The US's postsecondary education system is a joke. So much so that it's currently used as a sieve to chaff the wheat and those who are unfit to be in the competitive programs get cut out of the wolf pack of academic performers anyways. Why are many six figure jobs locked behind a professional degree that can only be attained after you clear the postsecondary route? Law schools, even T14, only reward their top performers in this economy who get the highest scores and get nominated into clerkships, internships, or whatever brainwashing camp is offered by the Federalist Society to 1Ls. Medicals schools, MD in particular only accept 2-3% of total applications. DO schools last time I checked was still around 6-8%. So much so that many students who did not perform during their postsecondary decide to do an SMP or a post-bac program which is another six month to one year do or die gamble where they bank on performing against other performers in hopes of gaining a seat into yet another four years program that promises this time to give them the skills to a rewarding profession. At what point can we just point out the rot that has happened because university has become a commodity now to everyone that the value of the proposition itself has come down so low that there no longer needs to be a racial gatekeeping mechanism to it? When it was a privileged opportunity in which only a few members of a select class could enter and gain prestige from then it was valuable. But now that you have opened the floodgates to anyone with any background and any race, why is it so surprising that a college degree now does not carry the same value that it did over a hundred years ago even after Ivy League schools got exposed for having always instituted racial quotas to stop the influx of Jews from poisoning their racially diverse biomass of the educated elite? It's because it was a bigoted racial institution that withheld people that everyone valued it. It was because not everyone could be selected that it held value. It is because people at their root are ignorant, bigoted, and naive that they valued a college education and ignored it as part of a rich history or exclusion and poor racial policy that has graced this country since its inception that we are conditioned to state that US college students are more successful overall than their non-college peers, even though there are likely a multitude of other factors outside of just holding a degree in and of itself that those students would have been more successful than their peers if they chose to invest in other opportunities.
So much of the current postsecondary education is based around survey courses which are emphasized more so than skills. Therefore you learn more about pattern recognition within the field rather than attempting to establish a linear regression model to map out a line of best fit that indicates a potential pattern with relative confidence. You don't find the pattern yourself or learn how to find patterns, rather you are told the pattern that was abstracted by someone else for you, forced to submit to it, and memorize it verbatim making you selectively less ignorant, but that much more biased to a viewpoint as you are conditioned with a senseless scoring system that attempts to loop you into a pointless negative feedback model where you yourself don't understand what the good scores mean down the road and what the bad scores mean in the end. You're just following the prompt that you've been given and feeding them the answers that they expect to see without any iota of individualistic thought or a middle finger as a gesture.
Students are more likely to speak with confidence in many of these open discussion classes in which you get inspired by your peers rather than present their opinion as being one within an Overton Window, N=1, or within a confidence interval. The issue has become systemic, so much so that even science journals like Science and Nature within the pasar have been exposed for not rigorously holding their publications seriously enough to reproducibility and allowing fraudulent papers to sit and thrive for years such as the Alzheimer's paper that included a photoshopped band on the beta amyloid, tau protein thesis. Furthermore, this faulty research lead to perpetuate even more fraudulent treatments such as Biogen's release of Aduhelm, a medication that they released in order to leech off medicare/medicaid for subsidies and instead of having upsides, increase the risk of brain edema and hemorrhage for the patients involved in the studies which garnered FDA approval.
People tout STEM as being the saving grace for the future of this country when most labs are staffed by H1B visa immigrants who are running primers and being educational resources to a freshman class of which 15% will drop out of STEM and engage in the liberal arts. The amount of fraud that occurs in any given university based on the amount of useless research that has little to no positive impact in and of itself is a disease on federal funding that will continue to go unnoticed because undergraduate systems train students to think on the absolutely lowest bandwidth possible. How can there be a conversation about Gruter vs. Bollinger without pointing out that the education system itself has become a cesspit that has little to no accountability to the most vulnerable population which has been students as the cost of this education has skyrocketed and the quality of the education has become increasingly diminished and fraught with increasingly more administrators weighing down the system rather than it being intuitive, agile, and a learning experience?
What's the point of howling about it when no one cares that most lab curriculum has never made sense from a mastery perspective. How do you gain value from running an agar plate only once? A TLC chromatography study only once? A Western blot only once? What skills are you actually learning from these classes, from these labs, from your prep, and from your professor when it comes to evolving yourself into a professional? And when you realize that you're failing or not performing then what systems are there in place to transition some of these students into other STEM fields rather than failing them and forcing them to either learn how to play the game or go home. When we're talking about exclusion into these systems, into these fields, and into these majors there is no reflection on the fact that the system itself is by nature designed to be exclusive and exerts pressure on students financially and insensibly to the point of jeopardizing their physical health to the point of them going on "all-nighters" or forcing them to eat ramen and other types of junk food to meet ends meet. Why am I always so disappointed in the level of discourse, the degree of thinking, and the lack of personal dialogue in these posts?
