What’s Real and What Wishes It Were Real

When my kids were approaching college age, we had a talk that neither appreciated.  By then, I’d spent almost 20 years on the path to my BA; 18 of those years attempting to get a EE BS and the last two settling for a Technical Writing BA with as many as possible EE classes crammed in as cross-discipline courses. I was 43 when I finally earned my BA and had been in southern California “long enough” (almost 10 years). I had to satisfy myself with a EETAS, but after a 20 year career as an “engineer” I hoped that would be good enough and it turned out to be so. My talk with the kids was about what I would be willing to help fund and what I would not. I mostly took the Jewish parent approach, “I’ll pay for any college classes you take as long as they are directed toward an engineering, medical, mathematics, or science degree. Anything thing else is a hobby and you’re on your own.” If I were a real Jewish parent I would have substituted a law degree for science, but I’m not.

Today, there is a lot of pissing and moaning from the Xgen and Millennial crowd about their oppressive student debt and I only have moderate sympathy for that, since far too many of those “degrees” were of the “studying my own navel” variety. Shriek away if it makes you feel better, but I do not believe there is a valid argument for liberal arts, arts, business, and most of what passes for vocational training costing anything near engineering, medical, mathematics, or science degrees. In fact, I think paying instructors equivalent salaries outside of those three very general fields anything near the same money just encourages foolishness. To anyone who has studied many of the “soft” fields, it’s pretty obvious that many of the most expert of “experts” in economics, literature, history, education, art, journalism, cultural anthropology, paleontology, etc are either college dropouts who are driven to learn faster than colleges are prepared to teach or hobbyists with engineering, medical, mathematics, or science degrees dabbling in the softer and easier fields. So, the downside to obtaining an engineering, medical, mathematics, or science degree is only the difficulty and effort required, which is what “higher education” is supposed to be all about.

With that in mind, a rational society trying to encourage the creation (in our case) of an educated citizenry or (in the case of actual 1st world nations) trying to maintain that educated citizenry that democracy is so dependent upon would concentrate on ensuring that anyone making the effort to obtain an education in engineering, medical, mathematics, or science would leave school with minimal debt; once that standard is obtained, we could have a conversation about the value of less necessary skills and specialties.

Academia, being the mindlessly corrupt and lazy territory of human inactivity that it is, would relentlessly try to dumb down the curriculum of engineering, medical, mathematics, and science programs to allow lazier and less competent “students” to filter into those fields and, therefore, water-down the value to the level of the fluffier academic fields. Which will be just one more thing that will have to be carefully monitored, administered, regulated, and critically considered; as it always should be. Everything heads toward entropy, including all human activities, and the harder, more complicated, more critical the human activity the more quickly it degenerates into uselessness.