25 years old and deep in debt

[Savonarola]

Another one for Ide:

Why the liberal arts matter

By Fareed Zakaria

It's graduation season in the United States, which means the season of commencements speeches – a time for canned jokes and wise words. This year I was asked to do the honors at Sarah Lawrence in New York, a quintessential liberal arts college. So I thought it was worth talking about the idea of a liberal arts education – which is under serious attack these days.

The governors of Texas, Florida and North Carolina have all announced that they do not intended to spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts.Florida's Governor, Rick Scott, asks, "Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don't think so." Even President Obama recently urged students to keep in mind that a technical training could be more valuable than a degree in art history.

I can well understand the concerns about liberal arts because I grew up in India in the 1960s and '70s. A technical training was seen as the key to a good career. If you were bright, you studied science, so that's what I did.

But when I got to America for college, I quickly saw the immense power of a liberal education.For me, the most important use of it is that it teaches you how to write. In my first year in college, I took an English composition course. My teacher, an elderly Englishman with a sharp wit and an even sharper red pencil, was tough.

I realized coming from India, I was pretty good at taking tests, at regurgitating stuff I had memorized, but not so good at expressing my own ideas. Now I know I'm supposed to say that a liberal education teaches you to think but thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my "thoughts" are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.

Whether you're a novelist, a businessman, a marketing consultant or a historian, writing forces you to make choices and it brings clarity and order to your ideas. If you think this has no use, ask Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Bezos insists that his senior executives write memos – often as long as six printed pages. And he begins senior management meetings with a period of quiet time – sometimes as long as 30 minutes – while everyone reads the memos and makes notes on them.
Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly and, I would add, quickly, will prove to be an invaluable skill.

The second great advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to speak and speak your mind. One of the other contrasts that struck me between school in India and college in America was that an important part of my grade was talking.My professors were going to judge me on the process of thinking through the subject matter and presenting my analysis and conclusions – out loud.

Speaking clearly and concisely is a big advantage in life.

The final strength of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to learn – to read in a variety of subjects, find data, analyze information. Whatever job you take, I guarantee that the specific stuff you will have learned at college, whatever it is, will prove mostly irrelevant or quickly irrelevant. Even if you learned to code but did it a few years ago, before the world of apps, you would have to learn to code anew. And given the pace of change that is transforming industries and professions these days, you will need that skill of learning and retooling all the time.

These are liberal education's strengths and they will help you as you move through your working life. Of course, if you want professional success, you will have to put in the hours, be focused and disciplined, work well with others, and get lucky. But that would be true for anyone, even engineers.

With all the primitive cultures we have here in Florida I think additional anthropologists would be of great value to the state.

[Ideologue]

It's shoddy work, that: the classism that informs Zakaria's article is almost text, and his reasoning is distressingly specious.  (Six whole pages of dry business prose?  You'll need four years of formal instruction to write that in a couple of hours!  Maybe six or seven!)

But I'll tell what I enjoy about these pieces: they mean my position is becoming the conventional wisdom.  It's such an atypical development that I didn't even notice till now.

[CountDeMoney]

But I'll tell what I enjoy about these pieces: they mean my position is becoming the conventional wisdom.

No, the conventional wisdom is that with the advent of technology, future earners require more specific skill sets tailored to it; not "meh, teh liberal arts suck".  Your wisdom in that regard is still unconventional.

[Ideologue]

That's basically my position.

I don't think "teh liberal arts" themselves suck.  If that were the case, my hobbies would probably run to different areas than history, film, comic books, and the like--all big liberal arts.  I think the "liberal arts education" sucks, and sucks bigtime, because it does not prepare people to participate in the economy.

[CountDeMoney]

I think the "liberal arts education" sucks, and sucks bigtime, because it does not prepare people to participate in the economy.

Sure it does.  You just had the misfortune of fucking yours up with a law degree.

[Ideologue]

What doors did my history degree open that I left unexplored again?

Teaching, maybe.  That's a little tautological.

[Ideologue]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/us/colleges-rattled-as-obama-presses-rating-system.html?from=homepage

WASHINGTON — The college presidents were appalled. Not only had President Obama called for a government rating system for their schools, but now one of his top education officials was actually suggesting it would be as easy as evaluating a kitchen appliance.

"It's like rating a blender," Jamienne Studley, a deputy under secretary at the Education Department, said to the college presidents after a meeting in the department's Washington headquarters in November, according to several who were present. "This is not so hard to get your mind around."

The rating system is in fact a radical new effort by the federal government to hold America's 7,000 colleges and universities accountable by injecting the executive branch into the business of helping prospective students weigh collegiate pros and cons. For years that task has been dominated by private companies like Barron's and U.S. News & World Report.

Mr. Obama and his aides say colleges and universities that receive a total of $150 billion each year in federal loans and grants must prove they are worth it. The problem is acute, they insist: At too many schools, tuition is going up, graduation rates are going down, and students are leaving with enormous debt and little hope of high-paying jobs.

The idea that the government would try to rate the schools has rattled the entire higher education system, from elite private institutions to large state universities to community colleges.

"Applying a sledgehammer to the whole system isn't going to work," said Robert G. Templin Jr., the president of Northern Virginia Community College. "They think their vision of higher education is the only one." Many college leaders accuse the president of grasping for a simplistic solution to what they call a crisis of soaring tuition.

The rating system, which the president called for in a speech last year and is under development, would compare schools on factors like how many of their students graduate, how much debt their students accumulate and how much money their students earn after graduating. Ultimately, Mr. Obama wants Congress to agree to use the ratings to allocate the billions in federal student loans and grants. Schools that earn a high rating on the government's list would be able to offer more student aid than schools at the bottom.

Many college presidents said a rating system like the one being considered at the White House would elevate financial concerns above academic ones and would punish schools with liberal arts programs and large numbers of students who major in programs like theater arts, social work or education, disciplines that do not typically lead to lucrative jobs.

They also predicted that institutions that serve minority and low-income students, many of whom come from underfunded schools and have had less college preparation, would rank lowest in a new rating system, hurting the very populations the president says he wants to help.

William E. Kirwan, the chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said Mr. Obama's desire to hold down costs and improve graduation rates is a "noble effort." But he questioned the wisdom of trying to create a rating system. "It's hard for me to imagine how that can work," said Dr. Kirwan, who is known as Brit.

But officials said Mr. Obama was determined to shake up a system that he has said costs too much and often provides too little value.

"We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars," Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said in an interview. He said schools often did a poor job of providing information to prospective students and their parents, making the choice of a college complicated. "To defend the status quo, for me, you can't do that."

The cost of attending public and private colleges continues to significantly outpace earnings growth in the United States. Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., one of the most expensive schools in the nation, will approach $65,000 in the next academic year. Costs will be about $60,000 at Stanford and more than $50,000 for out-of-state students at the University of Michigan.

White House officials said the government rating system would provide new incentives for colleges to hold down costs and broaden access to a more diverse student population — and provide an alternative to the private rankings, where colleges often battle for spots by erecting lavish new athletic centers and libraries and by becoming more selective in whom they admit. The officials said Mr. Obama's system would not rank schools numerically but would give them grades or ratings like "excellent," "good," "fair" or "poor."

"He is not interested in driving anybody out of business, unless they are poorly serving the American people," said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. "In which case, I think he's probably pretty comfortable with that."

In interviews, several college presidents expressed deep reservations about the idea.

"As with many things, the desire to solve a complicated problem in what feels like a simple way can capture people's imagination," said Adam F. Falk, the president of Williams College in Massachusetts. Dr. Falk said the danger of a rating system is that information about the colleges is likely to be "oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads."

Charles L. Flynn Jr., the president of the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, said a rating system for colleges is a bad idea that "cannot be done well." He added, pointedly, "I find this initiative uncharacteristically clueless."

Schools vary widely in the information they collect about the earnings of their graduates — some conduct surveys and do polling — but the college presidents said no school can mandate that graduates supply the statistics. Several college presidents said they were open to the idea of the government's requiring more information about tuition increases, graduation rates, the amount of debt their students incur and the success of their graduates in the work force. But most said they were extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a government rating system based on those metrics.

"We think that entire approach is quite wrongheaded," said Kenneth W. Starr, the president of Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and the prosecutor of the Whitewater investigation of President Bill Clinton.

Ms. Muñoz, Mr. Duncan and other top officials have held numerous meetings with college presidents, students and others to seek input. Some, like Nancy L. Zimpher, the chancellor of the State University of New York system, are supportive.

"I don't have a problem with the government incentivizing a focus on access and completion when that's my core mission," Dr. Zimpher said. She said, however, that some data about graduation rates and postgraduate earnings were incomplete and would have to be improved.

Ms. Muñoz said officials were aware of those concerns and were taking them into consideration as they developed what she called a "version 1.0" of a rating system, which could be unveiled by the end of the year. In a blog post on the Education Department website last week, Ms. Studley wrote that they were listening to the concerns of college presidents, who insist that any system must "thoughtfully measure indicators like earnings, to avoid overemphasizing income or first jobs, penalizing relatively lower paid and public service careers, or minimizing the less tangible benefits of a college education."

But officials said Mr. Obama had repeatedly told his advisers that he was determined not to let college presidents off the hook. Aides said that after the president pledged to deal with rising college costs in his 2013 State of the Union address, he kept rejecting policy ideas as too timid and demanded tougher proposals.

"This is a system which perpetuates itself, and is moving in a direction which is unsustainable for the American people," Ms. Muñoz said.

Some college presidents accused Mr. Obama and his top aides of being obstinate.

"This is a take-it-or-leave-it approach," said Tracy Fitzsimmons, the president of Shenandoah University in Virginia.

Ms. Muñoz countered that Mr. Obama had no patience for anyone who attempted to block the effort.

"For those who are making the argument that we shouldn't do this, I think those folks could fairly have the impression that we're not listening," Ms. Muñoz said. "There is an element to this conversation which is, 'We hope to God you don't do this.' Our answer to that is: 'This is happening.' "

LA VICTOIRE!

I mean, it's early days yet, but despite Obamacare being garbage, his insubstantial efforts to bring the unemployment rate down, and his failure to drive over Congress with a tank, I've really come around on the Obama presidency.

[CountDeMoney]

States cut back funding, the topic in question becomes a problem as schools increase tuition to offset the losses, popular pressure force the Feds to get involved to help fix it, and then people bitch about the Feds being too nosy in state's issues.

[Ideologue]

What?

[LaCroix]

What doors did my history degree open that I left unexplored again?

Teaching, maybe.  That's a little tautological.

there are tons of positions that just require a four-year degree. they may have nothing to do with history, but so what? a friend of mine graduated with a liberal arts degree, interned for some car rental company, and is now an assistant manager with promotion opportunities in the future

[Ideologue]

Do they make internships for 31 year olds?  Chandler had that one on Friends.

[garbon]

a friend of mine graduated with a liberal arts degree, interned for some car rental company, and is now an assistant manager with promotion opportunities in the future

Something about that just strikes me as so depressing.

[Ideologue]

a friend of mine graduated with a liberal arts degree, interned for some car rental company, and is now an assistant manager with promotion opportunities in the future

Something about that just strikes me as so depressing.

Garbon in a sentence.

[garbon]

a friend of mine graduated with a liberal arts degree, interned for some car rental company, and is now an assistant manager with promotion opportunities in the future

Something about that just strikes me as so depressing.

Garbon in a sentence.

Actually I know what it is. Being able to say I'm an assistant manager at a car rental place with the possibility of promotion! That's what it is.

[Ideologue]

No, I know.  And in fairness, I'm projecting a little bit.  I thought like that a few years ago, too.