Thomas Sowell asks what getting an education really means. He writes, “We don’t have a backlog of serious students trying to take serious courses. If you look at the fields in which American students specialize in colleges and universities, those fields are heavily weighted toward the soft end of the spectrum.”
Further evidence that the Norwegian Mindset of Not Bad is Good Enough has infiltrated America.
I went back to school to earn a degree after I discovered that fifteen years of business management experience with no degree couldn’t get me even an interview in a company with more than thirty employees. As an older student at a State University I noticed two things.
A. Only foreign students enrolled in technical graduate programs. An American student with a BS in Engineering could walk into a well paying job. The Central Asian student with the same degree had the choice of going back to his home country to work for $2000 a year or stay in America to get his Masters, at which point he could get $3000 a year at home or stay in America and get his doctorate. By that point he’d been here long enough to establish permanent residency and get a lucrative job teaching at an American University because there were no Americans with PhD’s in Engineering.
2. Students were more interested in Grades than in Knowledge. The only questions most students had was what they needed to do to pass. When I sat myself down in the middle of the front row and kept raising my hand to ask questions in order to grapple with the material, I was seen as a distraction, or worse, someone who might raise the curve. The greatest blessing of transferring to an adult degree completion program at a small Christian Bible College was that my fellow students were interested in learning, not just in putting in their time.