Jay DeVoy is an attorney focusing on First Amendment issues and regular contributor to the award-winning law blog The Legal Satyricon.
I recently convinced a family member not to return to school for a Master of Arts degree, arguing that the diploma – and the tens of thousands of dollars in debt it entailed – would not make my relative more marketable. Having done my good deed for the month, I was puzzled how this person came to believe that an M.A. would lead to a j-o-b.
There are many causes underlying this belief. First, the nation’s largest employer, the Federal Government, awards additional points to advanced degrees under its employee candidate scoring rubric. Second, there is the misconception promulgated by self-interested educators that more education in a particular field is desirable at the entry level, despite the obvious disconnect between education and practice in most fields. (Engineers seem to have a marked advantage in this area.) Finally, as every degree’s value is debased by dubious online and for-profit schools, the ease of earning a Master’s creates a race to the bottom where everyone wants one in order to appear competitive in the job market. After all, it only costs the student time, since they’re not paying for it now, or possibly ever, as already-underreported default rates for federally subsidized student loans continue to rise. Frontline thoroughly addressed this issue recently.
None of this, however, truly examines why the Master’s degree is – or is perceived to be – so valued. If the M.A. didn’t confer a benefit onto its recipients, nobody would want it. This is true of all educational degrees, even if the benefit of their completion is merely the social currency of attending the “right” school. Nevertheless, economic analysis has shown some degrees, such as the MBA, to be worthless. The value of any degree is clustered in favor of the elite, as seen by the earnings and job offers conferred upon Ivy League and equivalent undergraduate schools, the top 14 (t14) law schools, and the top seven (M7) business schools. Everyone else pays as much as an elite degree costs, as there is relatively little price discrimination among schools, without receiving commensurate benefits.
Degrees of any kind serve as proxies for native intelligence, but especially advanced degrees, as college has metastasized into an extended high school experience. The correlation between a degree and intelligence has been overestimated in recent decades, though, because employers have been stripped of other tools on which to evaluate potential employees.
The Federal Government Unwittingly Adds a Step.
In Griggs v. Duke Power Company, the Supreme Court ruled that Duke Power’s requirement of a high school diploma or passing of a standardized general intelligence test for employment or transfer of jobs was unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 401 U.S. 424 (1971). The facts of Griggs specifically dealt with the racial impact Duke Power’s employee testing policy had on black employees as opposed to white ones, which was prohibited under Title VII. This same section of Title VII, however – § 703(h) – addresses discrimination along gender lines as well.
[It is not] an unlawful employment practice for an employer to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
No reasonable person can quarrel with the Court’s intentions in reaching its outcome, as eliminating racial animus is an important goal for national cohesion. The end result, however, is that general tests of intelligence cannot be used to grant or deny employment by employers covered under Title VII. Instead, the court held that only task-specific tests could be used:
What Congress has commanded is that any tests used must measure the person for the job and not the person in the abstract.
In the interest of clarity, Title VII defines employer in 42 U.S.C. § 2000e as “a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year,” including his or her agents, with certain exceptions. Not every business is affected by this restriction, but almost all large companies and a great many “small” businesses are.
The Current Paradigm, a/k/a “Your Degrees, Please.”
The worthy desire to eradicate racial discrimination has carried unintended consequences. Aptitude and fitness for many jobs, particularly in today’s service-oriented economy, elude reliable and effective testing. Even if those skills could be tested and quantified, a risk averse large employer would want to avoid testing and potentially inviting a Griggs-style lawsuit.
This leads to hiring based upon the next best available source of information about competency: Educational attainment. In addition to spawning the higher education market discussed above, it has given rise to the lucrative test prep and admissions consulting machine, which adds thousands of dollars in costs to the application process.
Our credentialing system has created a feedback loop that disadvantages men. More women now hold post-secondary degrees than men, a trend that will continue as women continue to swamp men in college admissions. For example, women outnumber men in the University of Florida’s incoming class, a trend seen nationwide at other well-regarded schools such as the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. A prerequisite for any kind of graduate degree, women are leading men in obtaining Bachelor’s degrees for reasons that have been more thoroughly discussed elsewhere and are beyond the scope of this discussion. The end result is clear, though — men are structurally disadvantaged under the current regime and will continue to be well into the future.
In a broad sense, change may be afoot. Recent decisions such as Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), show the court’s tension over identity preferences, and Ricci v. DeStefano, ___ U.S. ___, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), specifically addressed Title VII, shining light on the murky relationship between the Civil Rights Act’s disparate impact standard and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment (noted in Scalia’s concurrence). All of this, however, is orthogonal to the issue of intelligence testing as an alternative to time-consuming, life-delaying and costly credentialing procedures. The emphasis on educational credentialing is particularly damaging in our under-regulated educational environment, which rewards hucksters for parting taxpayers with their money under the promise than an 18-year-old will someday, somehow, pay it back. Moreover, it creates a closed system where men face substantial obstacles to economically compete with women, if they are not excluded from competition entirely.
In this economy, job prospects for recent graduates are comparable to those of people who never pursued higher education. The latter camp at least avoided the college debt trap, and can always go back later in life when universities will still exist, and possibly with more competitive price structures in response to the smoldering student loan crisis. Despite decades of conventional wisdom favoring education, now might be the best time to not go to college.
Among those most harmed by the current system are smart people who don’t enjoy learning in a classroom. Who can blame them? From high school onward, learning seemingly is of secondary importance to social preening and consumerism within educational institutions. The work, in the form of problem sets, “reflection papers” and group projects – where a few do the labor of many for equally shared credit – is often unpleasant or pointless. In an upside-down post-Griggs world, people who don’t participate in or enjoy those activities are considered dumb or low-class by the yuppie influentsia, while their college-educated peers vie for a cubicle job to service an enormous debt load and discuss People Magazine on their 35-minute lunch breaks. In my experience, business owners and managers without formal education beyond high school have been able to run circles around me in their areas of expertise. Yet, without entrepreneurialism, it’s uncertain whether they would have fared as well as they have in a world so obsessed with college degrees.
The problems of excessive higher education have been clear for some time. While there are many causes, few realize that the nation’s highest court played some role in creating the system we have today. While the Supreme Court decided Griggs with noble intentions, the long-term effects of its decisions have quietly come to impose a cost on men and their ambitions.
{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }
I cannot really think of anything that would benefit the country greater than getting the government out of the business of subsidizing higher education. The original purpose of the University was scholarship not vocational training. It was for people who had a taste for learning, for Aristotle – not “necessarily” trying to get along in the world. Here is a quote by the great Kenneth Minogue about the Univerities:
As the classic formulation had it, universities are distinguished by the “disinterested pursuit of truth” – a somewhat risky pursuit at times. Amid the current vulgarity, many students would not even understand the word “disinterested.” Scholarship and reflection can certainly be found patchily all over the place, but all too many professors are merely peddling some form of political salvationism. Universities used to be stocked by the unworldly and the rich. Both sets of people were valuable because they were not trying to “get on” by trying to please future employers. This gave the academic world in earlier times a sense of adventure, of openness.
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Universities up here in Canada are not really all that great a deal unless you are going in to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer or pharmacist. I think the best bang for the buck are the tech schools such as NAIT or SAIT. You education is done in two years and you are ready to go to work immdiately as you have likely done a paid co-op term with an employer as part of your coursework.
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“While the Supreme Court decided Griggs with noble intentions, the long-term effects of its decisions have quietly come to impose a cost on men and their ambitions.”
There is no reason to believe that the intentionns of the Supreme Court were noble.
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Since Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 score better on the SAT than Blacks from families with incomes over $70,000, the Supreme Court and the politicians who advocated the disparate impact standard are part of a criminal cabal that what to impose totalitarian regime that ignores biological reality. Their first target was White people in general; now they have narrowed the focus to White men.
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What was the standardized general intelligence test? If a certain level of ability (or at least average IQ) is required for a particular job, but it is inconveniently failed by a certain group of people, does that make the test wrong? I do get a bit tired of the “no fair!” argument, really. Tough shit if you fail; that’s life. You want Homer Simpson (whatever race or sex version of him) in charge of safety at the nuclear power plant, or someone who could get more than 50 on an IQ test?
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No reasonable person can quarrel with the Court’s intentions in reaching its outcome, as eliminating racial animus is an important goal for national cohesion.
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Then count me as unreasonable. Many of the self-made men in the 19th century thought college was for sissy’s, they thought you should be earning money in your youth and college only got in the way. I dont know why an employer would not be interested in a prospective employees intelligence, nor does it seem to me that national cohesion (an undefinable goal) should trump the independence and competence of institutions and corporations to achieve their private goals. The ruling says a lot more about the values of the supreme court than the constitution. Basically the point of the game is this:
We must annihilate any form of “privilege”, honestly earned or not; so much so that it is most important for corporations and private associations to have the correct compositions of ethnicity than to actually produce a profit. Whether or not people in the lower classes would be better off if the government didnt get involved in such matters is irrelevant, our envy stands in the way.
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before the higher education act, many CEOs only had a high school diploma.
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I’d like to comment on several things in this well written article.
“Finally, as every degree’s value is debased by dubious online and for-profit schools”
While this can be true, the reality is that many of the online and for-profit schools actually give their graduates a bigger bang for their buck than do traditional brick-and-mortar schools with more up to date training, less time on things that don’t pertain to the degree, and an opportunity to work at their own pace. And, one generally side-steps the political correctness courses and atmosphere as well. Thus, they are more cost effective.
Another issue is the “accreditation” of the school. This was supposed to mean something back in the 1960s when it began as a sort of reform movement to more or less guarantee that schools actually taught what they claimed. Now it is another scam whereby the schools pay big bugs for their accreditation which is then used as a marketing tool to show they are somehow better than an unaccredited school.
This is so even though accreditation is “voluntary”, though one one not necessarily know this from licensing acts which require one graduate from an accredited institution. So the scam skews education in favor of the schools which can meet the unrealistic goals of accrediting agencies in favor of big education.
In many countries your degree is your license. In America the whole process has become skewed with licensing, accreditation, certification, CEUs, etc. All of which cause a higher financial burden upon the student without any real benefit, other than another piece of paper to hang on the wall to impress the unknowing.
The fact is that most educational institutions in America don’t care whether their grads get a job or not (regardless of their claimed placement activities). They want the student’s and government’s money in exchange for shoddy education, and further indoctrination into feminism, homosexuality, marxism, and other “progressive” isms.
One final comment as regards women’s degrees.
“More women now hold post-secondary degrees than men, a trend that will continue as women continue to swamp men in college admissions. ”
Is this really true? By numbers it is definitely true. If one, however, looks at what these women are studying, one will find that they are in large garbage degrees. Women’s studies, ecological science, and what have you that are politically correct subjects that have no real correlation to the real world. Nevertheless, these women students flood the coffers of the universities with massive amounts of money to promote such garbage.
For some reason I have not seen anyone notice this fact. I doubt very much that women are “out-performing” men in colleges. They are taking garbage and soft-science courses. Then they bemoan the fact that they can’t get a job with their worthless degrees.
Men, on the other hand, are interested in JOBS, earning a living, and providing for a family. A college degree is supposed to lead a man to a job, a profession. Not a feel good degree that is otherwise worthless. So men go into trades, or college career tracks that lead somewhere – accounting, engineering, medicine, aeronautics, etc.
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I can honestly say i use my liberal arts background to experience success in my field. But I had to attend a specialized vocational school as well.
But for many, getting the degree to get a job does not even out in the cost-benefit analysis. I think it would be advisable for men to look at higher education as learning a trade or a profession. So, choose the educational path that is going to most efficiently lead to a trade or a profession you’re interested in. Once you have marketable skills and a job, you can pursue the personal development-type stuff as you wish.
I actually know several men who graduated from two-year trade school or computer certification programs and have good, secure jobs now. And in their off time, they pursue the arts, music, reading, or whatever else interests them.
Another smart thing a few of my college friends did was set up a course of study that combined career-oriented classes with personal enrichment stuff. One guy created a double major of Political Science & Hotel Restaurant Management. One girl I dated for a short time was a Dental Hygiene major and paired it with an art history minor.
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The IQ test is still around in one sector – albeit a bit disguised. The Armed Services use a heavily loaded g-factor IQ test called the ASVAB to screen recruits and determine potential career paths.
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Using the letter of the law to defeat the spirit of the law seems to be the favorite vocation for feminists and liberals.
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Good essay and timely for me personally as I have two college age sons. Liberal arts degrees are worthless but funny that holders of those degrees end up in HR where they decide the fate of men who attained engineering degrees.
Now it is true that many business owners and entrepreneurs have limited degrees or non at all, and they are a different beast.
However, I have special enmity for non-degreed “engineers” who are cubicle competitors. These guys are notorious for screwing you over for the simple reason that a guy with a degree can find another job if he gets canned but the non-degree engineer will have a hard time convincing a potential employer of his skills. If you run into one of these types watch out as they are highly skilled at survival tactics, such as setting you up to fail by witholding critical information or flat out lying to you and about you. In every case I have had to deal with them I have gotten shanked.
Given availability of online tech programs from most state universities as well as community college programs, there is no excuse for not having some credentials if you want to work in tech. If you don’t have the papers, go out and pay the bribes and get them.
And spare me the anecdotes about non-degreed engineers who outperformed guys with “fancy degrees”. I can assure you that their success was due to politicing and deviousness, with a small dose of technical competency to mask their true nature.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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The IQ test is still around in one sector – albeit a bit disguised. The Armed Services use a heavily loaded g-factor IQ test called the ASVAB to screen recruits and determine potential career paths.
I took that test when I was 18 after a night of heavy drinking with my friends. During break I puked in the restroom. Still got a pretty high score but the Army put me in the company of drooling morons. I read somewhere that when Ralph Nader was drafted they made him a cook.
Well, maybe my point is that often in life your fate is determined by “gatekeepers” who are very often resentful of your intellect and education. You will find these people processing your paperwork while having the authority to funnel you to your assignment. Think HR.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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One girl I dated for a short time was a Dental Hygiene major and paired it with an art history minor.
My sister used to tell people she was pre-med with a minor in high fashion.
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Lets see, what do Bill Gates and Rush Limbaugh have in common besides being rich?
Several years ago, we had a long discussion on the benefits of going to a tech school, and learning heating and cooling, and billing Ph.D’s $80 an hour to fix their a/c.
I warn men who are considering college to go to a business which hires the degree they seek. If all the employees are dearies, but one or two men who look as if they are wearing Victoria’s Secret under their trousers, seek a different degree, or you will be working construction.
Back in the 80′s, my local newspaper printed a filler one day, never repeated, which said a major study had showed that degree holders tended to make pretty much what their non-degreed siblings made.
It is social class. Kennedy’s get a big diploma and make millions, because they have connections who own everything. You get a college degree, you tend to make what your social class makes.
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About the Army et al, to be fair, I was half the problem in every situation.
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@Unlce Elmer
Which engineering field are you in?
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Er, Uncle Elmer.
About your “pre-med with a minor in high fashion”. You were working on your BA. She was looking for her MRS.
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Uncle Elmer –
I managed to land a pretty good job (calibrations) and I scored in the 98th percentile after a day of no sleep and just coming off a shift at work. Also, I’d been dropped out of high school for over a year at that point, so my math was pretty rusty. Either way, I got partly lucky by having a good recruiter. I say “partly” because I was doing my homework and fact-checking everything he was telling me. They tried to screw me out of my job at the MEPS (paperwork my recruiter sent through must have gotten lost in the shuffle or what not) but I knew my rights and was prepared to walk if they didn’t want to hold to their end of the bargain.
TL;DR – people who complain about getting screwed by recruiters probably didn’t do enough of their own homework.
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The benefits of a college degree are:
1) You learn about the politics of kissing ass while interacting with professors.
2) You make early contacts with people entering a similar field.
3) If a certian employer/corporate culture holds the college degree in high esteem, you’re more likely to get the job.
4) You’ve proven to said employer that you posess a certian amount of discipline and patience for attaining a degree.
The actual material taught typically has a limited connection to any real world experience. Real world experience is 95% being liked and getting along with people, and 5% functional work. It’s important that you look good, sound good, align yourself politically with the right people and tow the company line. You’re a box on an org chart. No one expects you to be or do anything special. Don’t be controversial. Don’t make waves. Don’t be a hero. No one cares about what you think or even whether you think at all, just because you have an MBA. Mediocrity is rewarded. Standing out is punished.
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I recently read where the student-loan industry was a horrible trap…the loan people know students will default, but they get bailed out by the government akin to Fannie Mae…and they STILL go after the students; they’ve lobbied to make student loans harder and harder to default on.
I like my degree but in retrospect I could have written and acted just as well without it.
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As a PhD student in pure math, I have to say: arts degrees are worthless, hard science degrees get you jobs.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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My father was born in 1930, graduated from the 6th grade, and I graduated 4rth in my class in one of those high paid professions. And, I have worked steadily, for 8 years two jobs, and made it to the top of my profession.
He, at every stage of his life had more money, assets and less debt than me. I am 50 and still owe 50K in student loans. My dad worked very hard, but he was his own boss and, at my age, the toll that it takes on you to continue to be mediocre to get along is far worse for my health than my dad’s hard work was on his.
Plus, because of my degree, I have lived with a target on my back for every grifter (women) in town. So, I have, until I gave up on American women entirely a few years ago, been constantly fleeced so I have no assets (I include family court costs in this fleecing). I remember one time with my ex-wife where she spent so much money in one shopping spree she literally hyperventalated and we had to go for a walk.
All in all I would have been better off a plumber. My plumber friends have more real wealth, assets, can go on better vacations, have more toys, cars, boats than I do.
So, when you take everything into account, I would have been better off dropping off grid like my dad and working under the table.
To take it one step further, and kinda joking, maybe men are better off on the dole so all these advanced degreed young women can support us through their taxes.
Now that’s equality I can support.
And my dad never paid taxes, ever. He loved that.
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Who the hell honestly thinks a degree proves dick in today’s world? I’ve seen intl. students who had a plagiarism service hotline as one of the numbers in their cell phone address books, and students who wrote with English worse than that of the average 10th-grader. Get real.
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Here is an interesting thought…
There have been a lot of articles in the news lately about how more women than men have been enrolling in University. I wonder if this is even a problem at all. Is it possible that most men do not see the value in a univeristy education and are simply going other routes?
I am in the construction field. Our upper management all the way to the CEO tend to be a mix of Professional Engineers (4 years University) and Construction Engineering Techs (2 years of NAIT/SAIT). Why got he extra two years if it does not gain you anything?
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International students nothing: I’ve seen college students born and raised in the US who speak and write English worse than your average foreign student. So far as the plagarism: I’ve seen that as well. I’ve seen students in their senior year, 3 classes from graduating get busted for plagarizing. You could tell they were plagarizing, because everything they wrote that wasn’t plagarized, was unintelligible.
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Could you point out where you were able to derive the data from that showed the data by race and income like that? I’ve been over to NCES, and they go in blocks of 20K, starting at 20K. Plus, I don’t think any of their standard tables group by race and income. Did you use one of the dynamic data tools on their site? If so could you tell me which one and what info you used to get your figures. Thanks.
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“Men, on the other hand, are interested in JOBS, earning a living, and providing for a family. A college degree is supposed to lead a man to a job, a profession. Not a feel good degree that is otherwise worthless. So men go into trades, or college career tracks that lead somewhere –accounting, engineering, medicine, aeronautics, etc.”
Ha good point. I would however extend what men do.. We shouldn’t neglect to include the rich scientists in the 1600′s and 1700′s who werent bound by the practical need of a job and were free to their musings and investigations. Alot of those intellectuals had little to no practical concern but look what they did. I’m so impressed that many of these geniuses’ devouring and pursuits (philosophy, science, art, poetry, mathematics, and religion) in all kinds of knowledge rather then specializing.
So I would generally describe the good chatcter of men as driven, adventurous, and musers.
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I got a degree in Electrical Engineering.
I learned real stuff that I needed to know on the job: linear algebra, device physics, compiler design, electrical circuits, calculus, programming, algorithms, logic and reasoning.
It paid off in a big way. I’m in middle management now in a major semiconductor company and making more money that I could have ever forecasted. I enjoy my work and I work with great people. And I never got married, so I spend the money on myself: travel, motorcycles, hobbies, sports cars, and still save tons.
The degree and the skills I learned while I obtained it opened tons of doors for me.
Of course, it was a “hard science” degree and not in something useless like sociology, art or Asian studies.
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@Angelo: “Is it possible that most men do not see the value in a univeristy education and are simply going other routes?”
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ladies and gentlemen, I beleive we have a winner.
Of course, there are probably some enterprising PUAs that go to college just to have sex with lots of female students who have no intention of getting a degree. Heck, a guy wouldn’t even have to enroll, just sit-in on classes popular with women, carry a few random books around, and hang out in the cafes and study halls. Avoids all that tuition/debt stuff. Work some part-time job earning enough money to squeak by on (being a student provides a great excuse for cheap dates . . . ). College towns are often quite fun.
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Here’s my thoughts on the matter.
There are wayyy to may BS degrees especially when their above the graduate level and a greater portion of women get them compared to the men. I think that only idiots would continue pursuing useless education as they are wasting everybody’s time. I think that as a society we should discourage the overabundance of BS majors. There is a need for some flexibility and different pursuits but there are too many useless majors. Also getting masters and PhDs in those typew of fields is much worse and needs to be discouraged. While some people in the “BS” fields need the high education to help develop theory and structure we don’t need very many people there. And its not useful to apply an education masters in the real world for most.
However in certain fields it is extremely usefully to have people continue their education such as scienceand others to varying degrees. An educated population does in fact help the economy. But this has to be taken in measure. For one thing there can a be a diminishing return on education and productivity. That probably explains a study I saw whereby the people, in some field, with a masters degree had a higher IQ than the people with only a bachelors and the people with a PhD. The first is more obvious but the second is thought to be because the smarter people want to get out and actually make use of what they learned. Another issue with education is that while educating people helps the economy we should not be admitting everyone and dumb down the standards to do so. I know from experience that a college degree does not necessarily mean much. I was in a major (a bs one
) that I found very interesting and one of my teachers challenged us very well helping me to develop general learning and thinking skills. The problem is that from then on I was never challenged in that major. The classes became stupid and I could see how some of my really stupid peers would be able to graduate. (I got my ass out of there btw) The point being is that you should dumb down the standards to include everyone and in that case people should make use of alternatives to getting education and training.
All in all we need to encourage people to get educated but keep a minimum on BS majors and bear in mind individual limits.
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shouldn’t* dumb down
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Funny thing is that I am invited to attend a celebration for my cousin’s feminist wife who is getting her Masters Degree in sociology or something.
No amount of money in the world would encourage me to attend this smugfest. I remember years back when I first met her and I was talking politics with my cousin (since Politics was my degree at University) and she pipes up that “WE don’t talk politics.”
The thing is, turning forty, as a man one tends not to give a sh!t anymore about these silly social gatherings of delusional feminists and manginas.
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@Greg, greenlander, or anyone else
What are the job prospects for someone with a BS in physics. Do engineering companies specifically want to hire them? Are they seen as particularly useful or just as almost engineers who need some training? Do people with that BS have much flexibility in the type of work they can do?
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The education system is also being used to determine social rank. The hierarchy of bachelors/masters/doctorates and the various tweakings in between seem to play a significant part in how many people identify themselves, the folk who insist on calling themselves ‘Doctor’ being the most obvious. It’s reminiscent of the old nobility with its barons, earls and dukes – and the silly gowns and ceremonies seem to play to this human foible.
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Fondueguy, a physics degree is useful for BS engineering level jobs and graduate work. Get some practical courses in engineering as well. Gives you a lot of flexibility but you will have to market yourself a little harder than say a BSEE.
As for the question about my area of engineering, for many years it was embedded software engineering, which seems prone to some of the things I complained about, because it can be hard to quantify and projects tend to have unrealistic budget and schedule goals. I did some graduate work in another domain and that has paid off pretty ok. Strict computer work tends to pay well but can be a dead end. Skills in a business/engineering domain can help get more interesting work.
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About colleges, I think that here’s a case of throwing the baby with the bathwater.
I think that is your responsability AS AN ADULT to check the job prospectives that a degree in something ACTUALLY USEFUL and in a college that ACTUALLY TEACHES SOMETHING can give you.
Everything else is just people defending their choices.
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FondueGuy, a physics degree is respected in many fields of higher study. From engineering as Uncle Elmer says to biology to medicine. You have expertise in mathemetics and figuring out how things work.
I think one of the great things about physics is is broad applicability.
The world is your oyster, go for it.
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And to other guys out there, the reasons for my lack of money today are not my degree.
It was my desire to have a child in a country that allows men to be taken to the cleaners as we all discuss here.
My education was the best thing that ever happened to me and the large income I recieve has bailed me out more than anything I ever did.
I feel strongly that for young men today the best single thing you can do is get an education.
I personally recommend one in an area that pays well, but that was my decision.
Put up with all the bullsh@3 they throw at you in college about feminism, it’s only 4 years. It will serve you your whole life long, in my opinion.
But be careful of student loans. Live with family if you can to reduce your expenses. I always had a job in college to help. My student loans are high because I recieved an advanced degree in a field that pays well.
I would do it over again for sure, despite my griping.
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fondueguy-
One thing you might consider is getting an MS in engineering (if you’re still concerned about job prospects for a BS in physics). Think about how you would like to apply your knowledge of physics and see if any engineering graduate programs seem attractive.
For example, if materials science is sufficiently interesting and the electrical engineering job market is strong, you might look into doing a thesis-based (i.e., hands-on lab experience) masters in a semiconductor, superconducting, solar, or other electronic material and really widen your options, both upon graduation and further down the road.
Many universities have a menu of financial assistance for graduate engineering students- from grants to fairly cushy teaching or research assistantships (IOW, an MS Eng. doesn’t have to rack up the debt an MBA, JD or MA in Art History might).
If you get a PhD in engineering or science, it tends to pigeon-hole you (with fewer job opportunities) in a way that an MS won’t. Some graduate programs seem to only want PhD candidates. However, many students who start out as PhD candidates finish their MS and split for greener pastures.
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“This leads to hiring based upon the next best available source of information about competency: Educational attainment.”
Companies can search competence outside of the Political Correct climate: China, India etc. With the Western system more and more feminized, there will be more and more competition from emerging markets (many of them already emerged).
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“International students nothing: I’ve seen college students born and raised in the US who speak and write English worse than your average foreign student.”
Oh no, that was my point: native students who can’t write their own language. I actually don’t blame the students because it’s one seriously faulty admissions process that waves someone through when they’re literally not capable of transcribing their thoughts on the material in the course they’re about to take.
I don’t want to go too far on this; my father was a notoriously poor speller, but he could draft the orthographics of a ship’s hull on a day’s notice. In hard sciences, the quality of your English isn’t so important as much as your ability to communicate with it. But there’s a marked difference between not having the vocabulary to express your ideas and simply writing like a child. I don’t know how schools are failing to teach kids how to read (maybe because they’re boring snorefests) but it’s an epidemic.
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“I don’t know how schools are failing to teach kids how to read (maybe because they’re boring snorefests) but it’s an epidemic.”
http://www.angryharry.com/esLerningtoReed.htm
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Thanks alot guy’s. That’s a big part of why I’m doing a BS in physics, for the flexibility it is supposed to offer (especially in higher study). Its good to know that ill be able to get various engineering jobs, albeit not as easily as said engineers, in case I don’t want a masters. Good idea about taking a few engineering courses, I hadn’t really thought of that. Obviously I don’t have a specific career planned but there are alot of things id like to do with physics (bio-medical sensors, nano tech, research, etc). Ill just have to make alot of decisions as I go along and get more experience. Btw is it true that physics graduates are sometimes hired as investors due to problem solving and data analyzing skills? (Its just what I heard)
Its really good to talk to people with real world experience.
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@rend: I agree. I thought you were talking about international students exclusively.
So far as “who’s fault it is,” as much of a copout as it sounds, I think there is plenty of blame to go around on this. What namae naka posted was true, but it doesn’t help that you have students who just don’t act right in school period, and disrupt the class, don’t go, and don’t pay attention. However, you’re right about admissions being crappy and unscrupulous. I’ve seen retarded people allowed into college for hard/technical degrees. No, not stupid people. people who are mentally retarded. You gotta ask yourself “who is funding this guy to go to school, and what exactly is he going to do with his diploma when he gets out?”
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This piece is quite interesting, because I have myself often thought that a person ought to sue government organizations on the basis of discrimination.
Here in Canada, it is pretty uniform that any position in government requires a university degree – and in absolutely no way does the degree have to have anything to do with the position. An office girl who runs errands, answers the phones, delivers in-office mail, and makes the coffee, is required to have a university degree for the position – a BA in Women’s Studies will suffice – however, it has no relation to job performance in any way whatsoever.
For someone such as myself, being raised in small town northern Canada, this is an enormous disadvantage compared to a person living in a major city. The kid in the city can attend university while living with Mom & Dad. All he really needs is a part-time job to make ends meet.
For the rest of the country though, people such as myself were required to relocate, in my case the closest universities were over 1,000kms away. Travel expenses, dorm rent/apartment rent, utilities, food etc. etc. dramatically increase for people such as myself, compared to kids living in the city. To say that all people have equal access to higher education is simply bullshit. Therefore, discriminating purely on a person’s ability to obtain a degree ought to be clear-cut case of something wrong – such as not being able to become an office monkey in the same small town you were raised in, solely because you could not afford the extra $30,000 or $40,000 to relocate for 8mos a year to get a degree in basketweaving.
You can see the effects in my hometown too. The town is run by friggin’ outsiders, not the people who were born and raised there and have a vested interest in building and maintaining their community. Almost all policies are made by snotty little city-punks who don’t know the first thing about such places. They all go up north to “start” their careers, look down their noses at the foolish hicks who “don’t get it”, and after five years of screwing people around, they get transferred back to the big city with some “experience” under their belts.
I think it is a pretty clear case of discrimination by the government itself.
I wonder if someone could make a lucrative career out of simply suing the bejesus out of the government?
We have a lawyer in Canada called Richard Warman who has built a career on surfing the web looking for hate-speech, and then taking them all the way to our Human Rights Circuses…erm… Tribunals.
Why not make a career of suing the government, then?
I absolutely know that any government funded domestic violence organization openly discriminates against hiring men, and I doubt there is one around where males represent more than 10% of their workforce. Should be an open and shut case… apply for a job… get turned down based upon your plumbing… file suit… collect $200,000… take a vacation in Hawaii and drink beer with HL for a weekend (on me, of course)… move on to next case…
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@fonduegue
I hire programmers for embedded systems (device drivers for cell phones, etc.) I’d hire a physics major that could prove he was a hot coder and understood advanced software engineering concepts. But, he’d really have to prove it: a couple of programming courses wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to understand operating systems, kernel programming, etc. He’d have to be someone whose idea of a fun Tuesday night is to play with the innards of the Linux kernel code.
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I realise that a maths degree is nice and everything but I think your forgetting something. Namely that not every male is a born calculator.
I sucked at maths, so when it came to choosing a foundation degree, I choose something I liked, animation.
It was only a few years ago that I had a great time teaching foreign students in Japan, so I decided to do a TEFL (I could only do this course because the CELTA didn’t match a time I could do it) and I got great tutoring from it.
Then I HAD to take a BA in animation (and I could only do an art one because of my foundation) due to the face that:
A)To be eligible for a working visa in Japan you need a Foundation Degree
B) All teaching jobs in Japan (State or private) REQUIRE a BA.
So to get off this rotten island (England) I HAD to do that which you have stated is a waste of time, try thinking before you type next time before you insult someone on your side.
On the other side though the animation course is most likely the only course with just 2 females on it (out of 12).
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Great article. Awesome.
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And that you are willing to play the game and jump through whatever hoops are necessary to get your “sheepskin cookie.” After a very checkered first two years of undergrad, I took a year off and worked and saved up money to go back. Being behind on credits, I took an extra heavy load – 20 hrs/semester. That still wasn’t enough to catch up to my classmates and graduate on time, so I studied every loophole in college policies I could find and one semester booked 28 hours. I waited until every one of those hours showed up on my transcript and took a copy in to one of the deans with whom I had had a running battle since my first semester. I explained that since the entire purpose of college was to teach you how to play the game – regurgitate on tests what the profs want to hear, so you can get your grade – and this was proof that I completely understood the game and even how to get around it, they should just go ahead and give me my diploma.
The dean was not impressed by my argument.
More than 35 years ago I was teaching a course required for certification as a teacher. One of the assignments was a simple short essay. One got turned in with 65 spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors in about 3/4 of a handwritten page. I tried to fail the student and deny him certification. I was over-ruled by the department chair, who gave him a pass in the pass/fail grading system. Of course, a few months later this guy was teaching somewhere.
Why can’t Johnny read? Because his teachers can’t either.
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Oh, and one of the best quips I have heard in my entire life came from my undergrad advisor –
“If you believe that this is an institution of higher learning, it will drive you nuts. If you look at it as a playground for emotionally disturbed children, it will make a lot of sense.”
I have used that in a lot of situations since then, and it has always given me a chuckle and allowed me to get my blood pressure down when confronted with absolutely insane behavior.
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Here is a link to an article which demonstrates some of the problems arising from those who would ban IQ test and replace it with credentialing to achieve “national cohesion”:
Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 17 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of more than $100,000.
from-
http://www.jbhe.com/features/53_SAT.html
notice that the tone of the article demonstrates a huge disappointment in the differences between black and white SAT scores, but remember progressive educators/ intellectuals are only interested in “equality of opportunity” NOT outcome (and if you are stupid enough to believe that then you will fall for anything).
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@Epoche, any other interested party.
I can’t argue with the numbers, there is definitely a problem there. Black students scores are most definitely lower than White (and everyone else’s) scores.
However, I think we need to stop and look at a few things before we make the claim that it’s biology that is making White students get higher scores on the test than Black students.
1) The assumption being made here is that money should make a difference, but it clearly doesn’t, therefore it must be biological. I think a better question to ask is “how solvent are each of these families finacially.” It’s worse to have 80, 90, or 100K and owe just as much, if not more, than to have 10 or 20 K, and be living within your means.
2) Some of the statements being made here suggest a de jure solution to this problem beyond simply ending affirmative action. However, the problem isn’t even rigoriously defined.
Question: how does The College Board get information about what race a test taker is?
Answer: The test taker tells them what race they believe they fit into the most.
In other words, there is no geneologist, geneticist, or even so much as a phrenologist independently checking each person’s statement to see if it’s valid.
The problem with making the whole “biological reality” argument is that you have to ask yourself, “the reality of what?” If it’s of White superiority, here’s one of may problems with that assumption: the White on the SAT, includes Jews. Also people of Arab descent. Read the fine print: in most school districts, people of middle eastern descent are considered white. Go to nces.ed.gov and look up SAT scores, and see what races are listed in the rankings. You won’t see Jew, Gypsy, Arab, or any of those races anywhere: they count as White. Furthermore, I know for a fact that in the case of Jews, the average racial score is higher than all other Whites. The same people who want to talk about the sangreal giving them dominion over the whole world are strangely silent when it comes to Jews beating them regularly on IQ tests and such.
Then you have your Others: once again, the only thing TCB knows about your race is what you tell them. Every person who might be considered “Black” doesn’t put Black on the test. Nor does anyone else. Some people feel that that shouldn’t matter, and put Other.
Finally, you have confusion about what race a mixed person claims. If Tiger Woods comes in, puts “Asian” on his SAT and gets a high score, does it really count? If so, why is it that when a Black and a White person get together, the child is considered Black? In fact, it’s pretty arbitrary what race is what when two people get together and have a mixed child.
What I’m driving at here is this: the SAT race section doesn’t tell the College Board what the scores of people of any given race is, it tells them what the scores of people WHO PERCEIVE THEMSELVES to be of any given race is. Two people can come in, take the test, be an equal mix of Black and White (we’ll say 1/16th or something). One person considers themselves White, the other Black. Does this mean that two different races took the test? The SAT has no way to verify this, as it has no way to verify if a person with 25% Asian blood is just claiming his Asian heritage more, or if someone has blood and is denying it, etc. The only thing the test tells us for sure along those lines is what a person’s score is if they perceive themselves to be any given race.
To say or imply that these scores justify “biological reality” doesn’t hold water. In order for that to happen, you would have to define a race in a unique way that differentiated it from every other race, and you would have to be able to verify that everyone taking the test fit into one of these categories. It’s not enough to say that it’s all about skin color: this is like saying all grey dogs are greyhounds and run fast. I’m talking about a set and series of attributes that are unique and exclusive to any given race, that we can see and say “if you have this, you are race X. You are not any other race.”
Now while I admit that there is a largely self inflicted problem with education in the Black community, I don’t think it’s automatically biological. If it is, it’s on the people making the claim to prove it. Even if it is biological, I don’t believe that the SAT gives us the necessary data to establish that.
In any case, accepting biological anything isn’t a solution for me, and not one I see helping out the situation, so until we can define who is what race, and what race is taking the SAT, I’m just going to assume that people are people and are what their character demonstrates them to be, nothing more or less.
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I do not know of any group of whites that has successfully agitated for government interference in private spheres where Jews seem to be overrepresented, so what particular relevance this has is beyond me. As far as the notion of a family making 100k being insolvent that really just points to the stupidity of its members. The final point you have is that it is hard to define race in a manner to your pleasing, do you really think that this would be a problem if someone were to bring an EEOC lawsuit? This reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasurement of Man where they decry IQ tests as being an unfair representation of cognitive ability. Are you so cautious in your wording when you want to define white male privilege? Or is it only in concepts whose implications you dont like that you suddenly become tongue-tied? I dont think that IQ is as important as some would make it, but it is not irrelevant. As I stated earlier in the thread I dont think that the state should be in the business in subsidizing higher education whatsoever. The very fact that we have to have this discussion makes me sad because the country is broke, we are consuming capital to fund social programs yet at the same time we are so full of envy and resentment that will oppose any limitation of the size of government because leaving people to their own devices would lead to privilege.
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Check that off the list of things I was cfounsed about.
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