Columbia Prof Says "Do Not Go To Grad School"

[Vence]

From the Nation

http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education

"Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education" by William Deresiewicz

"A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”

[MR HOMO]

Good article. It's refreshing to see something like this and The Nation would be the kind of publication where these kind of sharp ideas are allowed to be aired. I don't see the MSM picking up the story from this angle anytime soon.

From the article, I especially liked this part:

"Yet the liberal arts, as we know, are dying. All the political and parental pressure is pushing in the other direction, toward the “practical,” narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian, the immediately negotiable. Colleges and universities are moving away from the liberal arts toward professional, technical and vocational training. Last year, the State University of New York at Albany announced plans to close its departments of French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater—a wholesale slaughter of the humanities."

[Impala]

Wise words, but did you follow them?

I thought not. Too many kids are going to college to get a BA in Useless as a kind of Pavlovian response to life. That's the grim reality out there.

[MR MBA, PHD, BS, BA, PHD IN MBA, MBA IN PHD]

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