re: Competition for College Admissions in Texas is unreal

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It's sales vs engineers.

As a PM, I get the fun task of being the adult in the room when the 45-year-old man with 3 degrees throws a toddler temper tantrum because some other engineer pissed them off. I then get to coordinate all their work and convert what the engineers with no social skills are doing into something explainable to the sales guys with no engineering background.

Yes, I am exactly like that guy from office space.

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Hahaha our Webex and staff meetings are like this more often than not.

The EVP who hired me told me after a few months the reason why he did. I worked retail and had to learn people skills to do it well for 5 years. He was tired of hiring 4.0 GPA students with zero social skills. They were getting churned out at an alarming rate.

And yes im admitting I didn't have a 4.0 GPA *gasp*

What is core corriculum to you?

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For 90% of us poor folk that wanted to stop being poor it is.

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i grew up with a mom that is a teacher and a dad who didn't pay child support..with 2 siblings...on what was then the wrong side of town (it's since been very gentrified). the frick you think you're talking to, boy?

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College has gone off the deep end into liberal groupthinkology. We need more degree plans actually focused on core curriculum.

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hell we need all degrees to require both 6 semesters of a foreign language and a real calculus class and that alone will weed out lots of the issues

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i grew up with a mom that is a teacher and a dad who didn't pay child support..with 2 siblings...on what was then the wrong side of town (it's since been very gentrified). the frick you think you're talking to, boy?

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Slow down turbo no one was calling you rich

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the frick you think you're talking to, boy?

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Sit the frick down with that nonsense. No one is scared of you lol.

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Do you even understand what I meant by gated?

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yes

now part of why they do that is money, but historically, they did the same thing before there was a primary economic incentive. it's about spreading everything out so you get a well-rounded education and don't just run through everything to get out

you have to think of this historically. people went to university to become educated. the paper certificate was just a signal. now, people go to college solely to get the piece of paper as if it's some sort of life (or economic) certificate

*ETA: destination v. path

Can you really say that most universities or most degree plans actually result in people who are educated? The vast majority of that information people forget by the next semester. Hell, your suggestion about foreign language is equally pointless. Foreign language is a requirement in high schools across the country, but 99% of people who take those classes don't retain any of the information they studied.

Having a large core curriculum with a wide variety of classes with the intention of creating educated people is a noble idea, I simply don't see any evidence that it works in practice. All of those extra classes just end up as extra money for the school, and a waste of time by everyone.

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Because it's true. College is supposed to be a place where you share your ideas and learn others. Some sort of large enlightenment over the course of your time there.

However, the increased stipulations with entry-level jobs across all industry have created a population that in my opinion, doesn't give a rats arse about enlightenment, just give me the fricking credential and let me move on with my life.

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Comparing college in 1700 (or even 1920) and college today is like lamenting that modern war doesn't involve single combat between generals a la the Iliad.

The college educated vs non in the period before WW2 had a very high ratio. Just looking at England for an example, Oxford and Cambridge were the only universities for hundreds of years, and they never had more than a few thousand students in a nation of millions.

Until recently, the model for upward mobility of the lower classes in colleges in the US was primarily through seminary schools. The classical college education of dabbling in a wide range of liberal arts subjects wasn't designed to create upward mobility; it was designed to give the already elite classes a way to educate their offspring, provide a status symbol, and network with other elites.

Modern universities are trying to apply a system that was designed around a romantic notion of turning every man into a parlor elite who could wax philosophical about Plato on a massive scale, which is silly and wasteful to everyone but the educational complex that rakes in millions to do it. Now one of the core reasons for universities to exist, status (i.e. essentially as a sorting mechanism) is breaking because EVERYONE goes to college. So now we need additional expense and time to obtain masters degrees (containing the actual information that should have been focused on in undergrad, if we weren't so busy with underwater basket weaving) in order to carve the top off again.

I see no benefit in a core liberal arts curriculum for engineers, doctors, or anyone. I don't use calculus in my day to day work, so I've forgotten every bit of it. It was a waste of a semester. Same goes with geology, and English lit.

The only education I received in college that I actually use relates to writing, basic business math, and my military planning courses (surprisingly useful in the business world). Everything else was independent study: Spanish, PMP, and so on. Everything else I was required to take essentially ended up as a pointless and expensive vanity. You could do my job (and most jobs in business) with a high school diploma and a couple of certification programs.

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It allows kids the are from overall shite schools in just because they finished in the top 7% despite maybe having less than stellar SAT scores. They flame out more in college.

This keeps out generally more qualified and college ready kids from competitive schools that finished in the top 8-25% with better test scores than the kids from the shite schools in the top 7%

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Winner winner.

Well said. A lot of first generation college people see college simply as trade school.