|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In questions no one is really asking…
Will A.I. Make College Obsolete? – New Yorker
Much like the New Yorker, colleges made themselves obsolete. What used to be a cultural consensus is now just the virtue signaling of a leftist fringe. And, much like cable subscriptions, more and more people are cutting the cord.
College made itself obsolete well before AI by becoming an echo chamber where there was no meaningful knowledge transmitted, only ideological indoctrination, where the western canon and any larger tradition had been tossed aside in favor of the malicious destruction of the past, and where there was nothing to learn, only slogans to repeat “late stage capitalism”, “systemic racism”, “heteropatriarchal capitalism” that made everything into a target for mass destruction.
Professions which had used a college diploma as a marker of knowledge and competence have learned hard over the last decade that it’s worse than worthless, that the average Amazon warehouse worker has more competence and reliability than some woke grad in a ‘studies’ discipline whose only two drives are demanding more workable wokeness and taking ‘mental health days’.
At this point college would hardly exist if we didn’t keep subsidizing it. And the economic sustainability of it is becoming unviable. Men are already opting out. Colleges are not so much graduating doctors, lawyers and scientists as HR bureaucrats for dying industries.
AI is just the death blow.
Colleges became dumb when they started offering courses of study that didn’t lead to employment.
A recent example: the latest Ag newsletter/magazine from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo announced that the Ag department is changing the major of Crop Science to Plant Science. The Plant Science major will now incorporate horticulture classes into its curriculum. This recent magazine showed pictures of Plant Science students winning an award for their floral arrangements – which is total nonsense with respect to college level academics. The magazine showed student clubs available to Plant Science majors: Ax throwing, mule packing, lumberjack logging – all of absolutely no academic value. And the Dairy Science dept. is another abomination. The Ag dept. dropped the major, but students still have an opportunity to study dairy science – get this – the recent Ag magazine from the university announced that a few Ag students will have summer internships to study dairy (Cal’s largest ag product) this summer. How will these students study dairy w/o a dairy major? BY GOING TO THAILAND AND MEXICO THIS SUMMER!!!! When I was in school, third worlders used to come to America to study Ag – now this university sends our students to cesspool economies to “learn” from them!
Excellent points. When we look at the structure of higher education, we can discern three primary phases, regardless of particular areas of concentration, for example, science or the liberal arts. A BA/BS is supposed to mold students into polymaths and even autodidacts. A MA/MS allows students to focus in on a particularly area, the studies culminating in a thesis, which demonstrates that person is capable of conducting scholarly research. With a PhD, a student pushes discovery forward, as seen in the dissertation. Overall, higher education is designed to create a productive citizen. Now, arguably a systemic problem these days is that these levels of academic achievement are now in name only. For example, have PhDs actually pushed discovery forward?
Only courses that teach needed skills such as engineering, optometry, dentistry, etc., should be subsidized.
Historians will one day recognize the college scam of the last 30 years as one of the greatest transfers of wealth in American history with an ironic twist.
The story begins with New Left activists going to colleges and universities and never leaving, preferring instead to trudge their “long march through the institutions” in familar territory. They imbibed communist and socialist doctrines and preached them in turn but that doesn’t mean they didn’t wish to do well in the belly of the beast.
And so, they settled on a scheme to dumb-down and indoctrinate America’s “best and brightest” for fun and profit. Charging ever-inflating tuitions and fees for worse than worthless degrees that students and families paid for through ruinous loans and debt that many could never repay. Meanwhile, all the pious, Leftist pied-pipers leading the kids to the dark cave of utter ignorance and depravity rewarded themselves with lifetime, tenured sinecures in insulated, well renumerated bubbles free from the forces of competition and intellectual challenge.
Their crowning acheivement was Obama, himself a product of the academia-non-profit- government complex sealed the evil deal by making all loans government issue with the IRS as their collections department.
We are very close to the scales finally falling from young people’s eyes for them to see the scope and breadth of academia’s betrayal and deceit which will be the death knell of “higher education”
Excellent, thought provoking comments. Thanks. The antecedents arguably also trace back to earlier philosophers such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and many others. Consequently, the Enlightenment idea of dispassionate discovery of truth has been replaced with a new underlying idea that truth is what one claims it to be.
But the “studies” classes develop our leadership (slave masters) class, so there’s that.
College didn’t just make itself obsolete through ideology. It also helped create a generation afraid to speak honestly, take risks, or even be awkward in public. Once colleges stopped teaching real history, philosophy, literature, and debate, and turned into echo chambers full of slogans and conformity, something deeper started breaking down. Young people learned fast that some opinions get rewarded and others get you in trouble. That’s not education — that’s performance.
Then social media poured gasoline on it. The normal fear of embarrassment turned into fear of permanent public humiliation. No wonder young people hesitate to speak up, ask somebody out, dance, or risk looking foolish for five minutes. Life has become one big performance, and performance creates anxiety.
The irony is that in throwing off every structure and limit in the name of liberation, we haven’t created freer people. We’ve created untethered people. And that dang phone, which promised connection, increasingly feels like the very thing pulling people away from becoming whole persons at all.
Leftism made colleges obsolete
Today, one goes to an Ivy League Uni to get a credential. To become educated, one becomes an autodidact by reading and thinking, and taking free on-line courses from Hillsdale College.
I think AI is the ‘next step’ in de-evolution of the brain. Universities primed the pump – do as you are told (no critical thinking). Now AI replaces the professor in a Pavlovian cycle. Human can’t think, asks AI, gets information, transfers it to someone else, gets paid, er, I mean, get the treat, human looks back to AI … and the cycle continues. The goose is cooked.
Good dog…
My degrees (BS,MS) are in electrical engineering so I’m biased. The only utility I see in going to college is if one is seeking a STEM degree. Other than that, the utility of a college degree is a roll of the dice and for many people, a regrettable waste of time and money.
What the US sorely needs and should emphasize are trades skills and apprenticeship programs. The few skilled tradesmen I know love their profession and are very well paid and are never unemployed.
Yes. Basically, we will soon return to a time when the only people seeking college degrees are those entering the hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, engineering and medical professions. No other degree fields will be remotely relevant or necessary.
Once upon a time, people who did not need access to advanced laboratory equipment did not need access to a university. We can return to people in many fields being self-taught via access to online information in libraries.
You could see their demise had already begun when the once respected Harvard began virtue signaling when they enrolled the mediocre David Hogg.
Student loans ought to be abolished. Contrary to economic principles for one thing. Give the students education vouchers if you want to subsidize them.
Last chance for Republicans is loan forgiveness before the upcoming election wipeout. As far back as Ancient Rome excessive debt was the main political problem, and partial loan forgiveness the best chance for a politician to become popular.
Excessive debt is a major human fallibility but that’s another big topic.