General Education Thread

I've made my opinion abundantly clear that the competition based nature of education in America is toxic and vile, with the idea that school admissions being discriminatory being something on the schoolboard rather than the parents. I'm not saying what they did was wrong, I'm saying that the punishment is grossly disproportionate and hides the real villains (the school board).

Also, parents trying to do things for their kids so they can live good lives is the LEAST awful thing about WASP culture.

Again, Laughlin at least wasn't thinking about her kids' lives when she pulled this crap. This was her trying to compensate for her own lack of a college education.

Shit, her kids didn't even want to go to college in the first place. They were already making bank as influencers! One of them in particular got a lot of ire when she announced that she wouldn't even bother attending most classes and instead would just go partying.

People like Laughlin and her husband aren't the victims of the USA universities' admissions problems. If anything, people like them are helping to perpetuate them! Think about it - how can students who work hard to get into top universities fairly possibly compete with people who blatantly falsify "perfect" academic records and athletic achievements?

Edited by M84 on Feb 26th 2021 at 4:45:47 AM

I've stated before that I'm a strong proponent that college should be free and available to every American. The American citizenry should be able to pursue education as a matter of self-improvement.

Its my UBI.

The problem is that we're not just talking about college education in general.

Lori Laughlin wasn't committing fraud to get her kids into the local community college, after all.

And that still doesn't detract from the point that someone committing fraud like this makes it even harder for people who don't have super rich families willing to shell out big bucks for forged academic records.

Edited by M84 on Feb 25th 2021 at 9:13:33 PM

This isn't a question of cost, this is a question of fraud. She was getting her children into a college on false pretenses. You're arguing that college should be free, and while I more or less agree, that's not really the point. Loughlin misrepresented her daughter's qualifications to get her into an exclusive university. That's not "doing what you can to survive," that's taking away opportunities for the deserving. There's probably an actual rowing champion among the applicants who was on the up-and-up on her application, but that's one less space for them.

This is a false dichotomy, it's more than possible to believe that the US education system's focus on competition is harmful while also considering fraud by privileged people to also be harmful. Nothing about it is mutually exclusive.

Given how a professional title can make the difference between poverty and success for a lot of underpriviliged people, I'd say that fraud here is a particulary severe crime, especially if the ones committing it are already wealthy people who could get their kid anywhere else and not take away a chance for a middle or lower class student to build his/her future.

I think that if there's any punishment other than kicking the kids out of college, it is a massive abuse of power and akin to torture. Prison time is an evil institution that should be reserved for people who are a threat to society.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 25th 2021 at 10:24:12 AM

So you’d oppose them being made to cover the costs that the person who should have got the spot incurred because of the fraud?

You’re approaching this as if they took something from the college, the victim here isn’t the college, it’s the kid who should have gotten that spot, that kid deserves restitution.

On the contrary, this should be a reminder that economical power should not be lorded over those that have less wealth, which is basically at the core of this fraud.

I couldn't imagine my single parent mum having more than a cursory involvement in my uni admission process. But seeing rich slackers and cheaters cry when they realise that they can't buy their way into academic merit brings me joy, actually.

I admit I am a bit out of the loop with this Laughlin person

Here you go

Oh wow those are some big name universities involved. Stanford, UCLA, Texas, Yale...

Edited by Aszur on Feb 26th 2021 at 1:15:08 PM

Oh, spare me that wrongheaded bleating. Fraudsters are a threat to society. This was an organized conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering for which there were fifty-three individuals convicted. This wasn't just everyday dishonesty, this was a ring and it constituted a felony conspiracy, the consequence of which very well ought to be jail time. I've no sympathy for these people, because they can't even fall on the excuse of class struggle to justify themselves. These were not ordinary people of modest, and their children were not academically inclined whatsoever, whose only disadvantage was in not making the cut at a deliberately exclusive institution. They're just rich parents trying to snooker colleges into accepting their mediocre children for perceived social capital. Even then, they probably destroyed whatever chance of them getting into even a community college now that their reputations are blackened.

Edited by CrimsonZephyr on Feb 28th 2021 at 5:06:39 AM

So who's at fault there? The children or Lori? I'm pretty sure her children are faultless in this one.

They went along with it - they posed for fake rowing photos and everything - but their parents are the ones with the legal culpability.

That said, the kids weren't exactly great in all this either. One of their kids made people mad by claiming she'd ditch classes and just go partying instead. Meaning she was going to squander the college education her parents stole from an actually deserving applicant.

Edited by M84 on Mar 1st 2021 at 9:20:06 PM

By 19 humans are known for being able to apply moral reasoning to everyday situations in their lives.

The more I get involved in my job at learning on academia on the United States the harder I see the possibility of third world countries ever being participant in high-level information systems.

There is simply little to no incentive for investment on higher level education in countries and institutions that do not already have them - heck to even get started I need minimum a Master's Degree that is not taught in all of latin america by any respectable university (Closest I can find is in goddamn Mexico, and not even by UNAM, which is like the big name in there.

So even if I go to Europe or the U.S on some sort of scholarship or entering debt into it, my best bet is to find a job there or elsewhere since no one is going to want to pay me anything close to what a Master's degree is worth simply because it is not a market here.

Sad. Shoulda started a cult.

@ Aszur

That's the sad reality of many Third World countries, given that most of those nations focus is locked on building up infrastructure, some of the jobs that are taken for granted in the First or Second World simply do not have market here, at least for a decade or two.

This is a recognized problem. What I find really interesting about that article is this claim: "To put it bluntly, countries are no longer going to be able to get rich through export-driven manufacturing. There aren’t going to be any more Taiwans or Koreas. In future, if countries are going to get rich, it’s going to be through some kind of services and knowledge-intensive products."

How true is that? This article goes into some detail. It's a dense read by an academic researcher, but mostly comprehensible. What stood out for me was this: "This is a trend that is appropriately called premature deindustrialization, since it means that many (if not most) developing nations are becoming service economies without having had a proper experience of industrialization." In other words developing countries have suffered a proportionally greater loss of manufacturing job than more advanced ones have.

This is connected to education because it's the knowledge intensive sectors that require the most educated workforce. This means that developing nations are simultaneously coming under more competitive pressure from developed nations that long ago made the switch, and are also underprepared to make this transition themselves. And the longer this process takes, the harder it gets for them.

This sounds like a problem that some kind of international program could solve. Of course, that runs into the problem that powerful countries are self-interested and thus without proper incentive are very unlikely to do such a thing.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Mar 3rd 2021 at 6:58:26 AM

And people wonder why the Third World countries hate globalization in general.

Not sure if this can be put here, but there's a launch of a mentorship program in Singapore... which I find to be interseting.

Kinda relates to me looking for career advice as a poli sci guy.

Good news is that RSIS in Singapore has my application still upheld as I’ve deferred from last year.

Bad news. I’ll need to sit down with my folks about going to Singapore to do Masters as COVID-19 vaccination is progressing there well unlike in Manila...

Edited by Ominae on Mar 8th 2021 at 5:14:57 AM