The education bubble

[Brad Sallows]

Mere "tech savvy" does help.  I agree with Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over" themes, one of which is that people who can use tech to support their job will prosper more than people who cannot.

Still, I lament the basic innumeracy which plagues many.  There is a reason to learn basics before learning to use tech tools.

 

[GnyHwy]

While I agree with you wholeheartedly, we will inevitably be dealing with this in the CAF also, probably a lot already.

The introduction of new techy type equipment into our inventory has made or is making us change the way we do things; much to many people's dismay.

Just speaking on education and training, it is tough to still teach the basics when the techy stuff needs to be taught in addition to the basics and no additional time is allotted to the courses.  Good thing distant online learning enables us to practice hands on drills with a mouse.  ;D

 

[The_Falcon]

This was posted on the FP site at the end of February, it's still up so I am reposting here

http://business.financialpost.com/2015/02/24/is-university-or-college-worth-the-investment-be-careful-who-you-listen-to/

Is university or college worth the investment? Be careful who you listen to







Republish Reprint








Kyle Prevost, Special to Financial Post | February 24, 2015 3:21 PM ET
More from Special to Financial Post
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If you’re a young Canadian, then do go to school to pursue a career you have a passion for, regardless of the financial outcomes. Go to attain a credential that will help you in life. Don’t go as a default option because your university-educated parents thought it was a good idea to “find yourself” there.

FotoliaIf you’re a young Canadian, then do go to school to pursue a career you have a passion for, regardless of the financial outcomes. Go to attain a credential that will help you in life. Don’t go as a default option because your university-educated parents thought it was a good idea to “find yourself” there..



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If you want a top-notch education, several Ivy League schools now offer many of their first- and second-year courses online for the bargain rate of free. On the other hand, if you want a credential that will financially benefit you for the rest of your life, you had better make sure you understand exactly what the market is for that credential.

Relying on a broad average that distorts the specific truth that will apply to you – is a quick path to disappointment for today’s high school graduates.

A recent Financial Post article comparing the financial proceeds of a university education with the investment returns one could realize by simply investing the tuition money and going to work – instead of trekking off to the ivory tower of academia – was thought-provoking.

The premise that university-related costs are rapidly reaching a tipping point due to an inflation rate roughly triple that of the rest of society over the last couple of decades is a solid one. The accompanying analysis may have failed to consider a few variables however.

The “$1.4-million-dollar promise” made by Council of Ontario Universities is similar to the “million-dollar promise” made by Association of Colleges and Universities of Canada. My belief is that both promises are somewhat embarrassing advertising claims put forth by institutions that require higher standards of academic integrity from their students. There is no mention, for example, of the skyrocketing number of students with university degrees who are now flooding college classrooms across Canada. Nor is there any sort of useful data for specific degrees – only averages that lump together graduate students with basic four-year options.

Ken Coates and Bill Morrison, two accomplished academics who have written extensively on university life in Canada, explained in a published article that it is statistically dishonest to directly compare college and university earners based solely on recent survey outcomes. Why?  If all highly motivated individuals with solid social support structures are encouraged to go to university in Canada then what you’re actually comparing – with these “million-dollar promise” statistics – is the outcome of a lot more than a university education versus “other.”


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It would be more accurate to compare university students to a test group of students that could have entered and succeeded at university but instead chose not to. One could assume the average income of this group of individuals would be substantially higher than the overall average of high school graduates.

Mr. Coates and Mr. Morrison take a closer look at the range of earnings statistics that go into the averages that these institutions of higher marketing love to proclaim.

It turns out that the average income for university graduates aged 26 to 35 is $42,176 – not a bad deal, but certainly less than most would expect. The same data set points out that a female student with an undergraduate degree in English makes less than a male who has attained only a high school diploma ($30,762 versus $32,343). Even STEM degrees are no sure thing as physics graduates earned $40,216 and $31,545 for men and women respectively.

Meanwhile, a high school graduate who understands the job market, gets into the workforce much earlier, and invests their nest egg of non-tuition properly, can make our comparison much closer. An even more financially rewarding choice would include looking at time-efficient trade school programs that the workforce is currently demanding. Lumping together all college and/or certificate programs makes about as much sense as averaging out our film studies students with our surgeons and MBA grads.

Roughly 60% of Canadian students graduate with debt these days and the average debt load is $28,000 according to the Canadian Federation of Students. If we’re to accurately compare financial scenarios we must take into consideration the debt paid on these student loans (prime + 2.5% for the federal portion), as well as the opportunity cost of not getting into the fast lane of compound interest sooner (due to paying off student loans and student credit card balances for years after graduation).

Frankly, it is extremely hard to control enough variables to give a definitive answer to the question: Do all university degrees allow you to come out ahead? Not all degrees are created equal, but not all diplomas, certificates, and high-school-educated entrepreneurs are created equal either.

If you’re a young Canadian, then do go to school to pursue a career you have a passion for, regardless of the financial outcomes. Go to attain a credential that will help you in life. Don’t go as a default option because your university-educated parents thought it was a good idea to “find yourself” there, because you think it’s the only way to make a dollar, or because you thought it was the only place that had cold beer available.

Kyle Prevost is a business teacher and personal finance writer helping people save and invest at MyUniversityMoney.com and YoungandThrifty.ca. His co-authored book, More Money for Beer and Textbooks, is available in bookstores and on Amazon

 

[GnyHwy]

Here you go, free as it gets. Probably costs a significant amount of time and the piece of paper saying you graduated will probably cost you too.  ;D

"Lecture 1 | Modern Physics: Classical Mechanics" - Leonard Susskind (Stanford). 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyX8kQ-JzHI

 

[a_majoor]

While the American Interest is obviously reporting about US Institutions, I have anacdotal evidence that the same attitudes infest the Canadian Universities that I can observe (Queen's and UWO), and I suspect this is probably true of other Canadian Universities as well (particularly the ones which allow more extreme "Progressive" behaviour like sanctioned anti semetism, supressing free speech if it is against leftist tropes and so on). WRM makes a very good case that this is not only counter productive, but actively dangerous:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/23/the-wrong-time-to-coddle/

The Wrong Time to Coddle

Our classrooms have become more and more like cocoons just as the real world has become harsher. A piece in the NYT this weekend highlighted how sensitive students have become to anything that challenges their beliefs or makes them uncomfortable—and how far colleges have gone to accommodate them. That piece has already gotten a lot of attention, but here’s a follow-up to it, about one of the examples mentioned in the NYT piece (h/t Matt Yglesias):


"All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance. […]

There are literally dozens of articles and books I thought nothing of teaching, 5-6 years ago, that I wouldn’t even reference in passing today. I just re-read a passage of Late Victorian Holocausts, an account of the British genocide against India, and, wow, today I’d be scared if someone saw a copy of it in my office."

These pieces, and others like them, are signs of a pushback against the infantilization of the university. But there’s still a long way to go before the cocoon culture rebalances itself—and the forces of prudish repression and PC lunacy remain strong.

But at the same time, some new studies paint a dark picture of the global trends. After a long period of time during which the world was getting less violent, world events are now going the other way. More people are being displaced and more are dying in wars as the world becomes a nastier place to live in. For instance, an Australian think tank called the Institute for Economics and Peace argues that violence has been rising globally since 2007, and that the world’s worst conflicts saw almost 30 percent more deaths in 2014 than the year before.

Between the infantilizing of campus culture and the growing global harshness, something has to give and—hint, hint—it won’t be the real world. The worst thing about the current climate of PC stupidity and mandatory cocooning on campus isn’t the ugly repression it entails. The destruction of free speech and free debate in the institutions that ought to be the citadels of intellectual liberty is a terrible thing and a horrible betrayal of everything universities are supposed to be about. But there is yet a worse consequence: the catastrophic dumbing down and weakening of a younger generation that is becoming too fragile and precious to exist in the current world—much less to fight the real evils and dangers that are growing.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Well, as long as you're not 'religious' all should go well  ;D

Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent?

Understanding the negative relationship between IQ and religiosity

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201312/why-are-religious-people-generally-less-intelligent

Catching up on my Xmas readings, I dived into the recent meta-analysis(link is external) on the negative correlation between IQ and religious beliefs, which, at least in my case, makes sense: I am highly religious but not very intelligent… or is it the other way around? [Sorry, I’m not smart enough to figure it out].

The paper has very few methodological weaknesses, but as we know correlation does not mean causation – though correlations do have causes. 

The key question, then, is why religious people are generally less intelligent. And the authors did not shy away from the answer, offering three compelling explanations:

(1) Intelligent people are generally more analytical and data-driven; formal religions are the antithesis: they are empirically fluffy and their claims are often in direct contradiction with scientific evidence, unless they are interpreted metaphorically – but maybe intelligent people are not that keen on metaphor. Another way of putting it is that people with a high IQ are more likely to have faith in science, which isn’t religion’s best friends (yes, yes, I do know about Einstein’s quotes).


(2) Intelligent people are less likely to conform, and, in most societies, religiosity is closer to the norm than atheism is. Although this interpretation is based on extrapolation, it still makes sense: first, smarter people tend to be less gullible; second, in most societies religious people outnumber atheists and agnostics - though global levels of religiosity have been declining(link is external), and there is substantial cultural variability(link is external) in religiosity levels.

(3) Intelligence and religiosity are “functionally equivalent”, which means that they fulfil the same psychological role. Although this intriguing argument contradicts points 1 and 2, it deserves serious consideration. Humans will always crave meaning. Religion – like science and logical reasoning – provides them with a comprehensive framework or system to make meaningful interpretations of the world. At times, religion and science are in conflict; but they can also act in concert, complementing each other to answer non-falsifiable and falsifiable questions, respectively. The authors conclude that some people satisfy their desire to find meaning via religion, whereas others do so via logical, analytical, or scientific reasoning – and IQ predicts whether you are in the former or latter group.

 

[a_majoor]

Frankly that is the most nonsensical thing I have seen in a long time.

Religion and science are two different things (and philosophically they can be thought of as complimentary; Science looks at "How" things are the way they are while Religion looks at "Why" things are the way they are). Many of the greatest minds in science were also very religious people, (indeed in the early enlightenment Natural Philosophy, as Science was then known, was often used as a means of glorifying the Creator), which suggests that intelligence isn't positively or negatively coupled to religion at all.

This is much like the study that purported to prove that conservatives were "less intelligent" than liberals, and I suspect that the same sort of methodology may have been used as well.

Of course since this supports the "narrative" then it will be endlessly circulated and quoted to prop up the Progressive worldview and shout down anyone who is religious and entering the public square to participate in debate or political office.

 

[GnyHwy]

I would simplify the crap out this and ask one question.  What do you spend your time thinking about each day?

If the answer is math facts, sciences and writing, you'll probably do pretty well on an IQ test.  If it is anything other than that, probably not.

But an IQ test alone is somewhat one dimensional.  There are many other attributes that could be chalked up as intelligence.

I can't help but think about the show "Canada's Smartest Person".  I think they may be on to something. Of course they could probably ramp it up a notch two, but they would probably sacrifice home participation and entertainment value to do it (gotta pay the bills).

 

[a_majoor]

The State of Nevada comes up with a workable means of getting more educational choice to parents. A similar program would also work to lower health care costs, when people actually get "market" information (in the form of how much they have to pay) for various services, and can choose among "vendors":

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/208592

BETTING ON SCHOOL CHOICE: Clint Bolick explains Nevada’s new “Education Savings Account.”

ESAs allow parents to pull their children out of public schools and put the allotted tax dollars toward an education they prefer. This makes the phrase “school choice” a reality.

Unlike vouchers, which make public dollars available only for private-school tuition, the savings accounts can be used for a range of educational options, for private schools or distance learning, tutoring, computer software, educational therapies, public-school classes and activities, and community college classes. Any money left after graduation can be put toward college. This will give Nevada parents more than $5,000 to work with. . . .

The emergence of education savings accounts may mark the beginning of the end for an ossified education-delivery system that is has changed little since the 19th century. It begins an important shift of government from a monopoly provider of education into an enabler of education in whatever form or forum it most benefits the child.

 

[kratz]

Reference:  CBC.ca : NSCC instructor frustrated with 'entitled' students

This college instructor is adding to the discussion.

<snip>

High school students are being "coddled" when it comes to assignment deadlines, according to one instructor at the Nova Scotia Community College.

Steffie Hawrylak-Young has been teaching communications at NSCC for almost 30 years. She says in the last decade, there has been a shift in how her students adjust to college learning — and it's not good.

"A lot of our young students are very entitled. They have probably been used to getting a badge for every single little thing that they do, and they're very disappointed when they're being critiqued," said Hawrylak-Young.

"In many of our businesses and industries, performance evaluation is very real, and they seem to have a hard time accepting that their performance is not there yet."

Deadlines optional in some schools

Hawrylak-Young suggests that high school teachers are allowing students to hand in assignments weeks or even months late. When students expect the same treatment in her class, she says they get a rude awakening.

"The late assignments just become bundled up and they never ever have a chance to get the feedback they need to improve for the next assignment. Further to that, it's a little disappointing when they don't care to improve," said Hawrylak-Young.

"Maybe they've been coddled. Maybe they've been allowed to make mistakes without consequences."

</snip>

 

[ueo]

Add to this sense of entitlement the fact that most high school grads and many university grads read and write at a significantly lower level relying on spellcheck and grammar checks to get a paper that somewhat resembles English/French, we have an almost perfect storm of institutionalised and accepted illiteracy. Does not bode well for the future IMHO.

 

[mariomike]

Aug 31, 2016

Peel School Board:

1) Launches gender-neutral washrooms.

2 ) Ban students and staff from wearing clothing with logos that may be “hurtful and offensive.” Logos for the Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins are all expected to be banned by the end of this year.

3 ) The board will also tackle the controversial issue of the black-male experience in the education system. Education Director Tony Pontes said these students are too often streamed into non-academic courses and are more likely to be suspended or expelled.
http://www.680news.com/2016/08/31/peel-school-board-launches-gender-neutral-washrooms-new-directives/

Same day in the news,
http://www.680news.com/2016/08/31/half-of-ontario-grade-6-students-failed-to-meet-provincial-math-standard/
Half of Ontario Grade 6 students failed to meet provincial math standard

 

[Ostrozac]

2 ) Ban students and staff from wearing clothing with logos that may be “hurtful and offensive.” Logos for the Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins are all expected to be banned by the end of this year.

I feel for the Kansas City Chiefs. Only one Super Bowl, and they have so few fans that their jerseys aren't even worthy of being banned.

 

[ModlrMike]

2 ) Ban students and staff from wearing clothing with logos that may be “hurtful and offensive.” Logos for the Chicago Blackhawks, Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins are all expected to be banned by the end of this year.

Where in the Charter does it protect the right to not be offended?