, who hoped to ignite a full-scale rebellion (and eventually, there was one, called the Civil War). By contast, Scott Roeder appears to have acted because there is NO HOPE of a full-scale rebellion, so he might as well do whatever desperate acts he can manage.

Even if he has to do it in a church.

And finally, Salon correctly points out that Fox News demagogue Bill O'Reilly has been waging a non-stop verbal war on Dr Tiller for years now. After calling everyone from Michael Moore to the DailyKos bloggers "terrorist apologists" and worse--I think it's now Bill's turn to wear the title of TERRORIST APOLOGIST, since his incendiary and inflammatory screeds have everything to do with WHY Dr Tiller was in the right-wing cross-hairs.

There were only three doctors in the entire country (and now only two) who did late-term abortions. Why do we only know the name of Dr Tiller? Largely because Bill O'Reilly was obsessed with him, in particular:

Tiller's name first appeared on "The Factor" on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O'Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as "Tiller the Baby Killer."

Tiller, O'Reilly likes to say, "destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000." He's guilty of "Nazi stuff," said O'Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and Al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. "This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union," said O'Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

O'Reilly has also frequently linked Tiller to his longtime obsession, child molestation and rape. Because a young teenager who received an abortion from Tiller could, by definition, have been a victim of statutory rape, O'Reilly frequently suggested that the clinic was covering up for child rapists (rather than teenage boyfriends) by refusing to release records on the abortions performed.

When Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, an O'Reilly favorite who faced harsh criticism for seeking Tiller's records, was facing electoral defeat by challenger Paul Morrison, O'Reilly said, "Now we don't endorse candidates here, but obviously, that would be a colossal mistake. Society must afford some protection for viable babies and children who are raped." (Morrison ultimately unseated Kline.)

This is where O'Reilly's campaign against George Tiller becomes dangerous. While he never advocated anything violent or illegal, the Fox bully repeatedly portrayed the doctor as a murderer on the loose, allowed to do whatever he wanted by corrupt and decadent authorities. "Also, it looks like Dr. Tiller, who some call Tiller the Baby Killer, is spending a large amount of money in order to get Mr. Morrison elected. That opens up all kinds of questions," said O'Reilly on Nov. 6, 2006, in one of many suggestions that Tiller was improperly influencing the election.

Tiller's excuses for performing late-term abortions, O'Reilly suggested, were frou-frou, New Age, false ailments: The woman might have a headache or anxiety, or have been dumped by her boyfriend. She might be "depressed," scoffed O'Reilly, which he dismissed as "feeling a bit blue and carr[ying] a certified check." There was, he proposed on Jan. 5, 2007, a kind of elite conspiracy of silence on Tiller. "Yes, OK, but we know about the press. But it becomes a much more intense problem when you have a judge, confronted with evidence of criminal wrongdoing, who throws it out on some technicality because he wants to be liked at the country club. Then it's intense."

Tiller, said O'Reilly on Jan. 6 of this year, was a major supporter of then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. "I think it's unfairly characterized as just a grip and grin relationship. He was a pretty big supporter of hers." She had cashed her campaign check from Tiller, "doesn't seem to be real upset about this guy operating a death mill, which is exactly what it is in her state, does she?" he asked on July 14 of last year. "Maybe she'll -- maybe she'll pardon him," he scoffed two months ago.

This is where it gets most troubling. O'Reilly's language describing Tiller, and accusing the state and its elites of complicity in his actions, could become extremely vivid. On June 12, 2007, he said, "Yes, I think we all know what this is. And if the state of Kansas doesn't stop this man, then anybody who prevents that from happening has blood on their hands as the governor does right now, Governor Sebelius."

Three days later, he added, "No question Dr. Tiller has blood on his hands. But now so does Governor Sebelius. She is not fit to serve. Nor is any Kansas politician who supports Tiller's business of destruction. I wouldn't want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day. I just -- you know ... Kansas is a great state, but this is a disgrace upon everyone who lives in Kansas. Is it not?"

Speaking of DISGRACE, I think we know who the DISGRACE is.

Of course, he will not apologize for inflaming the rabble. But we cannot allow him to forget that he is accountable, too.

It is not Governor Sebelius, but Bill O'Reilly who has blood on his hands.