It's a good thing science doesn't require listening, critical thinking, communication, or connecting ideas.
"Sympathy for victims"????
Are you sure Challenger isn't run by the villains in a 1930s science fiction novel? "We have no time for sympathy for our victims! Science must march on!"
Happier thought: it is a school dedicated to the memory of Prof. George Edward Challenger. Compulsory palaeontology lessons, followed by geology, rifle shooting, survival skills, rock climbing, unarmed combat and public speaking.
GEC wasn't much for empathy for others or listening skills, but he was all over the critical thinking, though. (Also keen on sympathy for victims, especially when victims = victims of hideous ape-men.)
Bring Back Vivisection! Bring back experimentation on condemned criminals awaiting the gallows! STEM demands it!
How much time do they spend on "sympathy for victims" anyway? Is that just code for "social studies" or something?
5: In Israel, there was a siren for a minute or so on Holocaust Memorial Day, but other than that I don't remember spending any time in school on "sympathy for victims".
Maybe they mean real victims, like people who sat through a Star Wars movie where more than one significant character was female and the obvious failure of the whole Jedi scam was made explicit?
I read the curriculum section for each grade, and it is weirdly specific as to what students will learn or be able to do.
It's like you've never even heard of a KPI.
It drives me crazy how often the magic word STEM is used as an excuse to starve other subjects of time/resources. I feel like those of us in science should probably push back, but I'm not sure how.
Maybe a hashtag like #NotYourExcuse. Except that I hate hashtags and hate twitter and think it should die.
The "sympathy for victims" answer is just weird.
I think the people who shove "Art" in there to make "STEAM" are the best hope of killing it by making it meaningless.
Even better, add "reading" for STREAM.
Wait, I assumed 12 was a joke? Is that a real thing??
All courses should focus on building STEAMER skills:
Science
Technology
Engineering
Art
Mathematics
Emphathy
Recreation
Also, 12 is really a real thing, because nothing that isn't a real thing has a wikipedia entry.
Metaphysics
Idealism
Dialectics
Science
Technology
Reading
Engineering
Art
Mathematics
I think somebody realized that people who didn't really get algebra needed convincing that STEM wasn't an attempt to turn them into a food source.
I thought the A in STEAM was for Adding up, to accommodate people who were just crap at Mathematics.
I swear this exact discussion has been on Unfogged before.
One of my kid's schools is really into the STEAM concept. It's still a good school. In my old age I've become convinced that many organizations/people do just need trendy dumb stupid buzzwords to do okay things*, and I'm trying to make peace with it.
*E.g., "Jesus was a disrupter," said yesterday by one of the most actually effective-for-good people I know. While I had to hold back a rage spasm at the end of the day who cares about my aesthetic response.
I'm all for beating money changers with whips.
WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU?
Science is great and cross-cultural, but you really learn the most interesting things from the social sciences.
20.last: Once in an airport I passed by a rack of those business advice/motivation/whatever books, one of which was titled Jesus: CEO.
I swear I wrote 24 before clicking the link in 23.
I don't like to shit in airports because it's hard to find a sanitary and secure way to deal with luggage.
26: preach brother. I'm debating whether want to pee even; I'd lose my sweet seat spot in the boarding area too. flew from PHX to LAX and now going to tokyo (fine, NRT) on my way home to narnia. (I imagine it's NIA) I hate this leg. no, I hate this whole flight. but at least I'm well enough to go home, mostly. my slightly tweaked for the nth time meds seem good. I burned myself on purpose five days ago but I feel pretty righteous otherwise.
in further total failures of understanding and empathy you should read "the Drum Major Instinct", the sermon from which ram trucks drew for their ill-advised ad. the extent to which it cuts against advertising of any kind is amazing. there's a good chunk of excerpts at LGM.
We need to some how get across to people that it's not STEM vs. non-STEM, but serious majors vs. bullshit majors. (Where "bullshit" = "things that sound to parents like they're practical, but don't have any rigor and are a waste of time.")
I FEEL SO JUDGED RIGHT NOW.
STEM is good, but what good is a stem without roots? #StudyHistory
STEM is good, but it's not enough without a flower. #StudyArt
but what good is a stem without roots?
Right.
27.1: Safe travels. Glad you are up for the travel.
28: One thing that really struck me when reading Paying for the Party was how appalling the proliferation of bullshit majors has become.
28/33: what are some examples of bullshit majors?
I ask because in my college experience I often heard people talk in these terms about liberal arts like history/English/philosophy, which (1) I stridently disagree with and (2) I really don't think is what you mean. But I'm unclear which majors you consider bullshit.
That things like Sports Management exist as majors is a travesty. It's just evil of universities to have allowed them to proliferate in the student loan era. I get it that colleges never eliminating departments thay have any student demand is how universities work, but at some point they are just going to have to do the right thing.
If you watch bowl games, they're the majors that the offensive line has.
The truth is though that there are (parts of) the humanities and social sciences that are also generally taught in a very non-rigorous way to undergrads and are pretty useless. Every undergrad knows this. This probably makes it harder to argue for eliminating the department of communications or whatever. Maybe as the humanitites and soft social sciences have shrunk since I was in college so this is less true now than it was.
Film studies? Women's studies? Music theory? I believe all of these can be legitimate fields of academic study. Of course anything can be a joke if students don't take it seriously, or if the school doesn't insist that students take it seriously.
34: Things like the Sports Management major that Halford mentions. Other examples: Event Planning, and bogus "Forensic Science" majors designed to attract people who watch CSI but which don't cover enough real science to get you hired anywhere. I've even heard a rumor that somewhere there's a major in Leadership, although I hope it's not true.
There were signs up for a "Forensic Accounting" major. I always wondered if that was real or not. It sounded fun.
Typical lists of "easy" / non-rigorous college majors that I've seen look like this:
Humanities: foreign language, literature, writing
Education: teaching courses, English
Sociology: social structure, behavior, etc
Communication: communication channels, publications
History
I think that's absolute bullshit.
"Forensic Event Planning". It would presumably be popular with aspiring assassins.
Forensic accounting is definitely a real thing. Why it would be a major instead of just "accounting" is somewhat mysterious (indeed, I'm not sure that accounting, while very much a real profession and a real skill, should be an undergrad major at all, but that's a way closer question).
Something is up with the html coding? I'm positive I entered this right. But the link for comment 42 was here:
https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/majors-easiest-and-hardest
I also wonder what Event Planners major in? It seems to be a good job for somebody who might otherwise have no options but a life a crime or marketing. Anyway, the women I see doing it always seem successful enough.
I think it's fair to describe every single undergrad major offered by the University of Kansas business school as "bullshit." Yes this includes a "leadership" major, which is how I got to their web page.
Obviously it's theoretically possible to conceive of some actually rigorous version of most of those majors. But as actually-existing things taught to undergrads? Come on.
Given that I trained in the social sciences and failed to get a good job that way but was easily able to find work in the sciences-sciences, it must mean that social sciences are way harder.
47: Huh. I mean, they are obviously job-skill-oriented and thus arguably should be taught at a technical school of some sort rather than at a university (but of course, that's exactly what university-affiliated "business schools" are, so), but beyond that I'm not sure why you would consider any of those "bullshit" or necessarily non-rigorous.
47.2: Right. I suppose that many of these majors could theoretically be non-bogus in a different world from the one we live in. If you haven't read Paying for the Party, I recommend it. They make it clear that many of these newer majors were created specifically to allow hard partiers to graduate without requiring much in the way of work.
Because the graduates will get a smattering of not-very-well understood "practical" skills without much of a broader theoretical apparatus, and will thus be, at most, in a position where their undergrad education has been helpful in providing things that they could have learned in 6months-1 year of on-the-job training, ultimately being not that useful. And those business classes are probably more rigorous than what you'd learn in e.g. a communications major. But, sure, let's have the discussion where someone points out that finance is a real academic discipline (it is, but there is no way that it is being taught well at an undergrad level at the U of K business school).
50: I'm not reading a whole book.
And I guess I'd probably make an exception for accounting, which is indeed a professional skill that needs professional training. Still, query as to why it should be an undergrad major, though.
I'm reasonably certain there are at least a few schools where the undergraduate communications major is rigorous as anything.
53: Having people learn it in graduate school would be expensive.
OT: The U.S. Supreme Court is refusing to hear the PA redistricting case. Hooray.
Yes. But the same is true for any professional degree, so it's unclear why accounting should be different. In any case, it's a much closer call than majoring in marketing or leadership.
I think they should be moving some graduate education back to undergraduate. But maybe they can't do that because they're spending too much time teaching remedial algebra.
My brother got an MBA from Wharton, and he said that it was all pretty much bullshit, except for the accounting class.
I can't tell you how glad I am that I wasn't too lazy to vote in the 2015 state elections.
I'm inviting you all to contribute to my new endowed Mariko Aoki Chair of Leadership Management Studies.
And that Jane Orie didn't stop to think "maybe asking the intern, who is almost certainly a Democrat, to commit a crime to help elect a Republican to the PA Supreme Court is a bad idea."
61: Are in-kind contributions acceptable?
I feel like in social sciences, the less rigorous and more pandering the thinking the better funded the field. If I started the Peter Thiel institute for white male disruptive innovator studies or the Donald Trump institute for white male Christian persecution studies I could probably raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the time it takes me to write this comment.
Persecution Science has a nice ring to it.
I bet John Yoo wishes the name had occurred to him.
We have a very embarrassing major called "Social Entrepreneurship" so that you can start your own TOMS shoes. I hate it so much, and it violates every thoughtful thing I've ever read about how tricky it is to do economic aid to developing countries. Broad dumping strokes! Send them spare shoes and wreck their shoe economy! Etc.
Isn't the point of those majors that they indicate to prospective employers a dedication to the subject?
It may be that you could cover enough accounting in 3 years (even including all the breadth courses) so that most grads could pass the CPA exam. But then you'd still be stuck on the point that no one wants to hire a 21 year old accountant. Like a 21 year old lawyer: 25 year olds are, on average, too inexperienced in the ways the world works to be entrusted with anyone's fate, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and 25 is at least better than 20.
The Dow appears at this moment to have lost 23% of its total gains since Election Day.
69: The safest move under the circumstances is to move all your money into bitcoin asap.
Further to 68.1 -- Used to be the Montana Bar exam had an essay section where you could pick among several different subject area questions. When I took it, the Tax question was ridiculously easy. To this day, I am convinced that this was designed by the tax bar (who wrote the question) to be a reward to small minority of exam takers who would elect to answer the tax question.
(Honestly, 1/6 of one's bar exam essay score depended on writing the words 'stepped up basis.')
Now everything is nationalized. Purely coincidentally, pass rates have plummeted.
57 and similar: ok I guess, but the Management and Leadership majors mostly feel the same way about the history and literature majors (in reverse). They think they're taking useless classes with no practical value in which all the answers are just artful bullshitting or regurgitation of whatever weird theories your professor wants to hear.
I think this perception is mostly false in both directions. At my undergraduate university I took a lot of classes at the business school and a lot of classes from the college of arts and sciences (which is the college from which I actually graduated), and generally they seemed roughly comparable in terms of overall rigor. There were easy classes in both programs and hard classes in both programs. (And people mostly knew which classes were which.) Maybe things have changed in intervening decades, or maybe it's different at other schools. I haven't read Paying for the Party.
Maybe obvious but 72 meant to refer back to 51, not 57.
67: The way I think of it, somebody was going to sell loose cigarettes outside that junior high. Why not me?
I actually think it's quite fair to describe many humanities classes as teaching, in essence, artful bullshitting. The thing is that learning to *artfully* bullshit is a more permanently useful skill, and harder to learn through on-the-job training, that most of what most undergrad business majors learn in their undergrad classes.
75: I think the difference is that the bullshitting required for business major classes is less artful.
Yes, that's probably the right way to think about it.
Spoilers for Paying for the Party:
Bullshit majors are great if you're going to rely on your rich family's connections to get you a job after graduation. You *do* have a rich family don't you?
I guess the "A" in a well-rounded STEAMER curriculum should be changed from "Art" to "Artful Bullshitting".
I've definitely heard STREAM around here, which I don't get why you don't just regress to the Reading/Riting/Rithmatic joke at that point.
Islands in the stream,
That is what we are.
On a plastic screen,
Where the current's strong.
I am deeply suspicious of the 34 argument. I constantly see people complaining that the education system should do more "useful", "vocational" stuff "like the Germans". Then the same people flip it and reverse it, and complain there are too many "bogus" qualifications, like the ones they were just advocating. It's pure class horseshit.
Of course there should be more oik courses! After all, you oiks don't really need a proper education like mine and that's one problem solved! PS this is without prejudice to my right to abuse oiks at any expedient moment.
Yeah, fuck off.
The problem is that oiks who can't afford to send their kids to college are voting for Trump because he says he can make oiking great again.
84-85 - are you making a point about something someone has said here, or about (presumably) Tories in Britain?
Anyway, around here, everybody who wants to do things like the Germans wants to repeat 1933, not 2003. It must be very frustrating for Germans.
The stock market dropped 5% and John Mahoney died. Not a good day for the American middle class.
Apparently John Mahoney wasn't really American or middle class.
87: it's literally the same talking point, down to the #BANTZ course titles.
Is the stock market crashing because people are now realizing that Trump is the King Midas of Shit or because they think that enough people might be realizing the Trump is the King Midas of Shit that the Democrats might win Congress in 2018?
Asking for a friend.
I have no idea what argument 84 thinks I was making in 34. But I think you may have been misunderstanding me. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, which is also quite possible.
Maybe it's my argument? I honestly have no idea what is being said. #BANTZ appears to mean "A spirited discussion between two people who share language and oppose ideals for the purpose of entertainment" making it even more confusing.
Has anybody suggested we all read "Paying for the Party"?
91: I think it may be different in who is paying for all of this. I'm worried not so much about who should get a proper education and who shouldn't. I'm worried about who gets $100,000 in loans (non-dischargeable) and a job that pays $1/hour more than if they'd never gone to college.
I'm supposed to be writing something else.
92: I thought it was crashing because the economy has finally improved enough that workers have some bargaining power and companies are having to use some of their record profits to raise wages rather than just reward shareholders.
Oh. Maybe it's time for me to see if I can sell out.
Hopefully by the end of this week, it won't be a lie that my resume says "Pokemon Go: Level 38".
95: I thought of suggesting that, since I think it would be of interest to a lot of unfoggeteers, for a number of reasons (not just the bullshit major angle). But then I realized that if I suggested it, I would probably have to write something intelligent about it.
Also, we've got a lot of reading about socialist AIs in space to get through.
That was maybe treating 95 more seriously than intended.
I bet the socialist space AIs throw some great parties.
They probably majored in some bullshit, though.
I've found the close attention to texts and wide exposure to human folly required by my undergrad lit degree super prep for law school and practice. Tethering one's bullshit to texts = legal argumentation. And persuasive writing requires a good understanding of human folly as the essential motor of storytelling. If they don't finish the statement of facts believing in you as the most trustworthy advocate in the case AND convinced your client should win you're doing it wrong (or the client rewrote it ... Ha! Bastards.)
Serious classes require either a serious amount of reading and writing, or math, or a foreign language. If there's none of those it's likely bullshit. Yes most business majors (but not accounting) are standard examples. Or most of these: https://spea.indiana.edu/undergraduate/index.html
(Humanities aren't traditionally bullshit on account of the reading and writing, though there's a lot of pressure now for them to move in a bullshit direction to compete with the bullshit majors for students.)
103: I'm supposed to be writing about the space orgies, but stupid real life keeps getting in the way.
They've been going downhill ever since the kids figured out that osteopathy teaches them how to work magic via butt-fingers.
Where's a post-scarcity society when you need one?
Is qualification inflation a thing in the US?
In the UK, the last Labour government set the fairly arbitrary target of 50% of the population going to university. It sounds quite enlightened and topless (and university is fun, and also worthwhile for reasons other than increased erudition or employability) but it contributed to raising the baseline level of education required for an entry-level office job to "undergraduate degree" rather than "compulsory secondary education". I'm pretty sure that this drives demand for less rigorous courses, which is filled by former polytechnics (i.e. vocational schools, which were probably more useful when they were allowed to be straightforward about their role). That means that for many young people, they're foregoing three years of earnings, plus taking on debt, for not a great deal in return beyond the credential itself.
Certainly that's an issue for the US as a whole, but at say at a state flagship I don't think that's a major factor. And people are definitely moving towards bullshit degrees at state flagships.
(I was leery of writing that comment as it relies pretty entirely on speculation and I'm sure that I have a lot of unexamined classism lurking in my subconscious. So if it's bollocks, please could better-informed commentators point that out.)
I just feel that it was sort of feeble for a purportedly leftwing government to imply that everyone should be going to university, because it plays into the narrative that graduate jobs are inherently more useful or desirable. They should have introduced the hideously complicated Swiss system instead, where everyone has to stay in education until their mid-twenties and there are two streams, one more vocational and practical and the other more academic and theoretical and constant opportunities to switch between them and finetune a given career path, and also bankers aren't ashamed to have their kid grow up to be a plumber, in part because there's no shame in it, in part because it pays almost as well as banking, and in part because they might start studying plumbing, realise they wanted something a little more theoretical, and end up designing hydroelectric dams*.
*this may be** a wildly rose-tinted view of the Swiss system.
**It is, but I still wish that I had gone through a system more like I imagine this one to be, rather than being forced to do four miserable years of a STEM subject simply because I did well at it in school and classism is rampant in the UK.
Banking pays shit here, except at the top.
Unless you mean like finance and investment banking. That probably pays better.
I have a couple of friends who worked for the BIS in Switzerland and not only does it pay well, but you're also effectively a diplomat.
Regular Swiss bankers don't get to commit minor traffic offences with impunity (an almost unimaginable privilege in Switzerland) but they can probably buy a menagerie of exotic apex predators to patrol the grounds of their mountain-top chateauxs.
Being a bank teller in Nebraska pays less well, according to my sister when she left it for lawyering.
As near as I can tell, everybody commits minor traffic offenses with impunity here.
I just feel that it was sort of feeble for a purportedly leftwing government to imply that everyone should be going to university, because it plays into the narrative that graduate jobs are inherently more useful or desirable.
Neoliberalism!
(I really don't want to restart the "neoliberalism" wars, but to the extent the term refers usefully to anything I do think it's this sort of approach to policymaking.)
What you want is a setup where everyone who would benefit from and/or genuinely wants to go to university ends up going, but where the system doesn't get clogged with uninterested people not learning much. So you make entrance easy but have relatively rigorous grading. But it's hard to maintain a norm of failing people who deserve it if they're paying through the nose for the unit, so you make tuition free. Which is fine, since the nation as a whole benefits from an educated population. If it was possible to do this in Britain in the seventies, it has to be possible now, because the world is much richer. All you need to do is reverse thirty years of 'user pays' propaganda.
119: I very nearly went to prison in Switzerland because a policeman didn't like how the brakes on my bicycle had been set up. (I'm not joking.)
Were they made from living kittens?
111 all applies to the US except tuition is much higher.
"You need a college degree for this job"
"Do I need to learn anything in particular?"
"No, any college degree will do"
"OK, good to know"
Another, probably bigger, problem in the US is that a lot of students drop out of college after incurring a lot of debt for it, thereby ending up significantly worse off in addition to the wasted time.
||
Can anyone recommend a Javascript blocker for Firefox? I don't want to rely on the reviews at Mozilla, because those are just random people on the internet.
|>
A Javascript blocker? Like, can't you just turn off Firefox?
If you mean an ad blocker, I use the EFF's Privacy Badger, which generally does a pretty good job.
Like, can't you just turn off Firefox?
Sorry.... "can't you just turn off Javascript?"
128/9: No, I mean to stop particular sites from running JS. Last I tried there wasn't a convenient way to do this in FF itself.
121: it was not possible to do this in Britain in the seventies. Very few (compared to today) people in Britain in the seventies went to university. About sixty thousand people got an undergraduate degree from a university in 1975. By 2015 it was more like 400,000. Spending on education has accordingly risen substantially in GDP terms (public spending hasn't but that of course doesn't include tuition fees). The same is true of health spending. It has been paid for by massive cuts in defence spending (from more than 4% of GDP back in the 70s to less than 2% now, disguised by creative accounting in order to keep our NATO commitment). Swapping soldiers for undergraduates has not produced a noticeable improvement in economic performance, equality, social cohesion or individual happiness.
As in, one had to go into config, find the JS setting and change the value by hand. That's fine to make a global change, but not for excluding particular sites.
I just did a single search on google and it asked me to do work for it by identifying cars by way of proving I'm not a robot, fuck them, I just added Duck Duck Go to Firefox.
Just in case anyone doubted we were living in a William Gibson novel.
Yeah, I was just looking to see if there was a way to configure about:config keys on a per-site basis, but looks like no dice.
127: I think NoScript might be what you're looking for? It's been around for a while and is quite well-known. However I'm not sure how configurable it is, because with its default settings it was a step too far for me and broke a lot of websites. (I use Privacy Badger and Adblock Plus and Ghostery.)
133: Yeah, I got that recently for something that really shouldn't have required me to prove my humanity. Previously I've only seen it while doing repetitive searches (as in, trying to find some information that I know Google is willfully hiding from me) while using a VPN. Between that and Google's increasing tendency to guess wrongly about what I might be looking for and to stick by that guess, however much I tune my search terms, I'm pretty close to done with them as a default search engine.
Also the constant requests for location information on mobile (which it already knows from my IP, and proudly displays at the bottom of the search results).
I mean, if I search for "local restaurants", fair enough I suppose. If I search for "population of denmark" or "how many legs does an octopus have" why do I get THIS WEBSITE WOULD LIKE TO ACCESS YOUR LOCATION INFORMATION. Why?? Does the answer vary because of Coriolis force or something? Fuck you, Google.
136.1: I had the same experience with Noscript. I was using Yescript but updates broke it.
What does Privacy badger do that Ghostery doesn't?
136 Yes, all this. And it loads so slowly.
138: Increased sanctimony, according to the FAQ on their website. They mostly seem to block a different number of things (generally fewer than ghostery) but sometimes they block things that ghostery doesn't, so I use them as a belt and braces solution. Although that may come at a cost to browser performance.
Germany has free university, but only like 30% of the eligible population goes. Compared to something like 40-60% (statistics were confusing) of the eligible US population. The difference is that Germany also has the most neoliberal thing of all, a robust public-private apprenticeship system where corporations work with the state to design vocational curricula and siphon off labor into apprenticeship programs, and kids get tracked onto a vocational path.
114: "constant opportunities to switch between them and finetune a given career path, and also bankers aren't ashamed to have their kid grow up to be a plumber"
I would want to examine those two conditions very very very closely to find out whether they actually apply to this world. Until then, color me skeptical.
142: "kids get tracked onto a vocational path"
Most kids in Germany get tracked onto university / not-university paths after the fourth grade. Let me repeat that, loudly: Most kids in Germany get tracked onto university / not-university paths AFTER THE FOURTH GRADE.
There are many good things about Germany. This is not one of them.
It's been quite a while since I looked at the statistics closely, but when I did Germany had the closest correlation between parental university attendance and children's university attendance of any European country.
I would call the apprenticeship programs corporatist rather than neoliberal. They're also a legacy of strong union representation.
UK GDP went up sixfold in current dollars (US$ 0.5 T to US$ 3 T) between 1984 and 2013, which is in the same ballpark proportionally as the increase in undergraduates, so it wouldn't be out of the question to provide a 1975 level of tertiary education free to those who want it. Maybe there's been more inflation in education than in other sectors, but it's not going to be due to the cost of presenting lectures in the humanities, basic sciences, and other established disciplines (as opposed to the cost of, say, managing a proliferation of bullshit options and other bells-and-whistles). Some trade-offs would be required, of course, and whether they'd be worth it depends on the details, but that doesn't mean free tuition is utopian. The German model doesn't service as high a proportion of undergraduates as the UK and US do, but New Zealand is at the same sort of 40%ish level as the UK and is going to move to free tuition this year.
In any case, the core outcome to advocate for is that no-one with a reasonable level of ability and a desire for basic higher education should be scared off by fear of debt that has to be paid no matter what your level of income. Literally free tuition isn't the only way to get that outcome. Australia has a government-run student loans system, but you repay only if and when you earn more than $54 000 per year, which makes it very low-stress compared to the US.
The Australian figure is a 2015 figure in $A, which bought about US$ 38K at the time.
UK GDP went up sixfold in current dollars (US$ 0.5 T to US$ 3 T) between 1984 and 2013, which is in the same ballpark proportionally as the increase in undergraduates, so it wouldn't be out of the question to provide a 1975 level of tertiary education free to those who want it.
That's only even close true if you don't bother adjusting for inflation because you plan on paying your teachers £5,000 a year or you have a time machine or something.
https://www.measuringworth.com/ukgdpir/result.php
Year Nominal GDP Real GDP (in 2013 pounds)
1984 £374bn £905bn
2013 £1.74trn £1.74trn
Growth x4.6 x1.9
So, I haven't even read the thread, but how can you do science if you can't think critically?!!!
Find a grant sponsored by a petroleum company.
Seriously, what fraction of actually existing jobs involve actually doing science? And is it even slightly possible to teach actual scientific practice at school level?
I do science for my job. Most people are like me. Therefore most people do science for their jobs.
It's admirable how you surface all your premises there.
I have to assume most people are like me just to maintain the bare minimum of empathy sufficient to stop me from keying cars all day.
If you stopped trying you could be a Republican and get all the tax cuts.
To clarify, here's what the authors of "Paying for the Party" mean by easy majors:
This produces a conundrum: How can students have a primarily social experience without failing academically?
Universities have solved the problem by allowing easy majors to develop. In his contribution to The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University, Steven Brint refers to these majors as "the practical arts" or "occupational and professional programs often housed in their own schools and colleges." 77 They include business, public administration, communications, tourism, recreation studies, education, human development, fitness, and fashion, among others. Easy majors contrast with the more challenging sciences and humanities that are generally part of colleges of arts and sciences. They are associated with higher overall GPAs and less measurable learning. 78 In many--although not all--easy majors, career success depends on personal characteristics developed outside of the classroom, even prior to college. For example, appearance, personality, and social ties matter at least as much--if not more--than GPA for media, sports, or fashion careers.
A developed party pathway requires that easy majors be richly variegated, with many possible sub-subspecialties, ways to opt out of challenging requirements (for example, language, science, and math classes), and schedules compatible with partying (that is, no Friday classes). When a party pathway is robust, these majors are well advertised, recommended by advisors, and generally supported by the school.
As others have noted, it's not that these subjects couldn't be studied in a rigorous way; it's that, as they exist at places like Indi/ana University (where the book was set), they aren't; and indeed administrators are fully aware of this.
I have actual recent experience with actual science practice in schools. It seems to be possible to get kids to understand the basic concepts of hypothesis testing, but they get really frustrated when you try to explain what a "Bayesian prior" is instead of helping glue pictures to a poster board.
155: Have you ever been to Indiana? It's like Ohio, but with less character and more driving in circles.
Oops, wait, that actually wasn't the part of the book where they really explain what they mean by "easy majors". Long but worthwhile:
MU [Ind. Univ] offers a vast array of academic options. This was not apparent when surveying the majors of women on our floor. Over two-thirds majored in business or communications (17 women, 38%), health or social services (7, 16%), or education (6, 13%). 15 These numbers include only those pursuing an applied medical or social service program not tracking to high-status professional positions, such as physician or dentist. Only thirteen (29%) women on the floor majored in a conventional liberal arts field and only two (4%) in a scientific or quantitative field.
This lack of diversity is not coincidental. Rather, it reflects heavy reliance on easy majors. As described in the Introduction, these majors are characterized by the ease of obtaining a high GPA; little evidence of general skills improvement during college; 16 and a heavy focus on appearance, personality, and charm. Easy majors are a key feature of the party pathway. Without them, partiers would not be able to divert so much of their time and energy from academics to the party scene. The academic infrastructure at MU is organized in a way that facilitates student involvement in these fields. Like many public and private universities, MU offers a business school. According to the 2010 U.S. News & World Report, the MBA program at the MU business school ranks in the top twenty-five. Undergraduate business school students can go straight through to the MBA or major in fields like accounting, marketing, management, or finance. Admission is competitive, and the program is demanding. Only two of the seventeen women on the floor majoring in business or communications went through the business school. ...
The remaining fifteen women took one of the many "business-lite" options that existed outside of the business school. At MU, arts management, sport management, recreational sport management, outdoor recreation and resource management, park and recreation management, and tourism management are some of the less rigorous business majors. One of our hardest partiers, who was enrolled in an arts management program in what was known as a business-lite school, told us, "I feel like [it] is a little easier" (Whitney Y4). Others gravitated toward communications as a way to gain less demanding training in marketing. For instance, one woman's advisor suggested telecommunications as "an option going around the Business School [to get] that same degree" (Sydney Y2). Of course, a telecommunications degree is not the same as a marketing degree--or else there would be no need to "go around" the business school. Classes in communications were notoriously easy. As a sport communication broadcast major admitted, "The classes I just don't think were that challenging" (Mara Y4).
MU also houses a School of Education. Historically considered to be vocational in nature, education is not a major available at many elite private or liberal arts schools. For example, Harvard undergraduates interested in elementary or secondary education must major in their field of expertise. Despite the importance of training future teachers, education majors at most universities have among the highest GPAs--a sign of less challenging coursework. Indeed, education majors at MU described their classes as filled with busy work: I don't think that education is that hard of a major.... It's just very time consuming.... Education gives you a lot of room to improve your grades, even throughout each course, because the teachers are very flexible with you, so that made it easier. (Melanie Y4/ Y5 combined)Some women, however, struggled to pass teacher certification tests. For these women, there was an easier option--human and family development--that prepared graduates to, as the Web site claimed, work in community services with children, the elderly, the disabled, and those with mental health issues in hospitals, schools, and group homes. Human development might be seen as an education-lite or social work-lite degree. It can be thought of as the modern-day equivalent of home economics--one of the most popular fields for female graduates in the 1960s, before sex segregation in field of study declined considerably. 17
MU has also developed a number of majors that rely heavily on personal taste, appearance, and self-presentation. These majors allow women on the party pathway to use charm and attractiveness to their advantage in an academic realm. Such majors are almost exclusively filled by women and appeal to the particular kind of upper-middle-class femininity that they are simultaneously working to perfect in the party scene.
At MU there is a Department of Interior Design and Apparel Merchandising that offers two majors by the same names. No such department exists at elite private schools or even most top state schools. The school claims that these majors prepare students for jobs like merchandise buyer, residential interior designer, and showroom or manufacturer sales representative. Many of these jobs do not require a college degree.
Sport communication, along with telecommunications and communications and culture (in the College of Arts and Sciences) attracts students who see themselves as future media personalities. For instance, as one noted: I still do love sports. I don't play them as much as I used to in high school or middle school. But I mean I love going to baseball games and you know, being active and exercising and stuff like that. It's just a really important part of my lifestyle. I thought [about] doing something with like, ESPN. (Mara Y4) Both men and women alike tended to pursue these majors, but for our residents an interest in communications broadcasting meant being the impeccably dressed, attractive, and bubbly woman that major networks would want to put in front of a camera. Students in these programs were, in a way, selling themselves--not their skills, academic knowledge, or credentials.
These majors were concentrated in the School of Physical Education. This school streamlined movement onto the party pathway by organizing a large number of easy majors under one institutional umbrella. The school's general focus is on recreation, leisure, sports, fitness, and nutrition--areas in which body, personality, and taste necessarily take front stage. Here one can find many of the business-lite options (such as tourism management and sports communication). The school also offers majors like athletic training/ fitness specialist and human development/ family studies. These students do not have to complete the foreign language requirement required of all students majoring in the School of Literature, Science, and the Arts. By dedicating an entire school to easy majors, MU ensures that the fields of study most popular among partiers are well publicized, easy to access, and treated as legitimate.
The institutional arrangements discussed above existed prior to any particular student arriving on campus. By attending MU or another similar school, young women entered a world in which the party pathway was organizationally supported. However, students are the lifeblood of this system and necessary to bring the party scene alive. If students arrived with other motivations, organizational arrangements would probably change....
Thanks Trapnel. Very interesting.
Seriously, what fraction of actually existing jobs involve actually doing science?
More jobs than you'd expect require a degree of statistical understanding and a sort of scientific outlook - testing hypotheses, critical thinking etc.
158: That looks like a very interesting and infuriating read.
143: Classism definitely exists in Switzerland (along wih plentiful quantities every other kind of -ism that you can think of) and my description of the education system was dramatically rose-tinted.
Streaming by subject ability happens early. Streaming by institution / form of qualification happens between compulsory and non-compulsory secondary education (almost everyone completes non-compulsory education). None of this raises eyebrows from a UK perspective, as it works in roughly the same way, at least in theory. What does seem a little weird is that, while it's possible to take the federal matura, most schools set their own exams - plenty of opportunities for inconsistency and unfairness there. However, there is a definite emphasis on providing more- and less-vocational options at each level, and extra support as necessary to make the move. In terms of subject choice, students are also encouraged to keep more options open and for longer than in the English system or the Scottish system. The Swiss system described in its own words is here, and here's the accompanying diagram.
I worked in education in Switzerland for a while - although not within the Swiss education system - and in retrospect a large part of our business was in taking the children of the unusually wealthy and trying to push them into more academic career paths to which they weren't particularly suited, for reasons of pure snobbishness (often with limited success, to the frustration of all three parties involved).
Anecdotally, the "stay in education and slowly make up your mind where you'd like to end up by switching between programs and / or doubling back" is taken for granted as an option there. I was good friends with a bloke that started by training as a joiner and over time switched to specialised wood engineering*, which was considerably more academic and better remunerated. Also, one of the most successful people I knew ran a major utility for a canton, having gone back to college to study economics after a career as a professional footballer.
*still a significant enough building material there that you can independently study this sub-specialisation of civil engineering.
Can anyone recommend a Javascript blocker for Firefox?
I use ublock origin on Firefox, and I've been happy with it.
147: Crap, I think I see what you're saying. Even if real GDP had gone up sixfold and so had numbers of students getting a bachelor's every year, and the amount of real wealth you get to spend per student without increasing the share of real GDP you're laying out is therefore the same as in 1975, that gets you a 1975 education per student only in the sense of "the amount of education you can buy for a 1975 lecturer's salary", which today is bugger all, and not in the sense of "a typical 1975 redbrick educational outcome". Or am I still confused?
(Btw, I took the numbers I quoted from here, which says that the amounts are in 'current dollars', which I took to take into account inflation and hence to represent real GDP. But that doesn't square with your figures or this. So that's another thing I'm confused about. Am now regretting winging it in an area I have read about only through journalism.)
I still think (shifting goalposts here) that the broader point of my 145 holds, i.e., that working systems in which paying for things like healthcare and higher education isn't an overwhelming headache for the user have to be possible. I mean, I've seen them.
163: Advanced settings! Works like a charm! Many thanks.
Thanks for the quotes, Trapnel. I've wanted to read that because the second author and I overlapped as undergraduates at a private school with a huge Greek system and I'm curious how she understands that in light of her later work, but I haven't gotten around to the book yet.
I was good friends with a bloke that started by training as a joiner and over time switched to specialised wood engineering....
Did they first teach him that abstinence was the best option?
164: I think you are still confused. Let me go through it:
1. It is the case that the number of undergraduates has gone up by about six times, while over the same period real GDP has not quite doubled.
2. If the number of students had gone up at the same rate as real GDP, we could spend the same amount in real pounds on each student as in 1975, and that would add up to the same percentage of GDP.
3. (and this is I think where you get confused) This would mean that lecturer salaries would have to be the same as in 1975, but that's in real pounds. Not nominal. Their pay would have kept pace with inflation. So your lecturers would still be more or less as well off as in 1975 (difference between price and wage inflation aside).
4. But the benefit to the student would not be as great. A large part of "a typical 1975 redbrick educational outcome", at least in job and income terms, was the fact that there weren't that many other people with a redbrick degree in 1975. Now, of course, there are hundreds of thousands.
5. Also, slight criticism here for not giving the figures a quick sense check. The British economy is six times as big as it was in the eighties? That shouldn't sound remotely plausible. I mean, you know what sort of GDP growth we get; it's 2-3% a year. Thirty years of 2% obviously doesn't make 600%.
The British economy is six times as big as it was in the eighties? That shouldn't sound remotely plausible.
What if all you know about the British economy in the 80s comes from The Smiths?
I am still intrigued by the original post. I know nothing about Challenger, but I thought its curriculum description seemed non-sociopathic. (Although any time you see a list of broad principles, you have to ask how those principles are carried out.)
So what I'm wondering is: Is the OP survey question designed to allow the school to downplay empathy or character development, etc.? Or is it designed to give teachers/administrators ammunition when parents complain about an insufficient focus on STEM. "Well, the parents told us that we needed to be paying attention to these other issues as well ..."
I probably don't want to know the answer to this, but are a large number of parents -- even in a nonpublic school setting -- going to come out against sympathy for victims, listening skills, critical thinking, empathy for others, character development, communication, and connecting ideas and concepts across subjects?
The curriculum description certainly seems to allow for instruction in these areas.
168: So, the pessimistic way to look at this could be something like: the UK is now producing three times the number of undergraduates per unit GDP, by moving costs onto the students, while simultaneously diluting the value of their qualification? If so, what might be an optimum equilibrium between "proportion of population educated to undergraduate level" vs "cost to students (which increases with increasing proportion) and value of qualification (which decreases with increasing proportion)"?
That would certainly paint a vulgar picture
168: OK, thanks for that. Sixfold did sound rather a lot...
170: I'm not sure about this context, but I'm sure that in some context, opposing "sympathy for victims" would be code for "I'm not a racist, but (insert racism)."
Well, the value of a degree is more than just its impact on lifetime earnings. And that impact is, in any case, still significantly positive in the UK; we're not at or near the point where getting a degree is a wash when you subtract the cost (fees, three years without pay) from the improvement in lifetime earnings. It's just smaller than it was in the 1970s.
And it's possible, too, that having an educated population is a public good, because it means that Britain is an advanced technological economy, and that benefits everyone, regardless of whether or not they benefit from having a degree vs. not having one.
Let's say that we were once a poor country where no one had a degree and everyone was a peasant with lifetime earnings of £10. Now we're a rich country. Getting a degree costs £20. Some people who have degrees get jobs as games designers and make £200. Even after they've paid for the degree they still end up with lifetime earnings of £180, so getting that degree was definitely worth it for them. Others get degrees and only get jobs as architects, earning £120. Still others don't get degrees and get jobs as baristas, earning £100. So for the architects, individually, getting a degree was pointless, because they would have been just as well off working as baristas.
But! The only reason architecture jobs and barista jobs exist is to provide houses and coffee to the games designers. If no one had a degree, we'd all be peasants and even poorer.
Part of the issue I have with the current situation in America is that I think the person who gets a degree and gets a job as a metaphorical barista is likely to have paid more for college that the person who gets a degree as metaphorical computer programmer. That is, even leaving aside the advantages of family wealth, the better students are likely to pay less for college because they get more scholarships and are more competitive for spots in subsidized state schools.
178: I think the real student loan crisis is among people who did not even get a degree. Or people who tried to be practical and were fooled into getting a "vocational degree" from some non-accredited for-profit outfit, in a field where there are no jobs that require vocational degrees.
177: all good points, and I especially agree about the more ephemeral value of university on individuals and on society as a whole.
Quick question about the improvement in lifetime earnings: presumably this is relative to not going to university (leaving education after secondary school, or entering an alternative form of teriary education / training)? Because this would be expected as a consequence of qualification inflation - not so much that university improves your earnings, as much as it is increasingly compulsory, and not going has a negative impact. Or, to put it another way, I'm not advocating for fewer people going to university under the actually existing UK system, so much as pining for an imagined version of the present where more options (each with genuine opportunities for professional advancement) are available outside of the university system.
I think that's probably true, but I don't think that it will stop there.
Everything I read from "Paying for the Party" makes me want to punch the authors, because they always come across as offended that poor people party. Maybe their conclusions are all true, but their tone makes me want them to be wrong.
155/158 are super interesting.
I have a young cousin who majored in something like "recreation management." I can't remember exactly. Anyway, he got a job teaching gym in the prison. I think it must pay well.
I think that the problem with what I'm trying to argue is that it's uncomfortably close to the argument in 84 & 85, mostly because it's such a convenient way to say "universities should only be for the elite!*" - but I feel like there ought to be a conversation about how much attention is lavished on universities within the British system and how feeble and poorly structured many of the alternatives are. (Especially given that those who tend to go to universities tend to have had more advantages in the first place.)
*"[unless my Toby misses his grades, in which case an exception should be made]"
184: Really? That's not at all the impression I got from it. My sense was that the authors were consistently emphasizing that this is a 1- a systemic issue, and 2- the university itself is knowingly complicit in reinforcing it.
The tone I took from the book was one of outrage barely concealed behind academic coolness -- but outrage towards administrators, not students. I suppose the *rich* girls don't come across all that admirable, but even there I don't recall feeling like the authors seemed at all offended -- if anything, the analysis of the "party pathway" makes it clear that it's *entirely reasonable* for richer girls to follow it. For those with the resources, it's a very solid strategy -- 100% of the rich girls on the "party pathway" were employed a year out of college, vs 4/9 of the non-rich ones, only one of whom in a BA-requiring job. (Here's the Crooked Timber post on it for those who want a bit more background.
Anyway, I have to get to Portuguese class. It is indeed a great book -- anyone who wants it but can't get a hold of it for whatever reason can email me.
I get tangled sometimes thinking through the following path:
1. Everyone should take a few years off before starting college. Work at an entry-level job. Master just living on your own, party as hard as you want and get a feel for functioning at a job under whatever conditions, etc. Understand more about yourself in a work environment before you choose a direction. Get some of the kinks out, about adulthood. (Maybe even develop empathy for people in minimum wage jobs! What!)
2. but what about all the people that get pregnant, or that get someone pregnant, during that time?
And of course, the rich would ruin everything by taking those years to do specialized unpaid internships or whatever elite path further distinguished them from the have-nots.
2. but what about all the people that get pregnant, or that get someone pregnant, during that time?
Abortions for all!
(BOOO)
Abortions for none!
(BOOOOOO!)
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
(YAAAY!)
188 - Portugese class is the real pathway to $$$$.
More seriously, for all of its huge flaws, the student loan era in US higher ed has seen (a) tons more people get an education (b) most (not all, but an overwhelming majority) of those people get substantial value for those degrees, net of costs (c) some people, mostly those who didn't finish or went to scam for profit vocational schools, get royally screwed (d) young people as a whole much better educated which is necessary because as a while the country needs to be better educated in an increasingly technological society (e) less immediate value to the mere fact of a college degree, but mostly because more people have them, which is a good thing.
But absolutely none of that means that college administrators at 4 year flagships should be sponsoring bullshit majors and party tracks.
Maybe a party degree can come with a miniature american flag attached to it. Or be printed on paper that has little confetti drawn in, like a FB frame for your profile photo.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the academic aspect of University is more important than the social aspect. I don't buy that.
There's an interesting cultural gap that, as an elite-school type, I am only vaguely aware that this "party major" phenomenon exists, and largely from pop culture media (every spring break movie) that I don't trust very much.
196: I'm not American, but I'm similar. It only came home to me when I met people with, eg. degrees in jewellery design. Whereas while I was studying, my university dissolved its social work department for inadequate standards.
Also because someone with more grants wanted the office space.
194: I went to a big state school, and was considered a light-moderate partier, largely because I've never been able to drink two days in a row, and I don't think it did me a hill of beans one way or the other.
To be fair, social workers seem to have unflattering jewelry.
158: Being a critical thinker, I notice that that extract is describing a study of a quite small group of students. Does the book go wider?
202: There are some general stats in the book, but it's mostly a detailed case study of a specific cohort of women at 1 large state university. I forget whether they called it a "participant observer" study or not.
190
Mandatory 1 year public service with stipend, no less than 500 miles from your hometown, sometime between your 18th and 25th birthday.
I spent college almost unbelievably drunk (generally blackout or near Wed-Sat) and still did well in a traditional humanities major. Since I definitely couldn't have done that in a hard science or engineering that's left me with a lifelong secret belief thay the humanities just are way, way, way easier. But I don't like to say it out loud because it depreciates my credentials and bothers nice humanities profesors
199: That was me also. Basically, not drinking on Thursday was pretty easy for me and not so easy for several of my friends who took five or more years to graduate.
201: Thanks. It must just be a local issue.
203: Does it include any historical work on how this came about?
The only people I knew who were drunk on Wednesday were from when I worked at the college paper.
By Senior year it had switched to Tuesday. I would work to catch up work/ do my thesis on Saturday nights because only lightweights were out on Saturday.
My thinking is very critical right now.
I used to oversleep finals periodically until I learned that I could stay up as long as I wanted and get as drunk as I wanted, then do some speed at, say, 4 a.m. and wake up fresh as a daisy in time for an 8 a.m. final.
I have many bits of hard-earned college wisdom that I will not be passing down to my children.
That sounds risky. How are you sure you'll remember to take the speed if you're drunk?
AIMHMHB I was sent in 1990 to interview the education minister who was turning all the polytechnics into universities; previously the pollies had been vocational and sneered at. My editor at the time was outraged on elitist grounds. He had been editor of Isis, the Oxford student paper and I think believed that his whole life since then was a gentle decline from that eminence (he is now a pompous and dishonest columnist on the Mail). The minister, however, had been a fellow of All Souls and took the view that nothing could really threaten real elitism so long as All Souls prospered.
It's a very English solution to degree inflation: everyone who matters knows there are still only six real universities and anyone taken in by the others deserves all they get.
But then I got thrown out of school at 16 and never went to university at all.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the academic aspect of University is more important than the social aspect. I don't buy that.
I'd love to see some elaboration of this. What is the intended or desired "social aspect" of University?
You can see how degree inflation worked in the U.K. from watching about how they murder people there. Back in the 70s and 80s, even in Oxfordshire, Inspector Morse was an oddity for being a police officer who attended Oxford, even if he didn't graduate. But even in remotest Wales, by modern times, it seems that all the detectives have been to university.
The only thing in common is the detectives still sleep with witnesses.
France has the "everyone who passes the bac is guaranteed a place at a state university" system and it sucks major big time bc the univ system is not funded adequately to actually educate everyone who enters, so the first couple of years consist of ruthlessly expunging all but a small percentage of each class. In other words, the entire nation celebrates the "j'ai reussi mon bacc!" each year, and then turns viciously on all but a small minority of those recently feted young people and brands them failures. And my non-Fr friends who have guest taught at Fr unis report that the hostility from the students in the lecture halls is like a sentient beast. Fun! The kid will *not* be going to university in France.
I think all the fun stuff in the fr system happens pre-bacc, like the concours general which have been around for donkey's years so there are tests in the usual suspects -- physics, literature, maths, economics, ferrin tongues, history, etc., but also cooking, auto repair and the really fun ones - fonderie, ebenisterie, and my favorite from last year - the theme for chaudronnerie industrielle:
"Une entreprise artisanale souhaite améliorer la qualité de ses produits et se diversifier en développant une ligne de test pour la fabrication de bière aromatisée. L'objet de l'étude se situe dans la ligne de fabrication du malt. Il a été demandé aux candidats de réaliser une boite à cascades permettant de séparer le malt de certaines impuretés par différences de densité et permettre d'acheminer le malt vers l'étape de concassage."
Towards better french hipster beer! Congratulations Alexis Molinero du Centre de formation apprentis de l'assoc de formation prof de la metallurie a Lyon, Willy Delachaise du Centre de formation d'apprentis pole formation des industries a Nantes, et Aurelien Renard du lycee prof Edomond-Doucet a Cherbourg-en-Cotentin!
216: exposure to people and perspectives unfamiliar to you, networking, chance to try out personalities and political opinions in a relatively lowstakes environment, skills in avoiding people at parties who seem like they may wish to discuss philosophy, etc etc
so the first couple of years consist of ruthlessly expunging all but a small percentage of each class.
Nebraska did a similar thing when I was there. They had to admit any high school graduate in the state who got a C or better to the main campus. Huge numbers would flunk out or get put on probation and decide to go to an easier school.
213 reminds me of the one piece of drug-taking advice my dad did give me before going to college. He said never take speed to study. You'll never remember what you learned.
At the very elite end, the undergraduates must be appeased at all costs, not mainly because they're paying obscene amounts of tuition but more so because when they're our evil capitalist overlords, the university wants them to fondly remember their college days and donate several hundred million to the university. This leads to competing demands, because you have students (often the same ones) who simultaneously don't want much reading while at the same time they want to be overburdened with serious texts presented to them by a white man with a German accent.
221: It's not just state-dependent, and you should take speed for the exam?
219
Most of the value-added at elite private schools in the US is precisely through social connections. It's one of the few ways a smart and ambitious middle class kid will get a chance to intimately socialize with the .001%.
223: He didn't get that specific. He was not a happy with speed at all. I think they handed out amphetamines pretty readily when he was in the service.
205
My feeling (having had serious college training in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields) is that the humanities and softer social sciences are harder to truly excel at, but they're way easier to not fail at. It's a lot easier to be a mediocre student in the humanities than in the sciences.
There's also the added pressure to not actually fail students for writing garbage, given that the Customer Is Always Right. Grade inflation is such that if anyone looks like they put even a marginal amount of effort in their paper, even if what they wrote is complete garbage they're probably not going to do worse than a C or C- on any one paper.
In my experience, not only does speed help you get shit done, it helps you lose weight. Alas, it turns out speed is bad for hypertension so it is no longer an option for me.
I'd still like to take off a few pounds, though. Maybe I should start smoking.
It turns out there's a hidden downside to smoking.
There must have been speed of some form around when I was an undergrad. I really wonder what kind of social-oblivion disorder I have that I was never aware of any. Recreational drugs, sure, those were easy to find (and I regret not finding more), but "performance enhancing" drugs? They were happening somewhere else or I looked like some kind of academic narc.
I never saw any speed or performance-enhancing drug in college either. Of course I was largely oblivious to my surroundings, see prior comments.
I could vape, right? Everybody is impressed by that guy who vapes....
I didn't see any either. I did learn that snuff and coffee and nothing else for 16 hours of writing would make you vomit.
OT but sort of related to drugs. So, Doritos is making Lady Doritos, which are less crunchy? Isn't the whole point of chips to be crunchy? I have uncrunchy chips that have been sitting in my cupboard for about 8 months, and I would not pay money for those. If I bought chips and they were not crunchy, I would return them to the store for being defective.
LADY DORITO
HAVING YOU FOR LUNCH
WONDER WHAT THE POINT IS IF YOU DON'T CRUNCH
WASTING MY MONEY
ON A THIRD RATE SNACK
I SHOULD MAKE A FUSS AND GET MY MONEY BA-ACK
233: It's not that it's less crunchy, it's less loud. It's very sophisticated technology that will allow a woman to enjoy a satisfying crunch and maintain the silence of a true lady.
Also in related news, my internet weed arrived. Looks dank as hell.
I was impressed with the packaging. Standard USPS mailer, and an opaque bag inside. Inside that was a vacuum-sealed bag, and inside that was another vacuum-sealed, opaque bag, which had the weed.
Just like the Kinder Egg shipments.
The thread's moved on, but I still want to share this. When My grandmother died in 1995, one of my cousins who was visiting at the time was studying for a PhD in icthyology in Pennsylvania. Her then boyfriend, now ex-husband, came along to the pre-funeral family dinner. He had followed her East from California and was spending his time sort of pursuing a masters in Leisure Studies.
I was an undergrad at Harvard and obliviously assumes that he was in some reasonably rigorous interdisciplinary field, a la Medieval Studies or Harvard's Social Studies concentration.
So I asked him if he studied the sociology of leisure, the history of leisure as a concept, and the economics of leisure. He said, "there's some of that," but didn't go on.
Later my Dad said, "I think it means they learn how to run a golf tournament." And I said "Oh." He also said that the guy must be very supportive, because he really didn't seem to have a lot going for him.
57: in many other countries law and medicine are undergraduate degrees. Law, however, as taught to undergraduates at Cambridge (from what little I've heard of it) serms to be a more intellectually sophisticated endeavor than what goes on in the average American law school - or even at a top-tier school. More historically grounded. But i'm Basing that on talking to one person.
Him, not you. Getting your trick to marry you, especially an ichthyologist, means he must have been a great gigalo.
I couldn't figure out what song it was supposed to scan to.
243: Huh, then who wrote it? (Lady Madonna)
I subleased an apartment from a bunch of Golf Management majors (located in the department of Leisure Studies). They had used the bedroom door at the end of their apartment as a target for golf balls. I knew this because the door was hollow and many of them were still embedded in the door.
But yes, many of them were hoping to be golf pros at courses around the state.
I knew someone who was a professional bridge player, which is apparently the same thing as a gigalo. He would accompany elderly wealthy women on cruises to the French Riviera and be their bridge partner.
Omar Sharif doesn't need your slut shaming.
So that's why it's called a rubber.
At my school, Travel Industry Management was the big major. I maintain that learning how to operate a hotel is actually a pretty useful thing to learn in college.
My college, which Lord knows I've revealed here enough and is in upstate New York, has a famous hotel management school for undergrads. Based on my friends in it and a few classes I took, it was relatively rigorous in its way, and certainly my friends in it seem to have done pretty OK (generic business guys, people who own restaurants, people in the hotel business). But I kinda feel like that works for the "best hotel school in the world"; there can't be more than a couple of those places for hotel schools and even there I wonder about the school's contribution specifically to their relative success, as opposed to just being career paths that they could have chosen regardless of undergrad major.
The people I know who own restaurants aren't people who went to college, except for my one cousin and he was really in the business of owning things, not running restaurants.
If universities aren't teaching capitalists to capitalize I don't know what they're good for.
When I was a Summer associate at a large North Carolina firm, one of the other Summer associates came from Campbell Law School We had both taken The Economics of Law. At Duke it was a highly theoretical course, examining conundrums like interpreting antitrust law to prohibit some corporate mergers is good or bad for the United States economy, whether fault-based or strict liability for defective products is more efficient, etc At Campbell it was more practical, covering things like how much you can pay your secretary and stay in business.
Sidebar: Before law school I had looked at the application forms for all of the North Carolina law schools. Campbell was the only one for which I had no chance of admission, since I wasn't able to check the box affirming my acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord.
258.2: They would have said you were too honest to be a lawyer.
I knew heard of Campbell Law School before now.
They condense the whole curriculum into convenient meal-sized portions.
Thinking about what good universities are leads me into a deep hole -- I enjoyed it mostly, but I don't think I've ever used anything I learned at my jobs, and I could have done my current job just as well, if I had dropped out of school in 8th grade or so. And then I think that the work I do here is fairly pointless anyway and my employer would do just as well without me. And then I think how the world would probably do fine or maybe even a little better without my employer. And then I wonder if the blog would be better off without this comment.
Leisure Studies Larry
There are a couple lines from this game that are embedded in my brain. One that's so dumb I have to continually suppress it is, "Is that a roll of dimes in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
I bet that would cut down visits for your office hours.
Calling them "Sugar Tits" is already pretty effective.
268: You wouldn't be able to get me to leave.
As a Title IX Mandatory Reporter I'm gonna have to turn in this thread...
High fructose corn syrup is the best I can do.
High fructose corn syrup tits doesn't have the same ring to it. Also, now I'm gonna have to report myself.
Years ago, Heebie said that she could barely resost the urge to say "Calm down, baby doll" in a Telly Savalas style. Ever since then I find myself fairly often wanting to say "Calm down, baby doll" to people in a Telly Savalas style.
If you still haven't shaved your head, you're living in denial of your true self.
It's not to everyone's taste, but my favorite is "Telly Savalas visits Birmingham."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EoHVO1eSMFc
I'm saving "Telly Savalas looks at Aberdeen" for later.
Fun fact: There's an old horror movies starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee called Horror Express, in which Telly Savalas appears late in the movie in a completely deranged cameo playing a Russian Cossack. He lasts about 8 minutes or so before getting turned into a zombie.
News you can use.
277 I need to watch this immediately.
Double your pleasure and get the double feature of Horror Express and Blood Tide, the movie about a Greek island monster where James Earl Jones eats a watermelon by punching a hole in it.
Incredibly, some generous soul uploaded the highlight of Blood Tide to YouTube in 2008.
On second viewing, no, it was not.
That was Lydia Cornell, best known as the dumb blonde on Too Close For Comfort.
I always assumed it was some European actress but no!
The Wikipedia plot summary for that movie is a work of understated genius.
Never mind. Having looked at the wikipedia summaries it's obvious.
Blood Tide. Pay attention in the back.
For posterity: "A treasure hunter accidentally frees a monster, forcing local villagers to revisit the sacrifice of virgins."
I pretty frequently have the desire to watch horror movies that I haven't seen before, and I've found Shaenon K Garrity's Horror Every Day has a good mix of classics vs deep cuts that I've never heard of. Plus I really enjoy the descriptions and illustrations. Plus I really like this, from the sidebar:
How do you get to decide what qualifies as a horror movie and where each one goes on the calendar?
I am the Mayor of Horror Movies.
Today's selection is Under The Shadow, which is great, for anyone who missed the hype.
275: "This is Mrs. Taylor. I'm sure somebody loves her, baby."
275: that was awesome. I don't remember hearing about Telly Savalas before, but his voice sounded familiar. It's hard to imagine any PR bragging about highways like that nowadays.
I'm 37. I don't think Unfogged has any young people left. Even Teo doesn't really count, I think. Sad!
37 is young! You'll figure that out in 10-15 years.
Is anybody working on a Kojak movie? It seems inevitable.
Gotta be pretty young to not have been around for Kojakmania (1973-1978).
I'm 41 and I think I'm right on the edge of remembering Kojak reruns on daytime TV. 37 may be on the other side of that line.
I don't think I've seen a full Kojak. But surely Trapnel is young enough to remember ads for The Players' Club, and the SNL parody The Players With Yourself Club.
You guys watching the Pelosi filibuster?
I'm at work, so no. But rooting for her.
She's reading letters that Dreamers have sent to their congresspeople.
I don't think Unfogged has any young people left. Even Teo doesn't really count, I think. Sad!
I'm 33, for whatever that's worth. I believe we do now have some commenters younger than me.
I hope you had a good Rolling Rock birthday.
301: I wish I were that age. Being my age sucks right now.
L. was a coupe of years younger than teo, wasn't she? She comments sometimes.
294: 42 feels really old right now. Wish so very much that I were still in my 30's.
When I was forty two, my ankles worked nearly always.
Hmm, my left ankle has been giving me some trouble lately.
I was feeling old until I found out heebie is older than I am.
Barlow was a wonder. A world-class bullshitter whose mere presence made you feel better about life. The most extraordinary, blazing eyes. Some people, like Denis Mc\Nally, the Dead's PR flack, really hated him: he first appears in McNally's big Dead biography as a cocaine dealer on the Upper East Side who wandered around with a .45 for settling arguments with.
I wonder if Weir still sings his lyrics to "Mexicali Blues" -- "Instead, I've got a bottle, and a girl that's just 14, and a damn good case of the Mexicali Blues"
Probably not. The age of consent in Baja appears to be 14 in fact, not sure whether Barlow would have researched that.
(Consent laws for children and adults in Mexico seem to be seriously fucked up.)
When I was one-and-twenty
A wise man made these points:
'Scorn crowns and pounds and guineas
But look after your joints;
Give pearls away and rubies
But take care of your ankle.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
When good points tend to rankle.
When I was one-and-twenty
He carried on his talk,
"Without a healthy ankle
There is no healthy walk;
If joints and bones go wonky
You're in for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.