mei-gin:

some-devil-some-angel:

mei-gin:

some-devil-some-angel:

Officially a philosophy major.

Hopefully just for fun?

I’m planning on going to law school.

Sometimes I envy all of you in your endless winding path of degrees.  

I have a degree in Philosophy. I focused on Logic/Critical Thinking as well as a lot of the political and economic philosophers. 

The Logic classes have paid off in spades. There isn’t a single day that I’m not thankful that I’m a logical humanoid. The rest comes in handy when discussing investments or bullshitting on Facebook/Tumblr. 

I’d say a philosophy degree probably isn’t going to land you a job unless you’re looking to become a philosopher or a professor of philosophy, then again, I might be an idiot and people might be dying to hire philosophy majors. 

As for law school, philosophy might or might not help but from talking to various law school professors and admittance board members  I’ve been told that they prefer English majors the most because they have a valuable skill of reading and writing that is critical to being an attorney.  

One of my other degrees is in Business Law, it’s also pretty much useless in getting you a job but is critical to success in a job. I learned contract law, IP law, employment law, investment law, real estate law, bankruptcy law, etc. My wife and other relatives are all law school graduates and their law school curriculum is nearly identical to my B.Law education. The only difference is that they paid a lot more for it and that they can take the bar after they graduated and I can’t (unless I gain 5 years experience). 

Then again, very few degrees actually land you a job, really. Many people don’t even go into the field which they studied. 

My advice to anyone is if you want to go to college, do it. Either get into the best schools (Ivy League) or go to a local cheap school. No one cares if you went to a middle ground school. They usually cost more and are a waste of your time. Get in, get the skills that you need and get out. Get a job and learn the rest on the fly (most do anyway). 

I hope my kid never goes to college. I hope he doesn’t have to. I hope that in the next 18 years, we figure out a better to learn and teach kids. I hope that one day anyone can learn anything that is being taught anywhere in the universe simply by logging in.

A lot of top colleges already offer free education online. Not receiving a diploma in exchange for what you learned isn’t the problem, society expecting one is. Perhaps we need to rethink how we perceive who is “qualified” and who is not.

How many people do we alienate because we base what they can learn and where they can learn it form on what kind of kids they were before they fully matured. 

I’m not just talking about high school grades and SATs. The dichotomy of the education system starts at a young age. We place certain kids in “gifted” programs or in “honors” programs and we place others on an education path with less expectations of those students and equally less contributions to those students. All of this happens well before high school, it happens in elementary school, before some children even develop a sense or drive for learning or a focus on a particular skill or knowledge set. 

Some people are late bloomers. They don’t figure things out and get their life in order until 20, 21, 25 years old. But for them, it’s already too late. They have 50 or 60 years of life left, but we’ve already sealed their fate. These people can’t get into better schools and they aren’t typically considered for better jobs. Not at 25, 35 or 55 years of age. We don’t view them as qualified. And we don’t give them a chance to prove it. 

I’m not saying let anyone into any school. Not right away, at least. But we need to gradually relax the acceptance program while also improving how colleges teach. 

There are people willing to pay to be taught and people willing to get paid to teach yet colleges put canyons between them. Application processes are ass-backwards. If people want to pay to learn, let them. If they flunk out, that’s their problem. 

There just seems to be this artificial divide between consumers and producers in this market and I think we can find better ways to bridge both sides without sacrificing the quality of education. 

eltigrechico:

at what point will college wither away?

As soon as businesses start to accept internet/youtube based training as the norm. 

“And where did you study economics?”

“Check my youtube history. I have 11,000 hours of viewed videos.”

halcyonhours:

sugashane:

oytotheworld:

YOU ARE NOT A HISTORIAN

You did not go to university to study history. The word “historiography” is a word you thought I made up. Chicago Manual/Turabian/Rampolla citation method is a foreign concept to you. You haven’t even spent a whole year studying a specific topic. You aren’t published either. You’ve read the wikipedia entry on the Dark Ages and you think you’ve got it all sorted out. So yeah, tell me how you’re a “historian” compared to me? (You are an English major. I am a History major.)

I think that if someone thinks going to college and studying something automatically makes them something special and also automatically makes them more qualified than someone else, I think that they are fucking clueless about life. 

Since you’re a history major, perhaps you should look into how people became experts before universities. Most people studied under specialists or read manuscripts or what I like to call analog wikipedia texts. 

There’s nothing I hate more than someone who thinks going to college makes them more qualified than those that didn’t. The shit they teach you in school is also found on the internet. Thank you very much. 

While I don’t think college is inherently a bad idea, much less a scam, I agree wholeheartedly. Nothing gets me more on my nerves than a functional imbecile who holds a piece of paper in higher regard than effort and experience. 

If you believe you’re more qualified to talk about a certain subject just because you spent X years taking classes on it, then I’m sorry, you’re nothing more than a despicable dolt. While college can give you valuable experience and knowledge I have no guarantee you actually had enough capacity to comprehend the full curriculum. Thousands of students graduate by cheating or memorising. They’re still college graduates. How do those pieces of shit compare to the ones who work hard or the people without a college education who have dedicated years of their life to the study of what they’re passionate about? 

Oh, and by the way, you major doesn’t define your career. You can major in English and be a historian. You can major in physics and be a sociologist. You can major in absolutely nothing and still have a career. Not only applies to business. Fucking Frank Lloyd Wright was a dropout and we all know his legacy. 

Right. I don’t discount the fact that college does have some merit and I certainly have never discounted the value of education, regardless of how it’s obtained. 

I just think the assumption of “college = knowledgeable in that subject” is a ridiculous theory. 

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn’t graduate college, I’d like to meet two random Computer Science majors that have more credibility than them. Heck, Jobs can school almost all marketing MBAs and the man spent a total of 6 months in a university, mostly studying calligraphy. 

oytotheworld:

YOU ARE NOT A HISTORIAN

You did not go to university to study history. The word “historiography” is a word you thought I made up. Chicago Manual/Turabian/Rampolla citation method is a foreign concept to you. You haven’t even spent a whole year studying a specific topic. You aren’t published either. You’ve read the wikipedia entry on the Dark Ages and you think you’ve got it all sorted out. So yeah, tell me how you’re a “historian” compared to me? (You are an English major. I am a History major.)

I think that if someone thinks going to college and studying something automatically makes them something special and also automatically makes them more qualified than someone else, I think that they are fucking clueless about life. 

Since you’re a history major, perhaps you should look into how people became experts before universities. Most people studied under specialists or read manuscripts or what I like to call analog wikipedia texts. 

There’s nothing I hate more than someone who thinks going to college makes them more qualified than those that didn’t. The shit they teach you in school is also found on the internet. Thank you very much.