Usdk wrote:
It's obvious, but you won't get it past the special interest groups and dickhead politicians. Term Limits please.
Kayllaira wrote:
That's the most frustrating part, that it's such an obvious way to deal with the issue while still allowing us to get an education in fields that need educated workers. And that they just don't seem to see it.
1. Scientific education is hard and therefore unpopular with parents, students, and administrators.
2. Scientific education is technical and exclusive and therefore cannot attract a strong, politically motivated administrative constituency to advocate for it.
3. Scientific education affords graduates unparalleled mobility, and therefore people who have scientific education are hard to control and shake down for loan money after graduation.
4. Scientific education deals in tangibles and therefore scientific degrees cannot be printed like toilet paper, frustrating administrators and lenders.
5. Whites, Asians, Indians and men perform significantly better at math and science than blacks and women, and therefore the field is hugely unpopular in today's educational environment. To the extent that this is mutable through long-term, bottom-up efforts in primary and secondary education, short-sighted, basically lazy left-wing educators who overcompensate for their sexism and racism through PC prefer to "equalize outcomes" rather than work hard to fix the underlying causes.
The TLDR is that educational institutions prefer to take the Wal-Mart approach of marketing moon pies to the lowest common denominator rather than making a product that is worthwhile and risk pissing some constituency off or rocking the boat or telling people they can't have it all.
This is an attitude that pervades American society and corporate culture and I believe it ultimately comes back to currency valuation and how it allows institutions and individuals to ignore the fact that their policies fail at creating value. The net result is a society that seems to be nothing but a mass of rackets, and anyone actually interested in creating value finds themselves up against entrenched interests desirous to keep things just the way they are.
At least that's my interpretation.
PS: It's worth pointing out many of these same issues afflict Classical Studies and Accounting, because although they are not scientific fields, they deal in tangibles to a far, far greater extent than closely related fields such as Literature and Business Administration - this is why graduates with the latter two majors have skyrocketed while the former two have stagnated. I would say that is QED.
