Modern American universities are as corrupt as the medieval church: Peter Thiel

[onesteptwostep]

A very interesting and insightful take.

 

[Hadoblado]

Mmm... I wish they'd say something more concrete or specific?

Universities have issues, but I don't feel like these guys really touched on any of them. What's insightful about this beyond woke university bad?

If you pick a good degree, and perform well, you will make a large return on your investment. They want to remove people from universities, while ignoring the fact that for people making informed decisions, they would be acting against those people's best interest. While I agree that the value of a degree can be exaggerated, this really depends on the job. People tend not to just luck themselves into understanding science well, for instance.

 

[onesteptwostep]

I think the point he makes with college degrees becoming something like an indulgence (in the Catholic sense) and that to fix this problem that you need a correction from without the institution, like in the case of the reformation on the Catholic church, is something interesting to think about.

The point about college debt compared to the soviet union is another cold reality to think about. The current system isn't sustainable and it's going to fail sooner or later.

 

[dr froyd]

he's very right about the uniqueness of these institutions in terms of their commercial robustness; usually in a capitalist market, you get no advantage from having been around long as a business. If a competitor shows up with a better/cheaper product, they will outcompete you until you no longer exist. With universities, age is a part of the brand and gives you an advantage. Which means that institutions like harvard etc can just keep jacking up the prices without improving the product.

there's been an insane inflation in tuition fees the last few decades, and i think a part of the problem is that young people have started to think of education as an experience, like a 5-year long summer camp or something. They probably know in the back of their minds that the actual knowledge they acquire is not worth 2 pennies in the real world, but they do it because the subject interests them a bit and they know the entire experience will be kinda cool, with lots of drinking etc.

another problem is that people think higher education is necessary to get a job, which I think is false even in fields that are exclusively cerebral, like computer programming etc. Unless it was at a school with a strong reputation, employers know that in most schools even a monkey can get a degree in programming

 

[Daddy]

The gatekeeping sucks. That you have to spend x amount of time and money to get a degree is bullshit. You should be able to test out of things, if you already have the knowledge and/or expertise. But this can also be a problem with trades.

Student loans also aren't forgiveable and so the loaners hold almost no risk, so they give the loans out to almost anyone for any reason, whether the student is likely to find a job or not. That's predatory lending.

A lot of jobs "require" the degree or a ridiculous amount of experience to replace the degree, so most people think they have to spend a lot of money on college or go into debt in order to get that degree and a "decent" job. We've put so much stock into degrees that it's now being used against us in the workplace before you even enter the workforce...and yet, the degrees often don't translate to workplace experience that a lot of jobs require for entry-level...You're better off just trying to start businesses because you can get limited liability on those and if it goes under you can not only declare bankruptcy, but it won't effect your credit either, because the business is separate...The school system is just predatory.

The solutions are pretty simple however.
1. Allow people to test out of credits and classes for a reasonable fee.
2. Make student loans forgiveable, like any loan, by holding the schools accountable for helping the student find decent pay to repay the loan. That's what they are there for and they aren't holding up their end of the deal. If the student can't find relevant work or it pays way too little (there will have to be some metric used to determine standadrs and such), then the loans are forgiven and the school eats the cost. Also, since degrees require debt or a lot of money, it should probably be socialized to an extent or we are just preying on the younger generations trying to find meaningful work and get a decent pay...
3. And tailor degree programs for less theory and more experience of what companies want, so it's easier for students to be relevant to the workplace right out of school. The heavy theory can wait for graduate school and further studies.

 

[Hadoblado]

Are you guys able to get credit over there?

I was able to qualify for a masters in teaching from experience in the workforce. It would have had caveats for what it was applicable to, but it was one year instead of 4+. People with that degree were paid nearly twice my wage, and with a few exceptions, were largely useless.

 

[Old Things]

The problem is that K-12 education in the US has gone down the drink.

So that needs to be fixed before any discussion on college would make any sense.

Yes, people are stupider today than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

 

[scorpiomover]

The problem is that K-12 education in the US has gone down the drink.

That's what happens when you stop using logic.

So that needs to be fixed before any discussion on college would make any sense.

You have to convince people that they want to be logical, before they would be willing to change the system.

 

[Daddy]

Are you guys able to get credit over there?

You know, I guess you can - https://www.businessinsider.com/tes...e-in-1-year-with-degree-by-examination-2012-7

I honestly had no idea. That's awesome, holy crap.

 

[Hadoblado]

The problem is that K-12 education in the US has gone down the drink.

So that needs to be fixed before any discussion on college would make any sense.

Yes, people are stupider today than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

Agree your education system is broken, but are you sure people are stupider?

The general trend in IQ in the USA is remarkably positive (though this trend is possibly in decline now?), with scores across the board being at least one entire standard deviation higher than 100 years ago (and as high as two).

If someone scored today as low as the average 100 years ago, they would likely be diagnosed with a cognitive disability. Likewise, if the average person time-traveled back to 1922, it would be a real-life idiocracy scenario.

 

[Old Things]

The problem is that K-12 education in the US has gone down the drink.

So that needs to be fixed before any discussion on college would make any sense.

Yes, people are stupider today than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

Agree your education system is broken, but are you sure people are stupider?

The general trend in IQ in the USA is remarkably positive (though this trend is possibly in decline now?), with scores across the board being at least one entire standard deviation higher than 100 years ago (and as high as two).

If someone scored today as low as the average 100 years ago, they would likely be diagnosed with a cognitive disability. Likewise, if the average person time-traveled back to 1922, it would be a real-life idiocracy scenario.

As I said in @Animekitty's thread, if someone is neurodivergent, then an IQ test is not going to be a good metric for intelligence. As such, it puts the whole validity of IQ tests into question as far as measuring intelligence is concerned. People certainly had more common sense back then. I recently saw a Tweet of someone being so vehemently opposed to Judeo-Christian values that when a Bible had been torn to shreds and pages left on the street, someone decided the best thing to do at that moment was to show their disagreement with the Bible by eating the pages of the Bible that came from the ground.

 

[Old Things]

The problem is that K-12 education in the US has gone down the drink.

That's what happens when you stop using logic.

So that needs to be fixed before any discussion on college would make any sense.

You have to convince people that they want to be logical, before they would be willing to change the system.

I don't disagree. Well, kids these days certainly are not learning about logic in schools, that's for sure.

 

[Black Rose]

As I said in @Animekitty's thread, if someone is neurodivergent, then an IQ test is not going to be a good metric for intelligence. As such, it puts the whole validity of IQ tests into question as far as measuring intelligence is concerned.

what is neurodivergent intelligence? if we can make the distinction we can define it such that as a construct it is what it says it is. you gave two examples order and common sense. can common sense be made into a construct that is measurable? is it just a higher form of order? would low common sense be associated with low-ordered thought? Is common sense just a cultural exposure construct is fault tolerant a cultural construct? does low common sense make one stupid? Would it need to be disassociated from general intelligence g problem-solving?

 

[Black Rose]

would not common sense be a verbal thing on the iq test, general knowledge?

 

[Black Rose]

People certainly had more common sense back then.

At Woodstock they had sex like pigs in the mud in the 60's Hippies. university, Vietnam.

Ted Kaczynski bombed offices because we should get naked and live in the woods and abandon civilization. anarcho-primitivism. 90s

 

[Black Rose]

lots of underground movements in the 60's 70's based at universities.

 

[Old Things]

Common sense is basically seeing what makes sense considering being pragmatic. Pragmatism isn't anything you can test for since it assumes that subjective things can be viewed objectively. In other words, eating pages from a Bible is not common sense since it is not pragmatic to do that. But based on some people's interpretation of reality, they think it is a good thing to do. It's based on them being overly emotional and not detached. There is no test for emotional vs. pragmatic behavior, as far as I am aware.

I'd also say that there is a difference in common vs. uncommon sense in how the person views things at base value. Does a person tend to go with Occam's Razor vs. a more complicated answer? Things like that. There's no test for subjective interpretations of reality. Otherwise, you can consider it a conservative vs. liberal train of thought. People who are more conservative in their understanding of the world tend not to get sucked into rabbit holes and conspiracy theories.

 

[scorpiomover]

Agree your education system is broken, but are you sure people are stupider?

I agree with the question.

The general trend in IQ in the USA is remarkably positive (though this trend is possibly in decline now?), with scores across the board being at least one entire standard deviation higher than 100 years ago (and as high as two).

If someone scored today as low as the average 100 years ago, they would likely be diagnosed with a cognitive disability. Likewise, if the average person time-traveled back to 1922, it would be a real-life idiocracy scenario.

I gather that's the general understanding of the Flynn Effect. But that is what we've been told. In science, we go by evidence.

But how would anyone survive without their mobile phones?

 

[Kuu]

Thiel is just bringing up in the mainstream what Yarvin already noted ages ago, nothing groundbreaking. The university is the birthplace of the Cathedral, and it really must be destroyed from the outside.

- Basic education should be free, and there should be extremely freeform curricula allowed for all educational institutions: make a marketplace of alternatives for basic education, instead of one size makes everyone dumb model.

- Eliminate the predatory loan system (duh).

- The majority of education should be developed via self-directed, free learning online and with new interactive tech. The whole gatekeeping bullshit and adult babysitting needs to die.

- The biggest issue of the present system is that it is detached from real world work. We should bring back guilds and apprenticeships for supervised education and work experience, which replaces the increasingly worthless university "experience"/titles and provides a gradual integration into the workforce.

Most businesses already have to spend a shit ton of money training recent graduates anyway, might as well pool that cash with the rest of the industry to create your own industry-specific training system and standards of quality.

This would also obliterate all useless meme titles.

Of course none of this will happen because that would imply having a meritocratic society. The elephant in the room is the monetary enslavement system that is behind the building of the Cathedral and its priests.

 

[sushi]

replace it with bank and businesses and he might have a point.

universities are just ivory tower institutions that try to monopolize teaching and knowledge to the selected few elities.