Auditor says several college majors indoctrinate students and should be defunded

OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 144 points –
Auditor says several college majors indoctrinate students and should be defunded
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I agree with him. If you want tax payers to pay for your higher education, in whole or part, they should expect some kind of measurable benefit to the state. Data shows poor benefits for the courses listed. You can still study those degrees. Just pay for it yourself. My taxes aren’t there for you to go on a personal journey of self exploration.

"Just pay for it yourself" means don't do it unless you're already well off yourself.

Sounds like "Fuck you got mine" talk to me.

What taxes? How much do Americans need to indebt themselves for for college until people like you stop trying to have a say in what's being taught there instead of it being the job of the professors?

Do you realize I got paid to do my degree in France and we also have sociology and everyone is fine with it

Americans pay on average 24.5% of their income on tax, plus state taxes, CGT, estate tax, fuel tax, etc. All in all, Americans pay a little under $5 trillion per year in taxes. On top of this, the government is projected to borrow an additional $2 trillion this year alone to pay for the ballooning national expenditure.

Someone is making a lot of money on the backs of taxpayers. Since it’s not going to healthcare, it bears some scrutiny.

Someone is making a lot of money on the backs of taxpayers. Since it’s not going to healthcare, it bears some scrutiny.

You think it maybe has something to do with the U.S. being not only the largest military, but larger than the next 20 or so militaries in the world? Possibly?

Nah, must be those anthropology courses.

No, it's the evolution. Hear me out: Why do we need to teach kids about how life came to be when we could teach kids how to end life?

This message has been sponsored by SIG Sauer. Yes, we germans can do guns.

And of course conservatives direct their scrutiny towards education. And not, you know, the military.

There is no VAT in the US. Also, most Americans don't pay an estate tax, as the estate has to be worth something like 4 million dollars before that kicks in.

The problem, though, is that if you want to increase competent people entering certain fields and adding to the local workforce, the last thing you want is to incentivize those fields over others in college. That seems a bit of a contradiction at first glance. But these fields are lucrative for a reason, it takes a high level of understanding to do correctly. If you try and recruit more college students into STEM fields without increasing funding to STEM programs at lower levels, all you will do is drive mediocre students into the field who will have a hard time getting that high payday, even after graduation.

You can't approach education as if you're making a car or an iPhone, where you can simply redirect resources to build products that capture more market share. You are dealing with people, and their life choices. You need to capture their imaginations early in order to motivate them toward a particular field.

That’s a solved problem. Reputable universities only allow competent people to graduate. Ideally they only allow qualified candidates to enter the programs at all.

What an incredibly short-sighted and ignorant take. Education is about more than acquiring a quantifiable skill that would provide a direct monetary benefit to the taxpayer. Get your head out of your ass.

Yeah, people think of it too much like free money falling from the sky instead of the investment that it should be to justify the theft via taxation that's paying for it.

Education is one of the best investments a country can make. It pays for itself many times over. Anybody complaining about education expenditure from a fiscal perspective is an idiot.

An educated populace is also key for a healthy democracy. Oh, maybe that's why conservatives don't like it...

The US isn't even making that investment, students have to bleed out the ass for it and there's still people out there complaining about the curriculum they're choosing

If I was paying €10 000 a year for college I'd damn well expect to learn whatever the fuck I want in it

Right, but while you were trying your damnedest to get your quip in you seem to have overlooked the fact that that's literally what we're talking about - investing in education and ensuring it's not wasted on pointless pursuits.

You unironically said "theft via taxation" so you are just about the last person I want to hear from concerning education.

An educated populace is good. Yes, even in the fields that you personally don't see value in.

You always have to wonder how many paragraphs until JFK jr when you hear someone say that

What is a "pointless pursuit"? History and any marginalized population by the list. So apparently when the government makes a plan for how to invigorate an area, they don't need to know anything about it's culture and history? We don't need people who understand things like that. Every citizen is the same obviously any thing the government demands is correct and will work out for all populations.

Also why does the state even fund PhDs? PhDs don't enter industry and spin that economy baby, so that worthless. Doctors and lawyers can just take out more loans. It's fine. Looking at that why fund programs for most master's degrees? What companies require one anyway?

I'm being flippang here because even as a STEM major, I've gotten so much mileage out of the "useless" part of my degree. Being exposed to those "pointless pursuits" allowed me to build things that people actually needed and avoid the pitfalls before we exposed people to them.

When I was in school, I wondered why the state was forcing me to take these stupid humanities classes at an engineering university at that, but I see it now. Mine was a school where humanities students had to learn to code a bit, and engineers had to learn do media analysis and probably take more history than they wanted, but getting out into the world, I've found that the engineers who got that exposure are just better because they know there is a whole class of problem involving people and they know when it's time to ask for help or when it's time to do research.