Monday, April 30, 2012

Rehka Basu: Labor Market Realities Should Never Stand in the Way of Some Spoiled Suburbanite Brat's Desire to Never Work for a Living

$185,000 for a degree in Catholic Studies (with an INDIAN emphasis).

Heck, EVEN MPR is starting to realize the worthlessness of worthless degrees!

You can e-mail Ms. Basu here and thank her for the laugh, or perhaps mail her a copy of Worthless

hat tip

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:39 AM

    I told her to be a stripper. God would forgive her.

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  2. Anonymous1:47 PM

    I've read your comments on the "value" of some degrees and agreed fully. Today I experienced another proof. I had a conversation with the guy putting fertilizer on my lawn and found out he had a degree in Sociology. I'm tempted to say that they spread fertilizer on him in college so he's learned that lesson anyway.

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  3. Anonymous10:57 AM

    Sure enough, for some degrees, say Film Studies or Anthropology is pretty dismal, and faculty owe it students to coach them about this. However, all humanities (or social sciences) are equal. Religious Studies is more promising than these, and ministerial degrees, e.g. M.Div. even more so. Majoring in English is not nearly as unpromising as jokes about it would lead you to guess. There's a revolution going on in the social sciences, with big data, game theory, network science and machine learning. So it a mistake to tell everyone to get an M.B.A. or become a doctor or nurse practitioner.

    Secondly, education is one of the most fundamental public resources we have. Education gives me the critical thinking and ore specialized skills that drive the US economy. There is some tension between public needs and private desires and aptitudes, but privatizing the funding of education -- where a bank could gouge a student with a 20% finance charge for paying early, is absolute the wrong move. Thank God Obama change the ballgame for student loans. (But federal and state governments, and perhaps corporations, should pay MORE of the cost of education, not less.

    There are some degrees that may not seem so economically attractive, but are so important to society that someone needs to be taking them. Philosophy is the best example I know of. For a personal who hasn't taken philosophy courses at a good university, it may seem that the cost to benefit ration, in terms of new knowledge is rather high. But the way that philosophers rummage through a subject, allows us to understand the subject much better, and it trains people to be MUCH better thinkers.

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