The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

It couldn't happen to a more deserving industry! The academy postures that they are an intellectual institution, above petty concerns like money and politics. They affect an air of philosophical detachment that in reality has not been the case since the 1960s...if ever.

Actually, the vast majority of its members are money grubbing champagne socialists, whose twin desires are to maximize income while minimizing actual productive work; and inculcating the mushy-headed undergraduates around them with the soft platitudes of communitarian, anti-market-economy, anti-freedom sensibilities that are accelerating America's decline into third-world authoritarian shithole status.

Imagine a work environment in which the greatest intellectual challenge one faces is to impress a bunch of 19-year-old, pimply-faced undergraduates of one's intellectual superiority. That is the lot of the typical college instructor and professor. And that supposed superiority is based in most cases on absolutely no real-world experience. The race hustle is the best example of this, as it is so often the professors with the least exposure to real America who rail against its structural racism. But business classes are taught by instructors who never worked in private industry, psychology classes are taught by people who have never provided therapy, and on and on. Of course the many "Studies" disciplines require no real-world experience, or for that matter any knowledge at all, because they are made-up nonsense!

And even assuming that these people have sufficient grasp of the topics at hand, so much of their class time is dedicated to a post-modern hellscape of racial, gender, sexual, class, ethnic divisions, and the pillorying of those whom they hold responsible...good old America and its evil market economy and its fixation on free speech and guns and liberty and autonomy.

College Enrollment Keeps Sliding Even Three Years After Lockdowns

Enrollment for most forms of postsecondary education in the United States continued to decline three years after nationwide lockdowns forced many students to temporarily continue their degrees online, according to a new analysis from the National Student Clearinghouse.

Public four-year institutions saw a 0.8% enrollment decline as of spring 2023, a somewhat less severe decrease than the 1.2% decline recorded in 2022 but more pronounced than the 0.3% decline in 2021 and the 0.2% decline in 2020. Private four-year nonprofit institutions meanwhile witnessed a 1.0% decrease in 2023, compared to the 1.2% decrease in 2022, the 0.4% decrease in 2021, and the 0.6% decrease in 2020.

Sure...engineering and the hard sciences are still mostly safe, but they too are under assault, and will probably not survive another generation of attacks from within. When 2+2=5 is taken seriously as an alternative, and admissions are no longer based on merit but on political reliability (read leftist), genitalia, and melanin, who is going to build our bridges in 40 years, assuming that we have the industrial capacity to provide the raw materials?

Add in the obscene cost of a typical undergraduate degree, and the calculation is clear. Oh, plan on paying for five years, because the typical university has structured its schedules so that it is almost impossible for all but the very dedicated student to complete the requirements of the typical degree in four years. Because they would rather spend money on new buildings and more administrators and professors who don't teach much, rather than instructors who do most of the teaching of undergraduates.

I hear that plumbers make a good living, and they don't have to deal with as much shit as the typical undergraduate does!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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