A 'bullshit degree', is any degree in a subject that has little to no value in assisting its holder to make enough money to recoup the cost to earn said degree.
It is absolutely fucking stupid to get a degree in the arts and expect it to get a 50k job.
A 'bullshit degree', is any degree in a subject that has little to no value in assisting its holder to make enough money to recoup the cost to earn said degree.
I think it's possible to get work with a pretty 'far out' degree. IMHO it would seem pretty unpleasant to get rid of literature. You know, throw books in a big pile and burn them and stuff.
Yep, there's plenty of folks basically returning to pre-industrial era lifestyle in our regions with the highest unemployment rate. You can buy cheap high-quality traditional products in our rural villages, such as food - cheese, meat; hand-made furniture; clothes.. On the other side there's pretty high criminality rate too.
What exactly is a bullshit degree? Even back when I was in the uni there was some animosity between the different departments, I never really understood it. I think there should be more removing of the various barriers in universities and enable co-operation rather then eliminate entire branches of knowledge.
Bullshit degrees are stuff like this: https://etd.library.emory.edu/view/record/pid/emory:rgnt0
This person has a "PhD" now. What can such a person do? As a PhD, she thinks she's highly skilled and intelligent, when in all actuality she has the mental capacities of a moldy piece of bread. She can't find a job anywhere except university, where she'll then write highly intellectual peer-reviewed articles about walking and talking: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2017.1280615?journalCode=rscg20
Yes, the lead author of that gem also has a PhD, and will likely never be a productive member of this society.
For more hilarity, check this Twitter account.
I think it's possible to get work with a pretty 'far out' degree. IMHO it would seem pretty unpleasant to get rid of literature. You know, throw books in a big pile and burn them and stuff.
Nobody wants to get rid of literature or literature studies. Or even the bullshit sociologists who make money by writing "peer-reviewed" autoethnographies about watching TV. But maybe especially the latter should be held up for much more strict scientific standards than what exists now. Remember the Sokal affair? What used to be a satiric experiment is now what people get their "PhDs" with. And these people are useless. That whole poststructuralist/postmodern bullshit does not only not teach them, it actively makes them dumber.
Bullshit degrees are stuff like this: https://etd.library.emory.edu/view/record/pid/emory:rgnt0
This person has a "PhD" now. What can such a person do? As a PhD, she thinks she's highly skilled and intelligent, when in all actuality she has the mental capacities of a moldy piece of bread. She can't find a job anywhere except university, where she'll then write highly intellectual peer-reviewed articles about walking and talking: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2017.1280615?journalCode=rscg20
Yes, the lead author of that gem also has a PhD, and will likely never be a productive member of this society.
For more hilarity, check this Twitter account.
Heh, yeah.
Nobody wants to get rid of literature or literature studies. Or even the bullshit sociologists who make money by writing "peer-reviewed" autoethnographies about watching TV. But maybe especially the latter should be held up for much more strict scientific standards than what exists now. Remember the Sokal affair? What used to be a satiric experiment is now what people get their "PhDs" with. And these people are useless. That whole poststructuralist/postmodern bullshit does not only not teach them, it actively makes them dumber.
First link is from a uni in Atlanta. Don't think we euros get to tell the yanks what they should teach in their unis. Not sure what that study is about? Gender studies? I know a person who studied gender studies, there are folks like that in the EU parliament, UN, and some other places like that. If we forget the human side and focus on 'hard' stuff, the end result might not be nice. Even a lot of engineers find that the work they end up doing (if they find any in today's harch economic conditions) has very little to do with the courses they studied.
Also, there is a lot of 'infighting' among the STEM-fields, and stuff like mathematicians hating biologists, biologists hating geologists, etc. I never understood that. It reminds me of military and how infantry hated artillery, artillery hated anti-air units, anti-air hated airforce, everyone hated the navy. I was like, what about the actual enemy?
The Humanities are not bad per se, and they absolutely have their place. The problem is that some years ago poststructuralism started to dominate modern philosophy, which then influenced vast sections of modern social studies. And by "influenced" I mean "ruined". Arbitrarily droping scientific standards just because some braindead fucktard from the Frankfurt School proclaimed that EVERYTHING IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT LOL is the death of any field. I don't want to get rid of all the Humanities, but they need to get their shit together and realize that the Emperor is fucking naked.
I'd like to know what's behind the temp-work culture that's sort of taking over in Europe too. Seems to me that fiscal conservatives are taking over everywhere. Nobody has a 'retirement job' anymore, except maybe medical doctors. People always die, somebody has to box them up in the end I guess.
Meanwhile the super rich are getting even richer and we have a Russia-style oligargh-culture in Europe soon. Comparing some Roman Abramovich - style evil bazillionaire cruising with a 150 metre long yacht and buying football clubs with some gender studies major who thinks gays and trannies shouldn't be beaten up. Which one is the truly evil one?
Speaking as a man who worked in university for a decade before becoming an author, the "liberals" are not the people who are responsible for the bullshit degree system. It's entirely part and parcel of the capitalist system at work in the fact it's profitable to offer people degrees in whatever subject they want to take. It's why classes have broadened and broadened to basically studying just about anything.
Which isn't a bad thing as we should have people educated for education's sake but unless you're going to be teaching the subject, you're not getting much value out of The History of Comics 101.
Also, respectable universities are not really the problem as there's a lot of completely bullshit for profit universities which teach nothing of value in exchange for their degrees and recruit wholesale people who barely qualify for the job of teacher. Ironically, showing you CAN get some money from a bullshit degree.
I'd say a major problem is the fact universities don't get enough state funding to actually teach decently to the public but the truth is that's a lie. State Universities have made so much money off college sports that they don't even need the United States government (which contributes to them being run like sports teams which don't pay their players--and means that less sports based college are SOL) to fund them but still don't teach anything of value.
It's different in Germany, where the universities are almost all state-funded and the whole drive to get as many people to go to university really is the politics' fault. It looks good on paper when more people get higher degrees, and people who have been braindamaged by the poststructural social sciences are much more mentally malleable than people with intact brain functions, so our Left (especially the Third Wave Feminist sections) really love these.
Also, respectable universities are not really the problem as there's a lot of completely bullshit for profit universities which teach nothing of value in exchange for their degrees and recruit wholesale people who barely qualify for the job of teacher. Ironically, showing you CAN get some money from a bullshit degree.
Yeah, about those "respectable universities"... This is how you can get a Ed. D. at Columbia University. Ivy League is completely dropping the ball, actually, considering all the bollocks that's going on at Brown and Harvard and everywhere, really.
Speaking as an academic, all doctoral theses are bullshit or at least 99% of them. My masters is notable for the fact my advisor didn't like my conclusion so they insisted I write a new one with the exact opposite. Which I did, because I wanted my Masters.
I'd pursue my doctorate in English just to be a snooty asshole (I have the money) but it'd be a waste of my time versus writing and I'd have to repeat the process again.
Speaking as an academic, all doctoral theses are bullshit or at least 99% of them. My masters is notable for the fact my advisor didn't like my conclusion so they insisted I write a new one with the exact opposite. Which I did, because I wanted my Masters.
"academic", top kek
Just because an increasing part of the Humanities are nothing but intellectual mimikry it doesn't mean that all of academia is. Stop lumping the real scientists with actual work and actual degrees in with the bullshit studies.
"academic", top kek
Just because an increasing part of the Humanities are nothing but intellectual mimikry it doesn't mean that all of academia is. Stop lumping the real scientists with actual work and actual degrees in with the bullshit studies.
I'm not trying to shit on the hard sciences, @Hassknecht, quite the opposite. It's one of my biggest complaints about the university system in America that hard science research is hampered by agendas and the need to work toward financial profit with a brain drain toward specific companies.
Marshall University, for example, has the problem of the fact it has a lot of researchers interested in investigating the long term damage to the environment by mountaintop removal (read: strip mining) as well as the health concerns about the region's pollution and chemical damage. Quite a few of my associates wanted to pursue work on more practical green technologies in the region.
Bluntly, they are slammed headfirst into the wall of the fact their projects are not funded due to the coal companies being major patrons of the universities. Getting them the money to do the necessary research has been an ongoing failure in the making for decades.
There will be a shift towards more highly skilled jobs. Somebody has to make and program these machines after all.
The problem is that large parts of the Left don't really understand what "skilled" means, and think that any "university degree" means that this person is now a skilled intellectual. Preparing for this future by just shelling out bullshit degrees helps nobody.
I don't think there will be such a huge shift towards high skilled jobs, infact they will become less. Look at how many totally new jobs digitalisation has created in the last 20-30 years. It's a steady decline.
Besides, when you look at the second generation in other words the machines and automatition that will happen after the one we will experience in a decade or two, like think about what we might see in 40 or 50 years from now. They might even replace extremly skilled jobs at some point. Pretty much anything that a human can do, could be in theory done by a machine with the correct programming. Machines building machines, to speak so. And it's not science fiction anymore, programmers are working right now some form of software that can actually learn on it's own not unlike how a human mind works, by observation, experience and making decisions. Even very high skilled jobs, might be on the line at some point.
IBM is currently working on a software that can make accurate diagnoses and offering therapies. Machines could one day replace even surgeons, or at the very least reduce their numbers considerably, the auto-doc not just a tale of science fiction anymore but an actuall possible reality.
What we need is an appreciation for skilled manual labour and artistic, individual products. Almost no new house or flat has stucco plasterwork anymore. People became too cheap to pay for it, and now barely anyone knows how to make that stuff. Make brass ornamental work and stucco great again! Tailored suits for everyday use! Hand-made lustres and furniture!
A 'bullshit degree', is any degree in a subject that has little to no value in assisting its holder to make enough money to recoup the cost to earn said degree.
It is absolutely fucking stupid to get a degree in the arts and expect it to get a 50k job.
That's a stupid way to measure a 'degree' though. Not everyone can become a nuclear physicsts, a doctor or some highly skilled engineer for a big oil company, just because they are hiring right now and paying you 100k per year. - Of course you're right, going for an 'arts' degree and expecting to become some rich designer is also totally bonkers. But I am just saying, you shouldn't only look to learn something purely because there is a lot of money to get if you managed to get your degree.
Not to mention, not everyone is actually good in everything even if they decided to learn the job. Hey I will become a child care assistant, but I actually don't like children, but who cares! They are hiring! I had such a co-worker once. She wasn't stupid. She just had no empathy. And that is really shitty when you're working with children. She constantly got into fights with the children, and also with us because of it. In the end, they had to fire her.
I'm generally a supporter of automation but the problem is society has to accept the idea of people NOT working as a thing which is not necessarily a bad thing in order for society to survive through a post-scarcity manufacturing life.
Which we are far far from.
In short, the basic way for us to head off French Revolution is just to let people enjoy being able to live off the charity of society.
Yeah, but that is purely an educational/behavioural problem, as our society is simply build on the idea:
no good job = bad human, no job = human trash.
The good news is, this can be changed, by making people into individuals right from the start, in other words the moment they visit a school. But yeah ... that's not happening right now.
Yeah, but that is purely an educational/behavioural problem, as our society is simply build on the idea: no good job = bad human, no job = human trash.
The good news is, this can be changed, by making people into individuals right from the start, in other words the moment they visit a school. But yeah ... that's not happening right now.
My wife notably refused government assistance her entire life despite the fact she was disabled, poor, and worked two jobs which almost (literally) killed her. She referred to me as a limousine liberal since my father was a millionaire and I was the biggest obnoxious proponent of social justice she'd ever met.
In what you're describing you'd have a small elite of scientists and engineers designing and developing new machines (because you can't automate that in the foreseeable future) and a huge idle mass that has nothing to do but work in the service sector or sit around sucking their thumbs. Not everyone is artistically inclined, and productivity is a huge source of happiness. Pretty sure there'd be new Luddites around just because life will be utterly meaningless for the majority.
And the engineers and scientists would be the only people really required to work hard. That doesn't end well. Either you give them so much money and fame that they'd be a technocratic elite, or they'd do so little work this whole pipedream would collapse immediately.
I seriously doubt anybody would despise your wife for taking social benefits, since thats exactly the situation why we contribute for - to take care of these who'd run into serious troubles, be it health or anything else. That's why any responsible and hard working parent gladly make his net contribution higher than he takes back from the system - he's thinking of his descendants.
What really outrages many people though is some thirld-worlder waltzing in, with his four wives and twenty kids, asking the hosting country's social system he or his family never contributed to for life-time social benefits. Right now there are thousands of these cases being investigated in Germany, revealing scammers with forged papers asking for welfare support repeatedly in different cities. As it turned out, a single African scammer got profit hundreds of thousands € in a single year this way.
tl;dr: People are not against social system per se, they are against abusers who made their comfy living from it.
The problem isn't necessarily society, society is made by the people and if the people change so does society, more or less.
The problem comes from the fact that many people define their 'well beeing' with how productive they are, how succesfull they are in their career. There is a reason why depressions are very common among long time unemployed. As Hass corectly said, people have to find something meaningfull to do, and for a lot of people that is a good job and if possible well paid job.
David Precht a German philsopher talks about it, where he mentions how the changes on the job market that could eventually lead to something like the UBI, but with the situation that a lot of people aren't mentaly ready for it, as you would have to actually find something to do with that time of yours ... The idenity for many people is defined by their job, their degrees and education.
For those of you with the luck to understand German:
