More objective criteria just means more standardized tests, which are of limited utility. Still, though, the cultural melting pot is one of the more important aspects to preserve. A hardcore MAGA in an office environment is going to end up fired for cause before they're done training and in a lab environment a MAHA style anti-intellectual is going to 'know better' about all sorts of important procedures until they're shown the door.

Our colleges are too expensive to go to meanwhile our conservatives have spent decades demonizing them as places where kids get brainwashed into thinking that LGBTQ people should be respected just like anyone else who's never done you wrong or that Palestinians deserve the right to self determination just like any other people and don't deserve to be starved and butchered in mass because a small group of them did something awful.

And no, I don't care that you think it's antisemitic to support the basic human rights of the Palestinians.

If you have the president of the United States, who is blindly followed by millions, slandering you, of course trust in you goes down. Itâ(TM)s not the universities that have lost their way, itâ(TM)s the orange turd in chief who never was on the way.

What if we got rid of the typically college educated STEM jobs and doubled the number of plumbers and electricians in the US from 1.5 million to 3 million? That's adding 1.5 million people ready for those high paying jobs fixing the leaky faucets. Just think 3 million people earning the current median electrician/plumber salary of $30 an hour (because doubling the number of plumbers won't reduce their salaries?) instead of the STEM worker average of $50 an hour.

Oh and mechanics .. we'll certainly need more of those (median $25 an hour jobs) when we switch to EVs?

The evidence that universities have lost their way is that people who never went to a university and certainly not to one of the top schools have lost their trust in the universities? What is that evidence of. Surely universities could improve, but up until now they have been the driving force behind the US dominance of the tech industry around the world. They are under attack from an administration that attacks any form of truth finding that might differ from it. After all at a university you might learn that vaccines work. Or they might teach evolution, or that renewables can be cheaper than coal or any number of things that you should not know. Of course with the presidential megaphone talking about how bad they are people will believe it, just like people will believe that Portland is burning.

It seems like there are plenty of hardcore MAGA Harvard grads. Ted Cruz being a notable example.

> Trust in America's elite universities has declined sharply over the past decade

Yeah, so has trust in America's electoral process. Except what you find is that the reason that's happened is the deliberate sowing of lies from the same people who then went on to say they had to do bad shit because people didn't trust the electoral process.

American capitalistic greed is so fucking pervasive that we turned higher education into The College Experience. And then sat around bewildered as to why the cost increased ten-fold while the grown-ass children graduated with a masters in political activism, and a minor in Follow-Your-Feelings that might land them a volunteer job outside of a campus bubble.

Eat, chew, and shit that for ten years and suddenly you’re calling some of those grown-ass children “boss”. Or “Representative

Quite the racket they have going on:

1) Attack elite universities for being "woke" and make those attacks central to your culture war

2) Tell your culture war allies the elite universities are not to be trusted

3) Survey people on whether they trust elite universities

4) Use survey as "proof" that the universities have done something wrong

Is out of control everywhere, not just higher education. High School grade point averages inch up every year; there was a big jump during COVID and they never corrected. It isn't uncommon now for a huge portion (sometimes 50% or more) of the graduating high school classes to have 4.0 or higher grade point averages. There's no way these students are prepared to go to a college where the average GPA is 2.0.

There's a similar problem in all evaluation systems. If you give your Uber driver or Airbnb or Amazon order anything less than the top score, they whine and complain and argue with you. I bought a car, and they said I "had" to give them a 10 out of 10 on the survey; for them, anything but a 10 is considered a failure.

So, what to do? Be a teacher who tries to solve grade inflation all on your own? Be the only harder grader in an ocean of A's? Fight and argue with parents, students, your administrators? And, knowing that giving your students a lower grade, while it might be honest, actually disadvantages them when they try to use that grade to apply for college or graduate school?

We've lost the grading battle. It's over. We might as well turn most courses into pass / fail (where an A is a pass and everything else is a fail). In terms of determining what students actually now, it's probably time to go back to standardized tests and portfolios of work (likely videos as papers can all be written by AI).

Colleges used to be run by faculty, with administrators as their functionaries.

Now faculty are employees with little say in governance.

Obama's nationalization of student loans has increased the ratio of administrators by 10x by guaranteeing tuition without regard for value.

The faculty are outnumbered and outgunned.

The same thing happened to doctors and hospitals for the same reason and with the same enshittification.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Traditional politics aside, ChatGPT is taking over on college campuses and the teachers are reportedly just rolling over and taking it, if not actively promoting it. Of what possible value, on any axis, can an education consisting of typing into a text box, and copying the results from another text box, be? Well, maybe typing speed will improve. Handwriting should theoretically improve, too, but I bet it hasn't.

It's funny that Republican elites decry indoctrination by indoctrinating their people to hate education.

For years, kids have been told that they need a diploma to get a good job, not an education, just a diploma.

Those with limited talent or work ethic slouch through college, putting in minimum effort, socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams.

They then enter the real world where there is an abundant oversupply of poorly educated diploma holders.

Pop culture celebrates the slackers and punishes high achievers.

Well meaning people want to give the disadvantaged a chance, so they lower standards.

College ad

Outside of America, people continue to love America's Elite universities.

Nobody not under the sway of American political cults distrusts Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. etc.

Internationally, the top ten universities, by reputation are:

Harvard (USA)

MIT (USA)

Standford (USA)

Oxford (UK)

Cambridge (UK)

Berkley (USA)

University College London (UK)

University Washington Seattle (USA)

Yale (USA)

Columbia (USA)

Note, China has a university tied for #11, Canada has one tied at 16, and Singapore has one at 20. All in, 13 of the top 20 world wide Universities are American.

Basically, USA's elite universities are widely respected unless you believe a felon convicted for lying to the government makes for a good President. The key word is not the word felon, but the word lying.

Critical or original thinking is not a strong point of the right whingers I have encountered, they are a simple herd animal, a kind of irritable donkey chimp hybrid.

It is no surprise more interesting, reflective intelligent types end up in arts and academia leaning to the left. It's a safer place where they can thrive away from all the go getters.

Of late the right seem to be scared of everything and everybody. Social Media is just too much complicated debate and nuance for them. So they come out with aggre

This is literally watch every single fascist dictatorship from the Nazis to Stalin to Pol pot to Mussolini did in the lead up to seizing power. Go after the universities and go after anyone who is educated and devalue education.

It's like nobody in America ever cracked a history book in grade school...

The reason Stalin and Mao starved their people is they bought into nonsense "science" from a guy named lysenko who believed that if a giraffe stretched its neck to eat leaves it's children would have lo