Curmudgeonly Musings

I feel dispirited today. Perhaps it's just all the opprobrium that higher educators have been firing at me following the publication of America's Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor's Degree in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But I think it's more than that. I feel like I'm living in the wrong era:

• I am at my core, an elitist. Today, the world, especially the intelligensia, deifies egalitarianism.
• I believe education is grossly overrated in its potential and certainly as implemented. The world thinks education is the magic pill.
• I believe that men are a good, sometimes superior gender. The world thinks men are inferior.

To use a popular feminist term for men who don't agree with them, I'm a pterodactyl.

With that as context, here are the thoughts rolling around in my brain in my current curmudgeonly state:

I live near a school and today, the schoolyard was home to a celebration of the start of constructing a new replacement school building. My reaction: I hate celebrations. They accomplish nothing; they're often self-congratulatory narcissism for things that anyone can accomplish: Anyone can have a birthday, get married, be christened, or have a bris (Jewish circumcision ceremony.) With today's grade inflation, nearly anyone can have a college degree, for godssake. And any educrat on the government dole can extort tax dollars from the public to build a building that will only obfuscate the crappy education that probably goes on inside. What good is it to put lipstick on a pig? You can gift-wrap a turd, but it's still a turd. I've seen great education go on in shacks and horrendous education go on in palaces. What counts are good teachers (live or online) and good kids. Period.

Then I started to read a book called Love Today by Maxim Biller. It reminded me of what a narcissistic waste of time romantic love usually is. You spend all sorts of time trying to get it or save it, often suffering enormously in the process. Indeed, many people, contrary to the aphorism, end up wondering if it's better not to have loved. And even when love is a net positive to a person, look at the opportunity costs. If the world redirected the time spent in the pursuit and maintenance of romantic love to activities more likely to make the world better, I think we'd all be better off.

Career Advice for Men

That's the title of my latest column on Kiplinger.com.

Education is Not the Magic Pill

Linda Chavez, in her Commentary article, "Let Us by All Means, Have an Honest Conversation About Race, wrote:

" Despite what many critics claim (about how to address low achievement among African-Americans,) is the problem traceable to a lack of funding for predominantly black urban schools as opposed to the predominantly white schools of the suburbs? A recent General Accountability Office study found no consistent pattern of underfunded city schools. Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis, for example, spend more to educate their mostly black and Latino student populations than do the surrounding suburbs with their largely white student populations. Perhaps the most glaring example of the disconnection between funding levels and achievement is the school system of Washington, D.C., which spends more than $15,000 annually per pupil—almost twice the national average—but produces among the lowest achievement scores of any school system in the country."

A Wonderful Model for Finding a Career and Landing a Job

See The Five O'Clock Way. That link is to an entire newsletter. Their excellent and proven model for finding a career and landing the job appears after page 8.

Our Frightening Graduation Statistics

Following publication of my article America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I received a fat packet from a Harry Stille, who, after retiring from the South Carolina legislature, started the Higher Education Policy Center.

That packet contained a variety of statistics on the four-year colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I was particularly saddened to see that, except for UC Berkeley, which attracts an unusually high-performing student body, the graduation rates, especially at the public colleges, is frighteningly low.

Of course, the term “four-year” college is a misnomer. Most students at such institutions don’t graduate in four years … if at all. Here are the six-year graduation rates for these colleges and their students’ unbelievably low 25%ile SAT score.

San Francisco State: 880 SAT, 40 percent graduate in six years.
Cal State East Bay: 770 SAT, 43 percent graduate in six years.
San Jose State: 860 SAT, 40 percent graduate in six years
Sacramento State: 840 SAT, 40 percent graduate in six years.

Even sadder, the true numbers are probably even worse. Those numbers were obtained by calculating the average of the numbers submitted to the U.S. News & World Report, Barron’s, Peterson’s, and Newsweek college guides. Many colleges do not submit data on all their students. For example, last I checked (a few years ago, admittedly) UC-Berkeley reports the results only for “regularly admitted freshmen.” That excluded the 6 percent who were admitted as “special admits.” I also know that other institutions exclude groups of low-performing students.

Four-year colleges must stop their obsession with making more money no matter what. They admit, every year, hundreds of thousands of students with poor high school records, and most of them suffer the terror of being clueless in their classes, accumulating a mountain of debt, little learning, and the enormous opportunity cost of what they could have been learning and accomplishing in an apprenticeship program, community college, at the elbow of an entrepreneur, or yes, even in the media-reviled military.

Never Let 'Em Catch You Networking

Have you ever met someone who's just a little too eager to befriend you?

And before long, you know why: The person is looking for a job or otherwise wants something from you? I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself then wanting to resist. My unconscious thought is something like, “This person doesn’t like me, s/he’s just trying to network me. And if s/he were that good, she wouldn’t need to do that.”

So, whether you’re trying to land a job or otherwise profit through networking, you might want to remember the ancient Chinese aphorism, “If you ask before a proper foundation is laid, your request will not be granted.”

Or if you feel you don’t have the time to lay much of a foundation, actor Spencer Tracy’s advice pertains. He said, “Never let ‘em catch you acting.” I say, “Never let ‘em catch you networking.”

Censored data on race and gender

The oddly titled site, La Griffe Du Lion, presents the sort of data on race and gender that is usually omitted from discussions.

I believe an even-handed examination of these data is crucial if, as Barack Obama urges, we are to have an honest, full-dimension discussion of race.

Such a clear-eyed examination is especially important if we hope to develop approaches to race and gender problems that will be more helpful than the past 50 years of massive, well-intentioned, but ultimately minimally cost-beneficial efforts.

We owe ourselves, the taxpayers, as well as women and minorities the willingness to examine all the data, even when it makes us feel uncomfortable.