Quote Of The Day

Talking about this utter and complete bullshit, J.D. Rucker saith:

“Whenever I see a story that invokes Ivy League scientists finding a solution to anything, I brace myself for the worst idea ever. Once again, they didn’t disappoint.”

Keep reminding yourself of the observation: “Your suggestion is so stupid, so devoid of commonsense and logic that it could only have been made by an academic or intellectual.”

Most of the time, you will not be misled.

Pushing Back

From Britishland comes this excellent news:

The University of Buckingham will become the first UK university to launch a ‘drug-free’ policy, where students will have to sign a contract promising not to take drugs on campus.
The move has been introduced in the wake of findings by The Sunday Times that reveal a 42% rise in the number of those being disciplined for drug use compared to 2015, among 116 universities.
Writing in the same paper, Sir Anthony Seldon, the University’s vice-chancellor, said that if students persisted in taking drugs, they would be expelled.

I await the same news from an American university, but I won’t hold my breath.

As an aside:  back when I was looking at studying at an overseas university, U of Buckingham caught my eye because of their excellent academic standards and reliance on a truly “classical” education. Now I wish I had gone there… and let’s be honest: could one expect anything less from a university which Margaret Thatcher helped found?

That “Human” Touch

Apparently some colleges can’t even get it right when it comes to acceptance letters:

Applicants to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health were the latest anxiety-ridden group of young people to fall victim to an admissions glitch, when, in February 2017, the school accidentally sent offers of admission to 277 students then said the notices were sent in error about an hour later. But those students are just the latest in a string of others who have suffered the same fate. Schools ranging from Carnegie Mellon to Tulane have sent admissions notices in error. In 2009, the University of California-San Diego accidentally told 28,000 students they were admitted to the school, when in fact they were rejected.

Of course, the response from these blundering fools is of the “My bad!” shrugs, along with the inexcusable excuses:

The errors are likely the result of the most mundane of office problems: IT challenges.
“For some places you’re taking relatively young professionals, you’re putting them in roles where they don’t have an enormous amount of experience with business process,” Farrell said. “The other piece is that sometimes the systems on campus, the enterprise management systems, can be very complex and not terribly user-friendly.”

I’m sorry, but we as a society are way past the “Oh, the computer got it wrong” bullshit. I’m not a litigious kind of person, but this looks like a classic case of a huge class-action “pain and suffering” payout. Without some kind of financial penalty, the universities (all of whom include courses on “Computer Science” in their curricula) have absolutely no incentive to fix this situation. So the “complex, unfriendly enterprise management systems” won’t get fixed, nor will the “inexperienced young professionals” get fired; and prospective (fee-paying) students will continue to get shafted. (My suggestion:  every time a person gets a false acceptance letter, that student should be entitled to a full-boat, all-expenses-paid four-year scholarship at the offending college. That, I think, would get someone’s attention.)

All in all, however, this sorry experience will also provide school-leavers with an excellent foretaste of corporate indifference and inefficiency, an experience that should stand them in good stead in their future careers. When their lives can be fucked up by a “mail-merge” mistake, young people will see at firsthand just how unimportant they are to Global MegaCorp Inc. If that doesn’t melt the “snowflake” mentality, nothing will.

The College Conundrum

Via Instapundit comes this NY Post article, which opens thus:

When parents and teachers urge kids to go to college, they visualize the success stories: kids who graduate on time with marketable degrees. If every student fit this profile, college would be an outstanding personal investment. Unfortunately, most students don’t fit this profile, and their returns are mediocre or worse. Indeed, plenty would be better off skipping college in favor of full-time employment.

…and then goes on to list the five worst things about college in the U.S.

I will never forget my homeschooled kids’ first impression of their college classmates after the first week of classes.

Daughter:  “OMG! They are so stupid! They have no idea what they’re doing or why they’re there!” Pause. “Most of them are gonna fail, big time.”
Son&Heir:  “When you said that most people shouldn’t go to college at all but go out and get jobs straight out of high school, I thought you were just being an elitist. But you’re right. At best, most of them should be in trade schools or something.”

As for the five most horrible things about college (as enumerated in the article), I can’t argue with any of them — although I would add “spring break” to the list. The worst, in my opinion, is the degree of conformity — not just to the societal “everyone has to go to college” meme, but mostly to the conformity of thought being imposed on the hapless students by their professors and by their peers.

I have to confess that I was not exposed to this pressure when I was on campus just about a decade ago. With but a few exceptions, my professors were always receptive to my sometimes-contrary opinions when I expressed them in class (perhaps because I was, in many cases, older than they were). And I never associated with other students to any degree, so I can’t talk about peer pressure. (I did, however, manage to open a few eyes among the chilluns with my forthright opinions.)

And my original thesis has been, if anything, reinforced by events, as witnessed by the appalling unemployment rates among recent graduates. Most people shouldn’t go to college. Even with the dumbing-down of curricula, emphasis on “soft” Humanities courses and the loosening of academic standards overall, most kids are still failing whenever the courses are just slightly more difficult than high-school level, or require even a small combination of intellect and hard work. The plethora of “-Studies” courses, taught on marginal subject matter and delivered by tutors only marginally more intelligent / capable than their students, have simply amplified the degree to which colleges are failing in their mission.

And the kids, along with society, are paying the price. The Post article has it exactly right in its conclusion:

What’s the alternative [to the current situation]? Simple: Dry up the funding. Since we don’t get much per tax dollar, we should cut taxpayer support. This would have obvious drawbacks if college were a fine-tuned system for turning unskilled youths into skilled adults. In the real world, however, cutting spending doesn’t just save taxpayer money; it also puts a brake on credential inflation. Waiter, cashier and cook are already common jobs for college graduates. As long as we keep churning out more college graduates, this problem is only going to get worse. Instead, we need to admit that far too many kids go to college. Cutting government subsidies is the quickest way to make them reconsider.

Amen to that.

Just A Minute, Sparky

From our mole in Scandinavia comes this little gem:

Seriously? You mean just laughing at this bullshit would send me to jail?

…and:

And who is this priceless little feministical?

So all that study in the hard sciences, and young Ashleigh is analyzing the  implications of gender differential in flatulence?

Send me to jail now, Judge Sotomayor. Because I’m never going to quit making fun of these spoiled First-World fuckups and their loony little “philosophy”, ever.