re: There's a skills gap coming that will reshape the economy

Oh, don’t get me wrong, plenty of these students end up failing out. A small number get a failed grade on this type of assignment, learn from it, and change their behavior. That’s the best case scenario and the desired outcome. But for most, a failure here is just a preview of more of what’s to come across their other classes, and they eventually fail out without ever receiving a diploma.

The problem (this problem at least) isn’t at the professor level, it’s at the administration and societal levels. The administration is letting in people who they know are not prepared to meet even minimal levels of accountability, and who therefore have no chance of ever earning their degree. But the universities have to do it to remain financially viable because the percentage of graduating high school students who are ready to transition into adulthood is getting smaller and smaller. And they know they can do it because the government guarantees tuition payments regardless of the student’s ability to repay tuition loans.

The government gets some votes, the university gets tuition payments for a year before the student fails out, the high schools get to say that a higher percentage of their students are going to college (because they are graduating students with 3.5 GPAs who wouldn’t have had a 2.0 20 years ago, adding more noise that is difficult to disentangle during the admissions process), and the only losers are the now former student who is left with $10,000 in loans to repay despite possessing no degree to increase their wage potential, and the taxpaying citizenry of the country who are functionally flushing their taxpayer dollars down the toilet every step along the way.


It’s predatory lending by the government, coupled with exploitative admission standards from university administrators (almost all of whom at this point have liberal arts backgrounds instead of STEM or business ones), responding to the collapsing competency of society to move children through the historically normal timeline of individual development. These plummeting admission standards are leaving professors with a student pool of functionally undeveloped adolescents who still need to be trained on how to be a responsible adolescent, when historically we were being given young adults who were in college to learn how to be responsible adults that can contribute somewhere within society.

If we could trust the government to actually care about the well being of society, we could use the community college system to get children up to that standard of responsibility we expect from a well-prepared adolescent, while we can use the more advanced university system to keep servicing the young adults who are legitimately ready to find their role in society. But since it will inevitably be considered racist or sexists or classist or some other ‘ist’ by the activist class, and because our government is too spineless to stand up to their derangement, we’re left with a system that funnels unprepared children into environments where they never have a chance to succeed.

It’s at a point where the entire incentive system feels like a logic trap straight out of Catch 22… there’s no way for any individual to win because the entire system of incentives is so far out of whack from anything a reasonable person would consider desirable. Which is just to say, we need to zoom out… this is a society-wide issue.