Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Generation Terminus: University as Social Stratification Machine

ZH/Economic Collapse Blog: March 17, 2015
"Out of 22 countries, the report from the Educational Testing Service found that Americans were dead last in tech proficiency.  We were also dead last in numeracy and only two countries performed worse than us when it came to literacy proficiency…"

In a previous article, I highlighted some statistics from USA Today about the declining state of college education in America…

-“After two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.”
-“Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago”
-“35% of students report spending five or fewer hours per week studying alone.”
-“50% said they never took a class in a typical semester where they wrote more than 20 pages”
-“32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

"Parents should be screaming bloody murder about the quality of the education that their children are receiving."

Quite the contrary, today's parents look back fondly at their college days as the "best days" of their lives. As I've said before, College has devolved into a ludicrously expensive drunken frat party, interrupted by Ritalin-assisted sessions of rote memorization. 

Worse yet, in a marketing-based Corporatocracy, learning and knowledge are wholly downgraded. "Networking" with other like-minded sociopaths is by far the most important benefit conferred by a degree.

Barriers to Entry
And these ludicrous tuitions are the barriers to entry to the country club. After all, in a zero growth economy that has devolved into ever-fewer haves and ever-more have nots, there has to be some way of stratifying the masses and determining who will be the master and who will be the slave. The 'system' stopped being about education a long time ago at the same time that the focus of the economy shifted from making things to selling things. Engineers to salesmen. 

University today is not about education, it's strictly about social stratification. It's America's caste system.