I find that people don’t fully understand the mechanism by which colleges release crowds of far-left operators into society. I’m all in favor of removing Women’s Studies, Black Studies, and all that, but these are disciplines that are lucky to get two students a year. They are unpopular and wilting. They have absolutely no impact on anything on a regular campus.
It’s all about numbers. If you don’t have high enrollments, you are a nobody. So who has numbers?
The overwhelming majority of students come to college hoping to study biology. Then almost all of them flunk out and end up in psychology. These are huge programs that teach absolutely nothing. As the dean of our Department of Psychology told me, “our courses are fluff. Anybody can pass them.” The degree offered by Psychology doesn’t give the graduates the right to conduct clinical practice, so they go into social work and all sort of government jobs. They are the real carriers of wokeness into the wider society because they are too dumb to retain anything beyond a vague sense of grievance and a bunch of slogans.
The real culprit is the idea that everybody needs and is cognitively capable of getting a college degree. This idea pushes many people into college who cannot begin to engage in college-level thinking. They are bewildered and lost and ascribe their confusion to racial and sex-based unfairness. They, and not the three forlorn Gender Studies minors (there’s very very rarely a major in this kind of discipline), are the angry wokefied mobs who terrorize the rest of us.
Once again, I absolutely support the idea of closing down Gender Studies immediately. They are a joke.
Clarissa's Blog 
I didn’t know that, I didn’t take a single psychology course or know any psychology majors in college. I agree that many people ought to not go to college, some people are best suited to manual labor or the trades and it shouldn’t be a bad thing to say that. There’s no shame in being a mechanic or a hairdresser or a waiter or any other regular job, having such jobs doesn’t mean you’re an idiot.
Since I’m applying for my teacher license, I had to go to college and it’s something I really wanted. I majored in History and passed the Praxis to teach high school social studies, it’s a matter of getting the money together for the fees. My major requires a lot of reading and for my senior theses I read 15-20 books and loads of scholarly articles, it was hardly a fluff major. You may be right that psychology majors are for people who can’t do harder stuff, it shouldn’t be embarrassing to say that some people would be better off learning a trade or just going straight to work
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The problem is: the trades are absolutely essential and right now they don’t pay enough to live on.
I looked it up.
As an electrician, plumber, mechanic, nurse, lineman, and most other infrastructure-supporting careers that we absolutely cannot sustain a first-world lifestyle without… you can expect to make somewhere between $60k and $80k per year. If you have a wife who works, maybe you can +$40k and afford a good mobile home.
So while we can all sing the praises of honest work all day long, if you can’t support a family with said honest work, we will very shortly not have anyone to do said work.
Also, most people going into trades are necessarily men. Those are physically demanding jobs, often with high risk of injury and toxic exposure. Most of the psych degrees are going to women. These things are not interchangeable.
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Yes, these degrees mostly go to minority women. The state apparatus needs to grow and grow and grow to set them all up with jobs.
They wouldn’t go into the trades if the degrees weren’t available. They’d go into the massive service sector. That’s the sector that’s currently requiring all those illegal migrants. This could be fixed.
I agree, though, that the trades are crucial and don’t get nearly enough attention.
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methylethyl
OPEC in the 70’s created inflation, housewives reacted by returning to work, real male wages stopped increasing. Trump changed that briefly early in his first win, but it could not be sustained given the number of illegal aliens. The lefties like to suggest it is 10 million, and now 11 million. Nobody really knows, but it likely approaches three or four times that, essentially under cutting and gutting the wages of working class families. And high wages or the military are the only realistic way out of the working class, there was a reason why I roughnecked in the rigs to get my education ;-D
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“The real culprit is the idea that everybody needs and is cognitively capable of getting a college degree. This idea pushes many people into college who cannot begin to engage in college-level thinking.”
I totally agree with this point in your post.
But couldn’t others argue that there’s lots of “fluff” in literature courses and Humanities courses in general?
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Just looking at job prospects: yes, all liberal arts degrees are pretty much useless already, particularly if you do not continue on to a masters degree
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Even with science degrees, bachelor’s degree is not enough for good job prospects. The best degree to get if you want a decent job without having to do MS or PHD are engineering degrees. They are also the hardest programs to get into.
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Here’s a comparison. Our graduating seniors have to do a course called “Senior Assignment” that is the culmination of their undergraduate degree. Here’s what our Spanish students do:
1)Read a book in Spanish (usually a novel).
2)Write a 10 page research essay in Spanish with 10 secondary sources in the bibliography.
3)Present the research in a 20-minute public talk where students aren’t allowed to read anything.
Here’s the equivalent project in Psychology:
1)In a group of 5 students create a poster illustrating a concept they studied in class.
I rest my case. Students who have to get to that level of Spanish, how much time do they have for woke crap? Not much, especially if they are writing the senior assignment with me. I fail 60% on the first try. But then they get to such a level in the language. Enough said.
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I did program review for Psychology. The Dean made the comment about fluff after seeing my face upon my first encounter with the group posters.
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Humanities degrees don’t have a ton of value on the job market, but the lazy, incapable students are not sitting in literature or history classrooms. The lazy and incapable students whine and complain when you ask them to read ten pages, they aren’t signing up for anything that requires them to read whole books.
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They are, but they’re not reading the books– they’re reading the online summary at best, and paying someone to write the paper for them.
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Here’s the rub. If we want students to read and write their own essays, we can’t use the principles of mass production. My students read and write their own stuff because I stand over them (often physically) and guide them through the process. This is possible because I don’t have to do this for hundreds of people at once. If you go the route where numbers are all that matters, you end up with Psychology’s group posters. There’s simply no other way to process all those students. You either have mass education and the result is crap, or you work individually or in small groups and raise knowledgeable, skilled people. These are the only options. The idea that you can crowd classrooms, cut teaching staff, and have great results is dumb. People are not widgets. Intellectual growth requires patient, personal contact. I don’t know why it’s so hard to make this understood.
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“You either have mass education and the result is crap, or you work individually or in small groups and raise knowledgeable, skilled people. These are the only options”
I wish I had a thousand accounts so I could like this one thousand times… it is sooooo true. Online ‘lessons’ during the covid panic just drove this home. I don’t think students in those years (or just after) were dumber than current students but they were hindered rather than helped by the lack of in person teaching and I’m very upset on their behalf…
There’s also a tremendous value in students sitting elbow to elbow listening to a real person in front of them and asking them questions. It’s very hard to lexicalize and express what the difference is… but boy is it there.
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A lot – and I mean A LOT – of the learning happens between classes when students hang out together, going over the material, quizzing each other, joking, establishing friendships. I saw it in real time when my in-person students during COVID left the online ones far behind.
Also, scheduled office hours, especially on Zoom are a total waste of time. Real communication happens when a student is walking down the hallway, sees an open office door and stops by to chat. People need to be present together in the same space and have unscheduled, spontaneous interactions. This should be very, very obvious. Yet we pursue a completely different model that has all the life sucked out of it.
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Maybe it depends on your major, or your school. I was in college long before online classes, but there was zero hanging out with other students outside class. Coworkers and roommates, sure.
Classes were large, and the only time anything like that small-group-interaction happened (you’re right, that’s where the learning happens), was in written feedback on writing, and taking advantage of office hours… which I did when asked to, but otherwise felt I was imposing. Looking back, I gauged the quality of my writing by the number of prof. comments scribbled on it when I got it back (good or bad)– add them all up and they’re a reader-engagement score.* A good grade with no comments is failure: no way to know if they even read it.
All of which probably contributed to dropping out– what was the point?
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Clarissa said “The real culprit is the idea that everybody needs and is cognitively capable of getting a college degree.”
But underlying this idea is the fact that it’s getting harder and harder to make a decent living in rich countries for people who are of average intelligence or below it. I remembered the name of a book I saw what felt like recently (but haven’t read), and the author turned out to be Tyler Cowen, whose article you referenced in your previous post.
”Average is over” – https://www.amazon.com/Average-Over-Powering-America-Stagnation/dp/0525953736
Like I said, I haven’t read the book, but I doubt that whatever he suggested was helpful or realistic, as things have only gotten much worse for the disappearing middle class since the book was published.
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If it’s getting harder, then why are we bringing in millions with the added handicap of not speaking the language?
Let’s decide already whether we have too many such people or too few. Neoliberals like Cowen change their narrative every 15 minutes.
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Social work still requires a Master’s. You can’t typically practice anything with just a Bachelor’s. Which means if they don’t go for that they don’t typically work in the field they went to school for.
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Right.
What’s the percentage of bachelor’s degree holders who go on to get a master’s?
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It’s interesting that these study fields are massively female dominated. I guess the biggest wosters are female.
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That has always been the case. The democratic party’s outreach to young men has, at times, framed progressive values as socially advantageous, i.e. embracing ‘wokeness’ will get them laid. That quoting bell hooks gets you more pussy than a gym membership.
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I don’t know about students. They don’t show that side to me. But among professors, yes, it very heavily skews female. Everybody is left-wing, of course, but the truly unhinged ones are 80% female.
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Women shift more conservative after starting families, which is why single women remain the Democrats’ most reliable base, and one they’re especially keen to keep engaged and politically active.
Maybe their fierce defense of criminals (and pit bulls lol) is just misplaced maternal instinct looking for someone to nurture in the absence of actual children?
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“Classes were large”
Did they have teaching asst led sections? That saved me in statistics. I went to the regular ‘lecture’ once in a hall with hundreds of people and couldn’t hear anything in back but there were grad student led sessions (15-20 students) that I went to very consistently and did fine (I had been terrified of statistics before that).
But yeah the big intro classes were nothing very good (terrible actually)…. but when you got to the smaller classes it was a very different story.
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I don’t think I ever had a class at the state uni with fewer than twenty-five students. The handful of smaller classes I had (which were pretty great) were all back at the community college.
No TA-led sections either, though we did have a couple of TA-taught classes. Which were fine.
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In languages, our course cap is 25 but we rarely get there. Translation, Mexican identity and linguistics are the only exception beyond the beginner language courses. Those get to 25 but the rest are lucky to get to 15.
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Imagine being highly qualified as a professor to teach these fluff majors. Have you read any of your psychology colleagues’ papers?
Unfortunately reading a lot of books and scholarly articles with a high Flesch-Kincaid score to write a thesis means nothing for an undergrad degree program’s rigor.
I didn’t think biology was the washout major but that inorganic chemistry was the washout course for science majors and anyone hoping to go to further study requiring science, like med school.
Of course every single major is fluff except for business, Clarissa’s and her husband’s fields of study and computer science. Arguably the magic of LLMs and machine learning can obviate most of Clarissa’s field and AI can do coding well, also most junior lawyer big firm grunt work. The only real professional fields are medicine and engineering. Get ready to see the brain drain in the United States; it won’t be pretty.
I’ve read statistics claiming that the median person has trouble reading above an 8th grade level and large swathes of people can barely do fractions — which 1)I refuse to believe on an emotional level [as a silly little person] and 2)would make the trades difficult. Imagine being unable to understand this manual for a tape recorder (1973) as a trades person.
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There’s no need to get upset. I wasn’t talking about psychology as a field but about the very specific psychology program at my university which its own dean described as fluff.
I’m sure there are many good programs. But ours simply isn’t one of them.
The joke about professors at my university publishing is funny, though.
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” only real professional fields are medicine and engineering”
AI’s coming for those too.
Nurses, who do physical things that doctors won’t (or don’t want to do) are safer than physicians.
Doctors will be like the attendants at self-check out sections in stores.
Engineering too will be mostly hollowed out (warning: lots of formerly safe things are going to be dangerous as the bugs are worked out of AI engineering).
The purposes of AI
-dumb people down and make them dependent on AI
-eliminate jobs
There are no other real purposes that I can perceive.
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Doctors asked for it by becoming prescribing machines. This is a profession that should have been safe but its practitioners made it not so.
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As I was saying…
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In SA, the government has mandated DEI college quotas. This has generated a lot of wild rhetoric and demand for the return of the stolen land, when in reality, what most of these people want is a decent job.
https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/eff-is-finished-it-was-the-party-for-the-unemployed-radicals-rob-hersov/ar-AA1CCL77
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