and those whose parents' donations to the school secured them a sheepskin.

Consider that as well.

The subject is "group", which is singular, not "people", which is in a prepositional phrase modifying "group".

They don't know things like this nor do they care.

Ignorance is bliss as the old saying goes.

Ignorance is no virtue.

across more egregious errors on a near daily basis now that everyone relies on spell-check.

Walker 2016!

http://falk.syr.edu

We have a lot of posters who still haven't figured out the difference between too and to for instance.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/02/scott-walker-doesnt-have-college-degree.html



Pretending that your college degree makes you a better person is wrong. Being proud of a hard-earned degree is not.

We Motherfuckers all think alike.

That going to college automatically turns you into some kind of evil, sociopathic menace to society? Or did you forget the tag?

BTW, I never heard of being eligible to join the Navy with only an eighth-grade education.

Conversely, NOT possessing said piece of sheepskin is NOT a disqualification for anything in particular.

Master Chief Max Melvin probably joined the Navy based on his performance on the entrance test, known as the ASVAB when I joined in the 80s... he would have taken whatever entrance test was mandated in the late 50s/early 60s.

It's funny that my post was instantly taken as a defense of Scott Walker. Methinks thou dost... oh never fucking mind. Funny, but not surprising at all... Just as haters gonna hate, some gonna consider themselves elite for attending more classes than others. Not necessarily achieving anything in particular... just attending more classes.

I wouldn't vote for Scott Walker if he were the only name on the ballot. That's not important.

I'm sick and pukingly tired of people who hold themselves above others simply because they sat in a chair in a classroom for more hours than others who either didn't have the opportunity, or chose a different path.

And if you are waiting for me to apologize for going to college (just a garden-variety state school; nothing to be snobbish about), as if I have done something wrong, I'm afraid you will be waiting for a long time.

Armed Forces Qualifying Test.

As I recall I made a 99 out of 100.

Corporate trade schools and scam artist online with fake colleges. Vulture capitalism worked it's way over the body of public education.

Of course I could argue the opposite of your claim, Cheney, Rove and Bill Gates all have zero college degrees yet have managed to change the country and the world in a profound and not good way. Gates has a monopoly and so is worshiped as an educator, just because he has money.

All the men that created the atom bomb had advanced degree in various fields. I don't think that is a reliable standard to measure things. Why someone graduated from HS or why someone graduated with a PHd from college is somewhat immaterial imo.

We talk about some law enforcement groups that discourage hiring people with a high intelligence. If you took the ASVAB in the Army and scored low, but just high enough - they sent you to 11 bang bang school. Of course the new butter bar in country gets them all fucked up and he/she has to have a degree to become an officer.

Just not a reliable way to measure things imo.

How did he get the deferments during Vietnam war? Maybe he attended college but didn't graduate.

Maybe he only attended to get the deferments. A tragically unfair draft system.

WTF are "11 bang bang school" and "the butter bar"?

"Butter Bar" is a second lieutenant (gold bars on the collar). ""11 bang bang school" is infantry school. That one always cracked me up.

the butter bar is a new one for me.

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney[1] (born January 30, 1941) is an American politician and businessman who was the 46th Vice President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, under President George W. Bush.

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney was primarily raised in Sumner, Nebraska, and Casper, Wyoming.[2] He attended Yale, then the University of Wyoming, where he earned a BA and an MA in Political Science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney

...is a second lieutenant with a map.

Too much variation within a group of people with college degrees.

I don't think it's productive to criticize those that sought (seek) higher education. In my own case I was the first in my family to graduate from high school and the first to get a college degree. It is the only thing that pulled me out of poverty. I got my accounting degree completely on my own with no family support.

Yes there's a sense of pride and accomplishment but I would feel the same if I had taken the trade school or military route. Higher education is the means to the end IMO.

Let's build each other up. Let's recognize and respect our different life paths and aspirations. We liberals are on the same team.

... has nothing to do with how much education they have, CP.

W. the first president with a MBA certainly screwed this country.
The other MBAs destroyed the American economy , shipped all the jobs overseas.
The jobs left here devolved into draconian nightmares justified by their penny pinching policies.
However if Walmart has to raise wages to attract workers maybe we are turning a corner and our long libertarian nightmare will come to a close.

working in collusion.

The difference between now and decades ago is that we used to have an opposition party standing between the people and the machinations of sociopaths.

Now that corporatists have purchased the Democratic Party, too, there's nothing stopping them.

I loved talking to people of the great depression generation over the years, they seemed to see through the bullshit foisted on us in the Media. We are getting no less than we deserve if we carelessly allow ourselves to be deceived.

It diverts from where the blame actually belongs.

We live now in a 24/7, massively funded propaganda state that barrages us 24/7 with lies about how our government is still a democracy. It's not. It's a bipartisan, united corporate oligarchy *pretending* to be a democracy. Even voting itself has no effect on the direction of government anymore, as the Princeton study recently showed.

Our civics education has been dumbed down and our schools defunded. Most people are busy working like desperate rats in a wheel to afford enough to survive. When they come home at night, they have little time or energy left to do anything but turn on the fake news and be told that their situation is their own fault and that all they need to do is vote Blue (or Red) next time.

The people didn't do this. Criminal oligarchs and their paid politicians, corporatists in Republican and Democrat costumes, did this while deliberately deceiving the people about their true intentions. The people need real news about what our bipartisan government is deliberately doing to them: TPP, surveillance state, police state, war for profit.... But the criminals in power, realizing this, are busy prosecuting whistleblowers, criminalizing investigative journalism, and building a massive, lying propaganda machine to keep blaming the people, instead.

trying to divert attention from the real culprits, the One Percent, while dividing and setting the rest of us against each other for what has been perpetrated on all of us.

My wife has her Master's Degree in Nursing and firmly buys into fox news tomfoolery.
Although both of us benefited from good Union jobs she is still sceptical of them.
At the mention of Obamacare she blows a gasket.( I think it is a great advance for our country).
Her misguided opinions are a product of her college education.

...Interesting.

We all live in Oceania now, with corporate talking points constantly being repeated through the telescreens, just like in Orwell's 1984. This constant manipulation is the level of corruption and contempt for the people to which our political machines have sunk:

It's right there in front of our faces. It shouldn't (and doesn't) take a college degree to figure it out. I guess maybe older folks, at least, can put their finger on the problem, after living through so much in the last 50-70 years. We know what it was like before and after the Reagan years.

You hit the nail on the head, woo. "WE didn't start the fire," as Billy Joel says in song. Deregulated Corporate Capitalism is exactly how we got into this mess, with the help of Congress and now the Supreme Court. And everyone seems to be afraid to say it, lest someone call us a Communist. Well, I'm not a Communist. I'm an American citizen just like everyone else here.

And lack of a decent education is also how we effing got into this mess, and now it's just getting worse!

that the corporate talking points are now focused on discrediting college education and those who seek it.

Creepy, creepy, creepy.

... I lived in the "back country" about 30 years ago, and those people loved their ignorance. Even had a family living nearby who wouldn't let their children go to high school because they detested education. They are proud of their disdain for education. They are the Republican Party base. Ignorance is cool, don't 'cha know. But it's not. Ignorance and poverty kills the body AND the soul. That's the way the Republicans like their constituents.

specifically in the area of testing. He sas that IQ test scores are excellent predictors of how well a person will score on IQ tests.The less similar a task is to taking an IQ test, the worse the test predicts.

(I know, duh. Obvious. But profound. )

Same with college.

Ex-gov. Corbett from Pennsylvania lost his re-election bid because in major part of his gutting of the budget for the state university system; Wisconsin Gov. Walker has just brought down a shitstorm on himself when he tried to narrow the statement of purpose for the Univ. of Wisconsin and its branch campuses. Why? Because the GOP doesn't want citizens/voters who are well-educated enough to be thinking, informed, and challenging.

They just want proles who keep their noses to the grindstone - fix that toilet, cut that hair, clean those teeth, don't even think about joining a union and just shut the fuck up. For gods' sakes, don't study history (like of the labor movement!), great literature, philosophy, political science, ethics, psychology, economics or communication. And most of all, never take a semester or summer to study abroad to get a bit of world perspective, including how much better the standard of living is in other first world countries as compare to the US. (What!?!?! You mean the USA is NOT Number One?)

The cognitive dissonance of getting a degree in vocational education, as you did, is amazing, i.e., getting a degree in an area devoted to NOT getting a liberal education OR a college degree. "Hey kids, don't equip yourselves for a meaningful life by learning how to think or analyze - just learn a trade." Yes, trades are important, and we all depend on people who practice them, but it's also important that our all our citizens/voters have a well-rounded education which includes learning to analyze, evaluate and basically think for themselves.

You accuse college grads of fucking up the world. Well in my experience as a judge of elections for going on 16 years, it's the college grads who are registered voters, and who show up at the polls. It's the under educated Americans who have zero involvement in community life and rely on rooting for professional sports teams and watching various escapist, reality TV shows to keep themselves entertained. They know who Homer Simpson is, but could not name the justices of the supreme court, let alone understand the basic structure of the legal system in the US.

Your college experience in studying voc ed was such that you, having previously or contemporaneously taught voc ed for 8 years (interestingly, without a college degree), stopped teaching AFTER you received your degree. And you have such a narrow experience with higher education that you equate your VocEd education with a liberal arts education or a demanding major in a STEM field. I think it's a damned shame that you put in all the effort to get a four year degree but became so disillusioned (understandably) in this faux field that you dropped out of it. You got ripped off at a state college. It's happening to far too many young people, especially on line, i.e, The University of Phoenix, etc. Hey kids, get a COLLEGE DEGREE on line! The online college dropout rates are a national disgrace.

I do agree with you that there are assholes who got their Ph.D.s from some school of education, for a thesis comparing children's fairy tales, and then flaunt that "doctor" title to justify their opinions on every topic under the sun.



LIBERAL ARTS: the academic course of instruction at a college intended to provide general knowledge and comprising the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, as opposed to professional or technical subjects.

What Is Liberal Education?
A liberal arts education provides a broad exposure to humanities, sciences, and social sciences in addition to your major area of study. Further, it teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to see the interconnectedness of the world.

Surveys show that employers desire the type of skills that employees can take with them to any job—skills like written and verbal communication, the ability to solve complex problems, to work well with others, and to adapt to changes in the workplace. These transferable skills are characteristic of a liberal arts education.

An education from a liberal arts institution can also provide the foundation for those who wish to pursue graduate studies. But above all, a liberal arts education prepares students to be successful in life and to be contributing members of their communities. Being able to understand problems, find solutions, and communicate these things to others is the trademark of a true leader.


Practiced extensively, across the curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance

Personal and Social Responsibility, Including:
Civic knowledge and engagement—local and global
Intercultural knowledge and competence
Ethical reasoning and action
Foundations and skills for lifelong learning

Anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges

Integrative and Applied Learning, including synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general and specialized studies; demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new settings and complex problems.

On the whole, the rich and powerful are most likely to have college degrees. Both because a degree can increase your earning power, and because the rich can afford to send their children to college, and, if sufficiently rich and influential, even to 'buy' a place for an academically unqualified son or daughter.

In general, powerless and marginalized groups are less likely to go to college, and this helps to keep them marginalized. If their position in society changes, they're more likely to go to college. One obvious example: women. Until recently, far fewer women than men went to college. With greater (though still not full!) equality for women, over half of the college students in the UK and USA are now women.

So to conclude: having a college degree doesn't make you evil or dangerous or more likely to fuck over your country. However, if you're rich and powerful you are more likely to be able to fuck over your country if you choose to, and you are also, incidentally, more likely to have gone to college.

.

...is more an exercise in "making connections" so they might take their proper place after "graduation."

partly because they (the functionaries with degrees) are so 'smart'.

And don't start telling us how "good" Scott Walker is.

That not the road liberals should go down.