[quote=flyer]
Yes, CAR, we too have heard many stories like the one you related. That’s why we took proactive steps to try to minimize the “curse of giftedness,” and our efforts seemed to have worked so far.
Regarding the current issue being discussed, IMO, life itself is difficult enough by nature, without imposing any type of quotas at the educational level.
Many of my kids friends who thought the sacred degree would assure them life would be a “slam dunk” after college, have found a very different reality.
When my wife and I, and our peers, graduated from college, life was pretty much a “slam dunk,” with any degree, but today, (per my experience watching my own kids and their friends compete for the gold) if you’re going after the most coveted career positions, you’re going to need a lot more than a piece of paper to get what you want in life.
I won’t even begin to go into detail about what it took to get my daughter into Harvard Med, and it had nothing to do with race.[/quote]
This is what scares me. It’s not so much about the education, but the ever-narrowing door through which one must pass in order to “succeed” in life. As a percentage of the population, fewer and fewer people are going to be able to find (or create) jobs that will be able to sustain them over their lifetimes, IMO.
The popular push to get everyone into college with a STEM major is part of the problem, IMHO. The PTB want a far cheaper and more qualified pool of applicants for increasingly restrictive job openings, so they are pushing everyone to get an advanced or STEM degree, all the while reducing the subsidies and increasing tuition costs. It used to be that people could have more general abilities and the companies would train for the more specific nature of the jobs they wanted to fill, but with the transient nature of employment these days, no company wants to make that investment.
Students/job seekers are being fed the myth that *they* are the problem, when (IMO) the problem is our global economic system. We have an oversupply of labor, globally-speaking, and demand for the goods and services being sold is drying up in many cases. So now, parents are expected to shell out upwards of six figures for their children’s educations without any guarantee of a decent job…or even if the decent job exists today, no guarantee that the (very expensive!) specialized training will be able to qualify that person for a job in another field if the job market should change.
And let’s just consider for a moment what would happen if *everybody* got an engineering degree. What would happen to wages for those job applicants? Would our economy, or the job market, be any better off? If we compare the “innovations” of the past few years with the innovations from our “glory days” in the 1940s-1960s, we’re not doing so well. If Facebook is what we consider to be innovation and progress, then we’re in serious trouble, IMHO.
