MCATs, Affirmative Action, and DEI, Oh My

[laughing dog]

How so?

By giving them a preference in admissions.

You know this because…..?

How is that counter productive?

Because it is a form of segregation. In this case not driven by whites, but by blacks.

How is “segregation” necessarily “counter productive”?

 

[Toni]

No, not at all. You are the person who thinks only certain degrees should be funded by the state.

I don't think she is. I think her concern is about the number of certain degrees.

We need some English Lit PhDs. But probably significantly fewer than universities are graduating at the moment.
A few years ago we had a thread about PhDs working poorly paid adjunct professor jobs. A big reason for it is the oversupply - all those people got their PhD in the hope of using them to teach in college. Except there are too many of them, so universities hire them as adjuncts teaching a few courses each.

Do you not think that oversupply of any major should be discouraged?

Why do you believe that some collective ‘we’ knows the value of and market for certain Ph.D’s? I don’t mean to be rude here but I’m not that smart and neither are you.

You and I have a different world view: You seem to think that the only real value of any degree is how many bucks you can make from it. My personal view is that people who earn PhDs in some area of English ( or whatever discipline you want to knock on) are smart enough to know the market for their degree. Sure sure: some people do think they can beat the odds.

But I contend that education is of value to the person pursuing knowledge—and also to society as a whole. Even if the person never earns a dime using that particular knowledge/degree.

I know for certain that the government does not do a good job of predicting all of the kinds of jobs needed 10 years or 20 years or 5 years from now.

It’s weird to me. I see you and Emily as being very anti-government telling people what they can and cannot do to the extent possible but here you both are, trying to argue that the government t has any business at all telling people what they should or cannot study. You’re basically arguing for government control in a way that sounds a lot like communism.

 

[Politesse]

From here. We spend a little more than countries like France, Germany and even Canada.

France is literally in flames because years of austerity budgeting have gutted their schools...