Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[SteveMetz]

You see, feel, and experience far more in Higher Education than I ever have Rex, and mine is only one person's view. You may well be correct, and you are certainly in a better position to judge that than I. But from my own observations and from what my friends and I experienced at university, this is what things seemed to boil down to, more or less, and I can't seem to help but perceive that that's how things have become. As I said though, this may well be a mistaken conclusion.

But I have seen more than enough of people in Penta's predicament to really wonder just what is indeed occurring vis-a-vis higher education and the workforce. It is increasingly unsettling to my mind.

Having a kid who is a college sophmore and one who is in the application profess right now, I've taken 17 college visits over the past 24 months, I too feel that vast improvements have been made in undergraduate education. To give on example, I'm sure I was a very low priority for my undergraduate adviser following his research, teaching graduate students, and teaching undergraduates. At my daughter's university, they had full time advisers.

To be frank, I wanted to slap Penta and scream, "No one promised you anything but an opportunity. Just get over the whiny sense of entitlement."

If the sole reason for pursuing higher education is employability, a kid should go to a tech school. This reminds me of a story I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago. It interviewed a number of people who had gone through Duke's new Ph.D. program in--and I'm not making this up--Queer Studies. Then they were complaining because after all the work they'd put in, for some strange reason they couldn't find jobs. Moral of the story: adults accept responsibility for their own decisions including bad ones.

Dang, when did I become my grandfather?