The collapse of academia

Well, yeah. Academia breeds academics for the sake of itself, it's a circlejerk. Send the kids to college so they can make a better life, if they don't go make sure society reminds them they are losers so they can keep dragging each other down; meanwhile, those in college can stroke each other off thinking they're doing the best thing possible and eventually develop issues when they hit their mid-life crisis because they've passed the point where they matter socially and where people stop jerking them off for meeting their responsibilities. Divorce, substance abuse, distancing themselves from their kids, love affairs, sudden shift in careers.

Back in the day, the wise progressed in universities, those who wanted to pursue wisdom and knowledge

Since XX century (and product of mass capitalism and industrialism) the academia became a trade school for country side plebeians who only want money and hide their low caste origin

I think the children of Millennials won't attend universities as much as Millennials did. Surely their parents will redpill them about it.

And yes the Internet is making traditional education obsolete just as it has done to many other industries.

Essentially this. Society doesn't have a need for everyone having a post-secondary education and despite what retards believe increasing mechanization doesn't magically create jobs as AI programmers and robot engineers.

Let's look at the issue a bit more broadly.

1. "Academia" itself is just a catchall term for the clique of people who inhabit and operate Universities. Universities exist to curate knowledge and understanding.

2. Since the late nineteenth century, the chief role of universities has moved from "general enlightenment" to "research and development". This is a major change, as it creates quantifiable products (patents and their associated profits) both universities and university staff can generate. As such, there has been a massive shift from humanities focus to STEM focuses, a process which was largely complete by the 1960s due to the demands of WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. The original Free Speech Movement was an organized attempt at fighting this, but it lost most of it's momentum after Congress did away with conscription. And with the end of the Cold War, so was the end of history and most historical debate as everyone just assumed liberal democracy/capitalism was the only practical system.

3. Since 1991, the response to concerns about global capitalism's impact on the workforce was always met with "get more college". This spawned a massive college industry, especially with the rise of government backed student loans (not unlike programs that led to the 2007 housing crash). Since the housing crash, more and more people have decided to invest educations rather than property. This has led to a supply "crisis" which universities abuse because it allows them to offer middling quality service at a high cost.

4. Additionally, the standardization of education with the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the 2010 Common Core has removed the need for teachers in K-12 education. It will inevitably be extended to "core" college classes, as employers find that more and more graduates are low quality and need more training.

The idea that education = money is the problem.

Most people don't study because they want to be educated or because genuine vocation or love for their field. They study because they want money, and ironically they keep being ignorant retards even if they become "professionals".

If the average Joe could do well in life with a simple job in his countryside house picking fruits and potatoes, he wouldn't pursue higher education. Funnily so much emphasis is put on school and high school and the importance of it but at the end of the day it's considered garbage if everybody doesn't go to university.

Society is simply wrong motivated and directed. It's just another sympthom of modernity and soulless postindustrial society.

The end result of this is that all college cirriculums are decided by some office in DC and everyone uses computers for learning. Meanwhile the college industry collapses like the housing industry did, leading colleges to axe humanities courses that don't bring in grant money or profitable patents. It is much like how Ray Bradbury envisioned it in his 1953 book Fahrenheit 451.

Interesting. Gonna give a read to the book

You haven't read Fahrenheit 451? You'll enjoy it. It's a great book. Not sure it is quite how that user described it, though. I think it's more about limiting knowledge due to oppressive political regimes. Unless you think of profit-motivated universities within capitalism as being a part of an oppressive political regime (and maybe you could, a political regime that mandates knowledge to be profitable or else it becomes de facto censored due to falling to disuse is pretty dystopian).

The two major modes of thinking when considering education are a classical self-improvement mode and a modern job-training mode. These two modes of thinking coexist in today's society while I would say that the sheer cost of education has forced a more general adoption of the modern mode. If it has such an immense cost in not just time but money, people reckon that it must have a financial return on investment.

Two trends will cause a return to the classical education-as-self-improvement model. The first is that even high education jobs will become mechanized, outdating the idea of education-as-job-training. The second is that the education bubble will pop, and there will be hellfire for a few years -- universities going bankrupt, government bail outs, nationalized education, etc. -- the result of which will be a lowered cost of education. Because there will not be such an incentive to justify education as an economic investment, there will be some return to the attitude of education-as-self-improvement.

But higher education will never go away. The reason why it's so popular right now is because many people see it as useful. So, in a scenario in which higher education is no longer useful (cost too high, no jobs for anyone regardless of education), then the system just returns to the age old system of only the nerds and/or rich individuals seek higher education.

Bump

I believe those who shame current education for not raising the right students are in the wrong.

Those phantom students of times past are now culled from top schools such as Harvard, Duke, and Yale. They are the ones who carry the torch of passion for whatever subject they are learning and will be the ones who move higher into society. Not to say a state college kid can't do that, but it's custom to choose from the ivies as it's a filter system

The more people who are educated to higher levels the better. The problem is not that to many people are getting degrees, It's that we are not reorganizing societal systems to account for them.

I feel this is basically a butthurt post by somebody externalising their failure to get into university.

They have completely hyperbolised the real but far less dramatic problem of qualification inflation, the claim that one can learn more about a field by reading a, A book or a goddamn youtube video is beyond hyperbolic and is simply extreme and absurd horseshit; anything further down the post just stinks of asspain.

lmao

That's yet for OP to tell us, otherwise its just as much projection on your part as you suppose he's indulging in. Your questioning his reputation is actually disgusting in a thread that has otherwise produced thoughtful replies.

Your melodrama is disgusting tbqh, don't lay it on so thick. I'll respond thoughtfully to a thoughtful post and not one which is majority bullshit.

>Stage 1: denial

One of the problems is that you actually have to be smart to recognize college's flaws, and most college students have mediocre intelligence. If you are average intelligence, then to you college, which is controlled by people with slightly above average intelligence, will seem scintillating.

>foreigners come to study for free and don't leave

What country is this?

...

join the military and get your education for free, fuck.

Probably some eurofaggot shithole

Nah, man, you've got it a bit mixed up. There is a strong regime in place, but the reason for book burning was that the people as a whole decided that they didn't want to "think critically," they didn't want to have to deal with subjects that were in the banned books, they just wanted to watch the wall tv all day with Jesus advertising his products. The government wasn't the catalyst, but it was more than happy to oblige the will of the people.

Argentina.

I think he is right. College can be great or awful at teaching things. I learned a lot more about history on my own than I ever did on school.

I would say that maybe some STEM fields are not as feasible to learn on your own, but STEM is hard science, so the facts are fact regardless of where you hear them.

I want to know why our country also suffers from this retarded "you HAVE to have a college degree to do ANYTHING" when most schools are free or heavily subsidized. I don't get it.

My paranoid brain thinks it must be that it's politician's families running the schools and keeping all the tax money that never gets used to improve the schools.

No, it was just a finishing school for the children of the rich, many of whom didn't even bother completing their studies. The main reason that, for example, the syllabi of most Oxford courses is basically ossified and about fifty years behind anywhere serious is that this situation continues. Academia only began being a place to think when it had to offer an objectively rigorous product in a competitive marketplace, where new-rich felt they could take education or leave it - most pre-20th century philosophy, for example, reads like /r9k/ posts.

Because Argentina

And

>politician's families running the schools and keeping all the tax money that never gets used to improve the schools.
This is factually true. The UBA specially is a BIG money (and money laundry) scheme.

>Two trends will cause a return to the classical education-as-self-improvement model.

Not even the rich want this any longer, though. I think you're being unduly optimistic.

No, it's a class system. Once you understand that America has a class system more restrictive than Europe's are now, everything will make a lot more sense to you.

>Your questioning his reputation

He doesn't have a "reputation", does he, this is an anonymous discussion.

Amazing how not even the anonymous system can't eliminate ad-hominem

>Not even the rich want this any longer, though. I think you're being unduly optimistic.
That's because they've become decadent and degenerate despite living in an increasingly meritocratic society. Watch as the resentful middle class seizes the opportunity to overthrow the current breed of elites.

Not that user, but there haven't been any ad hominem attacks in this thread. What was said was analysed. Only people who can't get into university think you can replace a degree with YouTube videos, and the rest is sour grapes.

But all the middle class resent is the lack of money. There is nobody beyond a residue of eccentrics who gives a tin shit about culture any longer, let's face it.

It was more of a general comment about the site in general than a direct response to that particular post desu

And maybe not with youtube videos alone, but the internet in general does contain more information than any book, simply because, well, you can find most if not all books ever written in here.

Yep. Here in Uruguay we used to recieve quite a lot of Chilenos due to our good public universities and the fact that they have entry exams and we do not.

I'm fairly sure this has always been the case with the general lower classes. And probably among the aristocracy too.

It is absolutely fucking retarded how we have absolutely no requirements from students at all. No entry exams, no minimum notes, we don't even fucking control whether they even assist to classes anymore.

We give them free education, we provide the materials, and even give them cash, and we literally expect nothing in return.

At least here in Argentina, it's pretty fucking stupid.

Criminals in the UBA XXII program can study whatever they want no matter their sentence or charges. Law, surgery, psychiatry, accounting (get the message, right?).

Well criminals do seem to make up a huge chunk of the population of Bs.As. Or that's the impression we get from the outside desu

And most everywhere, if I am to drop the smugness.

>going to a shit university to begin with
This is what you get when universities becomes privatized and for-profit. Worthless degrees with high student debts.

Also unironically this

I don' t think the UBA XXI is only for Bs As, AFAIK it works with the jails countrywide.

I've never heard of it here. And I do believe every province gets a certain degree of independence when it comes to education. But it is yet another online program so who knows, it might be.

Not the same user but the UBA has departments for distance learning even in Ushuaia, wouldn't surprise me if it exist there.

I minored in polishing because I love the art of politics, diplomacy, and history. Due to this, I read a lot of history and politics on my own time. I can tell you I never once felt engaged in any of my classes and never had to study because even the higher level classes were so easy that anyone with a basic political understanding of the topics' dearth could breeze through. I had one professor in the fall of 2016 who would just rant about Trump and our only test was naming countries on a fucking map. There were a lot of stupid people in that program.

Autocorrect *polisci

I majored in PENIS and got a job in PENIS

I hated it when I read it, but I was forced to read it as a freshman in high school. I'd probably appreciate it a lot more now.

desu in my experience the problem starts with highschool. I think only elementary should be mandatory, and high school should be closer to college in the way it works.

Most kids in high school hate going there. and they feel confident enough to challenge authority, so I was never able to learn a single thing there because it was impossible for any teacher to give a class.
I myself hated going to high school. I only liked biology and humanity classes, but I had to sit trough math and physics and stuff I didn't get nor wanted to get. I regret both not paying as much attention as I should of have, and knowing that even if I tried there was hardly a class to pay attention to most of the time anyway.

So I expend 7 years of my life going to a place I hated for no reason. If I went back now I feel I would be able to make a lot more out of it, and I think maybe it would of been a good idea to just let me and others realize the value of knowledge on my own and go there because I wanted to learn, rather than because I was told to. Highschool would be a lot more productive that way. Or that's what my dumbass thinks anyway.

Iktf

Bump.

Hopefully. Doing a maths degree right now and I can objectively say that well over half of the material is stuff we learned in highschool. As in, if I hadn't gone to a single lecture and done no reading beyond going over my highschool textbooks, I would've breezed through 3 of the 4 end-of-year exams. It's a joke that I'm forced to pay £££ for this '''education'''. Unis and HR departments are both scams, parasites leeching money from society by their cornering of the white-collar jobs market, and the sooner they collapse the better.

Surely someone has brought this up by now. Education should be as close to free as possible. I'm not referring to what socialists call "free college" but the rather basic principle of supply and demand. I assume there's plenty of people going to college, but does the "supply" of education really go down? What are the expenses to warrant $30,000 a year, per individual?

If we're keeping it purely US-focused. Wages in the US are stupidly high.

Knowledge was limited to a few and the source of it was the teacher who assimilated it and shared it. Then millenia later with technologies it's not the case anymore.

University is overrated mainly due to self denial of the university on itself and because $$$

>Society doesn't have a need for everyone having a post-secondary education
>Pajeetland and Chinkna have millions of millions of graduates
>millions keep going overseas to the already saturated Western countries because no jobs in home
This is gonna end bad.

VERY bad

>tfw spent 3-4 hours a day in highschool reading for pleasure (unrelated to school) or sleeping

what a waste

Everyone keeps denying that automation is a problem. All the denying is going to end up biting us in the ass harder than any global warming ever could.

Same. I felt really bad for the teachers too. Especially the music teacher, I think he ended up quitting his job because of the students.

29 years, Italian.
University degree at 25, architecture and construction engineering
I worked for three years in a professional studio that treated me like a slave underpaid without giving me opportunities for growth. Competition is huge and there are too many architecture studios, but only those with political recommendations get the best deals. It looks like a cliché, but my country is a sewer for these things. Clients were another pain in the ass because they delay payments pretty often.

Now I'm a teacher of secondary school, and it's not so bad. I do not earn much, but it's fine. I have more free time than a friends of mine who have studied too, but now work 8 hours in a factory.

I have to say, my degree has still served me something.

Bumpo

It's 8am, calm down.

It's 1 PM, my atlantic friend

Could be Greece, same exact thing happens here.

This is actually a common misconception, but I don't blame you for holding it, because the research against it is pretty new.

nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html

Ivy leagues and other "elite" universities that take "only the best students" and don't award merit scholarships because their "students are already meritorious" often have a clear, even overwhelming preference for students of wealthy families. I'd wager this is because in the United States, students and their families are forced to disclose their financial information before a decision is made by a university. They swear up and down that they don't consider money, but when the entire process is locked behind closed doors, they refuse to let any outsiders witness it if only to document it, and the results nevertheless end up like this, how can you trust them?

>the claim that one can learn more about a field by reading a, A book or a goddamn youtube video is beyond hyperbolic
Have you ever, like, been to university? In the United States, if you actually read the assigned textbook, you're doing more work than almost everyone else (you might be the only one doing that), and so you're practically guaranteed an A. Just one book on the subject might make you more knowledgeable than all others who claim to pursue this as their degree, their career, their passion! It won't make you an expert, but it will put you above many undergrads. It seems unbelievable, but it's far from hyperbolic.

Or maybe I was just studying a field full of retards. Psychology desu

> in the United States, students and their families are forced to disclose their financial information before a decision is made by a university. They swear up and down that they don't consider money

I've visited the sites of different universities in USA to look for postgraduate scholarships and they all said that before applying you must have the money to pay for the tution as if you didn't need the scholarship in case you weren't selected (except for specific nations like Haiti and some African countries). That scholarships and acceptance are first awarded to american nationals and none for foreigners.

Seemed strange with how /pol/ complains that foreigners receive scholarships to study in USA just for being foreigners

I could be. What makes you think this will not be the case? I am saying that the future will be catastrophic for universities, one way or the other. Attendance will surely drop by 90% or more, given enough time. But, unlike the OP, I argue that at the end of the day, higher education will still exist as a concept and still be pursued by some. I think it's a fairly conservative estimation, actually. But what makes you think that something else would happen? I'd like to hear your reasoning, because I could be mistaken.

>Seemed strange with how /pol/ complains that foreigners receive scholarships to study in USA just for being foreigners
WOAH. Where did they even get this? Often times from /pol/ I hear a craven politicization of facts, like using the lower IQ of a race as justification for eugenics/genocide or something, but rarely do I hear complete fabrications. And this is a complete fabrication, at least for US universities. Everyone who has ever talked to a foreign student even once realizes they're either an exchange (i.e., only here for a year and paying what they would pay at home), wealthy, or taking on a lot of debt. I had one peer who was literally like the son of an Iranian aristocrat. Drove a Ferrari. Another was like the son of a well-off Chinese businessman. Unlike Americans, they're not benefiting from state scholarships, in-state tuition, university merit-based scholarships, the Pell Grant, or anything. So most of the time, they're paying their own way.

I think self-education will continue as it always has, but I doubt that the institutions will ever again be somewhere to learn about the humanities, except in gated communities like the Ivies.

Too many people are getting into college. It should be the exclusive domain of landed elites.

It's /pol/. What did you expect?

Schooling and setting the mind straight can be very important. You can be an athlete with all the talent in the world but usually you'll need a coach to guide you and refine that talent. Same deal with education. Again the problem comes from a glut of college enrollment for monetary purposes lowering the standards, the takeover of academia by those on the far left and a moving away from the classical education curriculum, lack of focus on the Classics, etc.

Fuck off, commie.

...

>falling for the jew b8

There's also the social stygma

>if you don't have a 4 years bachelor + a 2 years masters AT LEAST you are a retarded nigger and should kill yourself

the self-education crowd isn't being realistic in this thread. Most people can't be expected to study in a dedicated way or learn all required information to be effective at a trade. You can't standardize society based on youtube lectures and posts you read on reddit

That's a good point. Though there could exist some kind of widely-accepted, populist alternative. Imagine Khan Academy or Lynda got university accreditation, or was allowed to award certificates. They might not be free services anymore, but they could still be standardized, curated, and significantly cheaper.

Depends on the job yo.
polisci and humanitites, basically anything non quantitative can be learned from a youtube video.
Also, the ones who do get a formal education in those fields aren't as educated as they like to think either.

See vid related
youtube.com/watch?v=EzCl0eWsbYY

>Max Boot
>Max Boot (born September 12, 1969) is an American author, consultant, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian.
>. He is now Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
>Boot wrote numerous articles with the CFR in 2003 and 2004.[15][16] The World Affairs Councils of America named Boot one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy" in 2004. He also worked as member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 2004.
>Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain in his 2008 United States presidential election bid
tl;dr Political elites are fucking retarded

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I thought his had a 20 freeze on topics! I leave you people for ten months and this is what I see....

U wot m8?

>can be learned from a youtube video.
The main problem with this line of thinking is that critical thinking skill aren't inherent (nor are they really taught during compulsory education), so self-educated people really have no way of knowing what they're doing. The possibility of learning complete bullshit far outweighs a a good self-education. Just look at /pol/, Sargon, Holocaust deniers, or anyone who posts redpilled information here. Most of those people genuinely think they're well informed and have a better sense of history than most people. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a real thing, and it makes good self-education almost impossible.

>implying info that is red pilled is inherently wrong
Not even a /pol/tard. If academics were as educated as they think, they would realize that there is no such thing as an objective historical record, just different events and perspectives to justify the popular ideological perspective of the time. Basically for social sciences and humanities you don't need any critical thinking, you just need to regurgitate what you're spoon fed.

>they would realize that there is no such thing as an objective historical record, just different events and perspectives to justify the popular ideological perspective of the time
That's the basis of postmodern thought in modern scholarship, which does exist. It's also something that most people here seem to hate exists.

But that's the thing, they don't practice what they preach. They push their own narratives including feminist perspectives, minority perspectives, and progressive perspectives. Instead turning post modern thought on their own biases, they end up perpetuating the cycle of one flawed ideology superseding another

>They push their own narratives
As part of a multivocal dialogue about history. The point of people narrowing their focus about a specific area like that is to cover a specific topic so it can be examined alongside other things. It's an attempt to get at those different perspectives you were talking about. If you don't realize that (or see how it's useful), and just whine about people discussing things you don't like, you're part of the problem you're talking about.

You can't have it both ways. It's ridiculous to complain that historians are supposedly regurgitating some kind of unified, spoon-fed narrative and criticize people for offering different perspectives.

>multivocal
>still suppresses dissent from their own ideological narrative
Nah, and that gets to the bottom of it right there. That whole attitude your post embodies is the reason why Trump got elected president