Any employer will tell you that all a degree tells him about an employee is that he can learn, he can put up with crap, and he can learn how a system works. My degrees were in astronomy and mathematics, but I never worked as either one. In fact, the only thing I ever learned in college that directly led to a job opportunity was a one semester course I took in Fortran programming.

After I started working as a Geographer and Cartographer, I went back to school to pick up job-related skills to pad my resume. It made me much more marketable, but there wasn’t one single thing I learned in the Master’s program that I ever used on the job. Nothing. Nada. But it was worth a premium in my $alary!

Its certainly not fair to bright young kids with good high school records or military or trade school or extensive
on-the-job experience, but don’t blame the colleges for that. Complain to the guys in Human Resources and to the bosses. We don’t make up the rules, they do.

Don’t go to college to get a better job. Go to become a better person.

Now they’re the factory worker and middle manager and small businessman who haven’t had a raise in a decade, and know they could lose their job at any moment.

Fortunately, I had good teachers in Math, science and foreign languages and English. I was well prepared for college.

I started college in 1964, before the hippie invasion came to Florida, and I was struck by how much more tolerant and reasonable and racially enlightened the environment was than in high school, and how the people seemed so much nicer and smarter. I guess this is where I learned the real difference between Liberal and Conservative, and I chose sides.

I came back from the Navy in 1969, right in the middle of the Vietnam Protests and sex, drugs and rock and roll. Things had rolled further to the left than I was willing to accept, I considered myself pretty much how I see myself now, somewhat left of center, a liberal, New Deal Democrat, just like my parents and most of my relatives, pro-union but not a revolutionary. If I lived in Canada or Britain I’d probably vote Tory.

But I also had friends that swung far left, including my cousin Robert the Red and my best friend Roger. The fact I never swung that far convinced me I was truly a moderate, because I could see the extremes and nonsense of the left as clearly as I could see those of the right. I cared for neither, although I still felt the folks on the left weren’t as mean and as dumb as those on the right. There are exceptions on both sides, of course, but that’s the general trend I still see around me.

But in today’s America, a middle of the road, center-left, liberal New Deal Democrat is considered by half the nation to be bloody Bolshevik bomb-throwing anarchist. And regardless of what Conservatives tell us, there is no true Socialist political wing in this country, other than a few radicals out on the fringe. Bernie Sanders may call himself a democratic socialist, but he’d be considered a middle of the roader in most of Europe, Britain, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealnd. You know, the civilized countries.

I haven’t moved my politics left since high school. The country has moved to my right.

“Women Studies 200″ forced me to realize that other world views are legit. No one has the same experiences, therefore not the same points of view. It’s okay that gays adopt (i know, how big of me) and native Americans have a different concept of time. That’s why they’re late to work. I’m not making that up. Psych 210 solidified the fact that homosexuality is genetic, not a life choice.

I know you’ll say that this is education but those with certain religious beliefs would call it brainwashing. Too bad the tolerance that is taught at University isn’t extended to the religious types.

I’ve know my neighbors kid since he was 7. I use to help him with his homework. There was a clear liberal bias where he went to school. That’s putting it mildly. He moved to the east coast and came back when he was 18, more liberal than you or ER. There is no way he informed himself of the gross inequality, malice, and insidious greed of the capitalist system. He lives on a steady diet of NPR and the DKOS. He’s so full of liberal talking points, complete with an arsenal full of gotchas like Atwater, he’d probably bring a tear to your eye. All at 18.

e also screams louder than you.

Maybe he’s just that smart but I certainly have doubts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/college-doesnt-make-you-liberal.html

It’s certainly true that professors are a liberal lot and that religious skepticism is common in the academy. In a survey of more than 1,400 professors that the sociologist Solon Simmons and I conducted in 2006, covering academics in nearly all fields and in institutions ranging from community colleges to elite universities, we found that about half of the professors identified as liberal, as compared to just one in five Americans over all. In the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents outnumbered Republicans by a wide margin; among social scientists, for example, there were 10 Democrats for every Republican. Though a majority of professors said that they believed in God, 20 percent were atheists or agnostics — compared with just 4 percent in the general population.

It’s also true that young college graduates are somewhat more likely to identify as liberal and to hold more liberal attitudes on social issues than their non-college-educated peers.

But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. The political scientist Mack Mariani and the higher education researcher Gordon Hewitt analyzed changes in student political attitudes between their freshman and senior years at 38 colleges and universities from 1999 to 2003. They found that on average, students shifted somewhat to the left — but that these changes were in line with shifts experienced by most Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 during the same period of time. In addition, they found that students were no more likely to move left at schools with more liberal faculties.

Similarly, the political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker analyzed data from a survey that tracked the political attitudes of about 1,000 high school students through their college years and into middle age. Their research found that the tendency of college graduates to be more liberal reflects to a large extent the fact that more liberal students are more likely to go to college in the first place.

Studies also show that attending college does not make you less religious. The sociologists Jeremy Uecker, Mark Regnerus and Margaret Vaaler examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and found that Americans who pursued bachelor’s degrees were more likely to retain their faith than those who did not, perhaps because life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder can be rough in ways that chip away at religious belief and participation. They report that students “who did not attend college and two-year college students are much more likely — 61 and 54 percent more, respectively — than four-year college students to relinquish their religious affiliations.”

So why do conservatives persist in attacking higher education? There’s no doubt that in terms of overall curricular content and campus culture, most colleges and universities do skew more to the left than to the right. And research by the sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood confirms that this can be a frustrating and alienating experience for conservative students, even if it’s not serving to indoctrinate anyone.

But that alone doesn’t explain the intensity of the animus. Doing so requires some historical perspective. Conservatives have been criticizing academia for many decades. Yet only once the McCarthy era passed did this criticism begin to be cast primarily in anti-elitist tones: charges of Communist subversion gave way to charges of liberal elitism in the writings of William F. Buckley Jr. and others. The idea that professors are snobs looking down their noses at ordinary Americans, trying to push the country in directions it does not wish to go, soon became an established conservative trope, taking its place alongside criticism of the liberal press and the liberal judiciary.

The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power.

I knew ONE physics major who in a frat- and he flunked out… not because his professor disliked him because he was a conservative… he flunked out because his fraternity events took precedence over studying….

Apparently a business major doesn’t require so much study, and can be done with a 4 year hangover….