The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Anyone else find it funny this post was written by a guy who didn’t go to university and the first 2 commentators went to Stamford and Harvard?

Just saying.

DH, the university is Stanford. The other one, Stamford, is where the Stanford and Harvard grads roll drunk off the train on their way home from Wall Street.

thank fuck my daughter is already showing signs of being a genius so every fucking top university will pay me to have her study there or id be fucked. 2 ex parasite wives is one thing. a fucking university bill is like bein in debt to the fucking mafia.

i almost like this post campbell, then i remember you wrote it and i stop giving a fuck.

I agree with so much of this, Campbell, but it’s not just education inflation and the obvious student loan burdens that are an issue (though the latter’s a disaster, I agree), but the fact that because they have this batshit insane non-payment structure and 5 year job interview called grad school, that the best talent is almost actively being kept out of academia.
So… to add to the gripe about debt, look at how grad school works, which feeds in to the quality of education the poor damn undergrads are getting for the debt they’re accruing (at least in the UK, but a lot is true for the States too):
There’s an open assumption that you will have parents who can/are willing to pick up the tab for you. Even though everyone doing a PhD is a grown-ass person. I have been told straight out, at the age of 30, by university staff: “But can’t your parents help you, financially?” That’s step one of messed up-ness: almost only rich kids whose parents are happy to subsidise education for education’s sake can actually go to grad school. You wonder why academia is bland and boring? Why it systemically fails to understand the challenges faced by kids from “non-traditional” backgrounds? Look no further. It’s one thing to try and give a handful of kids scholarships; it’s another to create a situation which is welcome and inclusive. If all the staff members have had their parents pick up their tabs until they were in their 30s, it’s not creating an inclusive environment. Some of the most bigoted remarks i’ve heard go unchallenged – about women, about minorities – have happened in UK academic settings. If the workplace was more diverse, that shit would not fly.

Also – If you take loans, you will NEVER be able to make up that money on an academic salary. Even if you are “lucky” enough to have a stipend, they barely scrape minimum wage. Barely. So: if you’re supposedly the best and the brightest, you can barely support yourself. How’s that for an incentive? You’re also expected to be grateful for being paid minimum wage. Grateful. The people universities end up keeping, as a result, outside the people who don’t really have to work, the occasional kid who has never known anything outside of school and who doesn’t know better, or the inevitable rogue hermit who is happy to live off dew and tree bark, are often the clever people who can’t do anything else – because they’re socially dysfunctional or for one reason or another are truly incapable of dealing with the outside world.

As a result – with VERY few exceptions, graduate schools frown on creativity, on anything that is outside the traditional mold. I’m actually all for tradition, but when it either serves a purpose, or is beautiful. It isn’t, in most academia: it’s fear. It filters through everything that’s created. I believe that it’s worth spending time doing things, and thinking. I don’t believe that engaging with things that are happening in the world around us is irrelevant. And I don’t believe that the peer-reviewed article should be the be all and end all of what counts as knowledge, with no attempt to include the outside world, or allow for creativity.

As a nasty sting of the scorpion’s tail: even if you survive all of that – the poverty, the insularity, the in-built conservative crushing of every reason you wanted to go to graduate school and learn about something in the first place, you run in to the fact that 2/3 PhD students (in my experience) have serious problems with their supervisors, ranging from not getting their work read, to intellectual property theft, to outright bullying. Do the universities care? Nope. They see their jobs as to protect their own, get new students, and raise more money: nobody’s been that unfussed about attrition rates since the WW1 generals.

So universities aren’t only broken because they are tricking undergraduate kids into debt with the promise that “If you DON’T go to college, you’ll be flipping burgers at McDonalds”, they’re also so fundamentally broken in terms of their junior talent recruitment (grad school), that the talent levels among university staff are much, MUCH lower than they should be to justify that expense. It’s not because decent, creative people who could be great teachers and researchers don’t WANT to do those jobs, even knowing full well that they’re not going be making masses of cash – it’s because the system’s so broken that it’s an accident if one of those people gets the qualification required to get through. And the way the student loan/payment system works has a lot to do with that too. So yeah – it’s broken, alright.

This stuff makes me too angry to say anything sensible.
But what also irks me is the hypocrisy of successive UK governments saying ‘The answer is university, what’s the question’
Some people are not cut out for higher education, but that doesn’t mean they’re inferior, it just means they’re different. Apprenticeships as opposed to internships (otherwise known as acceptable slave labour) don’t really exist anymore.
Yet when I look at graduates that (amazinly) ask me for advice and stuff, I see people that know everything and understand nothing, next to some people who somehow came into agencies as runners or production lackeys and were given the opportunity to work their way up.
Anyway, what scares me the most is the insistence that knowledge and learning are not ends themselves, rather than delivering ‘value’ to the economy.
Anyway