You really don’t know shit . I am involved in political theory. Students of political theory make up most governments. Most academics serve on boards, think tanks, etc.

This goes for the right as well as the left.

Thanks for helping me make my point. Now the question is do College’s purposely offer useless boutique courses for their own self interest?

I think so. But not for cheap labour, but for cheap political indoctrination. I mean, how much cheap drivel can a professor inject into a skill-based course without getting identified by his students as un’profession’al having another agenda?

Marxist Materialism, as pointed out in Theses on Feurbach, is not vulgar materialism, it simply sublates the discoveries of idealism into a materialist framework. Marx’s early work (pre Manifesto) is very important on this stuff (my personal preference is pre”Marx” Marxism, but I digress….)

The point that Jim R doesn’t get is that there is social utility in having an educated populace. There is also something to be admired about societies that privilege intellectual inquiry. I admire that about the US, though the likes of Pipes, Horowitz are trying to turn that around.

And count me as a conservative traditionalist, actually (and I’m not alone among Left academics) in that the whole “diversity” notion of “Dead white males” is limiting. I’m the first to criticize a lot of the “post colonial” diversity bullshit that is inspired by - btu was not approved by - Edward Said, not to mention the Althusserisan tinge of what passes for Marxism, the fact that the classical humanist essay form is no longer respected. So I’m a “Right Winger” in that sense, not politically, but in that the term “Dead White Male” pisses me off.

What a waste of intellectual ability. I told my kids they could always go back to school later to learn job skills, and they should use their undergraduate time to study whatever they found interesting. That’s what I did and I have a better life because of it.

Some of the people I work with were Bus Ad majors, and they don’t have any advantages I haven’t matched by taking some marketing and accounting courses on the side. One of the most successful salespeople I work with was a Religious Studies major. My wife was a Women’s Studies-English dual major (how do you like that, Jim?) She earns about twice the US median family income in her technical job in the film industry. No one ever asks either her or myself what we majored in, unless they are making small talk.

On the election front, “…Senator Clinton has directly told Senator Obama that she wants to be his vice presidential nominee, and that Senator Obama politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably said ‘no.’”

How about McCain-Clinton? That would be hard to beat.

Expect JC will say that the GIs, excepting Saint Hegel, were basically deluded, so a refund might actually be in order

Maybe a refund?

First, there is ceratinly no “general trend for the total cost to be paid by others,” unless the “others” are the students’ parents. In fact, undergraduate education is generally a profit-making enterprise in which universities charge parents what the market will bear. I know this well, since I have just finished paying four years of tuition that were in excess of the annual US median family income.

For-profit companies make loans to help with this. They’re subsidized by the government, but that’s a case of politically connected companies like Sallie Mae raiding the Treasury for their own investors’ benefit, not of the gov’t subsidizing students.

As for unmarketable navel gazing, I make a pretty good living selling financial products even though my BA and MA are in fields that are unrelated to my occupation. Employers care about two things: a) student learned to get up in the morning and b) student learned basic white collar skills like writing, tailoring the work product to the audience, and brown nosing. No one ever asks me what I majored in.

Yawn. The pursuit of happiness can take different forms, not all of which need to be approved by you. What someone minors in during college hardly qualifies as a “big problem.” I can think of 3 or 4 others that loom over this one.

You’ve taken a laser beam narrow position on an old debate. Liberal education should be focused on making good citizens instead of good cogs, so I find your whole thesis objectionable.

In college I consistently held down 2-3 part time jobs simultaneously. This was far more common than people living off the dole, at least at the school I went to.
Besides, I loved my Wittgenstein course even if it doesn’t have too much day to day application for me now.

As someone currently paying 2 college tuitions, I have a hard time feeling that my kids are sailing through school on a “working societies labor”. More like my labor, and lots of it. Added tyo which, my daughter works 7 hours a day while taking a full course load at a tough school.

And by the way, ‘German Idealism’ isn’t some sort of multi-culural trifle. It includes many of the most important dead white male thinkers.

But as long as Universities and students are heavily subsidized by a working societies labor, and the political trend is for the total cost to be paid by others, that society and its people must have a high interest and say in what they are getting for their money.

A healthy society must have talented competitive disciplined young people that have been trained and prepared to take the high level jobs employers, and those paying for it, expect and need to be filled by highly educated college graduates. Damn capitalism…..and adulthood.

We in the US have a big problem here. It is nice and warm and touchy-feely nice to have minors in unmarketable navel-gazing Afro-American, Anglo-American, Indian-American, or worse German Idealism, but it takes valuable time away from the limited time available to ’study’ in one of the ‘disciplines’ that is likely going to stand a chance of getting you out of your mom’s basement, off the public’s dole, and out McDonalds working at minimum wage……while bitching like hell, between drug/booze depressions, the unfairness of that goddamn system that ‘lets’ others have way more than you!