I saw a question recently: Did the boomers destroy college, and do universities have a duty to ensure people can get jobs after graduating their programs?
The answer must be: Realistically, buyer beware.
It doesn't really make sense that universities end up as glorified a job programs. If you get a 4-year degree, most of the classes you're paying for aren't even related to your field.
Until the postmodern age after the world wars, University wasn't intended to be a job training center. It was a fancy school where people with a bunch of extra money would go to play around learning about things that they were interested in. Virtually no jobs on Earth required a university degree. Postmodern bureaucratic norms ended up turning everything into a policy or procedure. Companies stopped training on the job.
Did the boomers do this? It's a tempting narrative to go with, but the reality is world wars represented the end of the modernist era. Before the beginning of World war I, there's been 99 years of relative peace following the Napoleonic wars after the 1815 conference of Vienna. This extended peace had convinced the Western world that the modernist way of looking at the world, rational and logical, objective and Grand, was the correct way of looking at the world. They thought that they had ended war, since for centuries before that there was almost non-stop war. The first world war shattered that illusion, and the first postmodern thinkers were born, but they didn't have total control of the society yet. The second world war, that's what ended up ultimately breaking the modernist project all together.
I think it's important we treat the boomers as what they actually were: People who did get to experience the best times, but who came of age into a decline, much like many millennials who came of age into the 2008 financial crisis.
I'm working on an about this for my third book, effectively what existed as liberal democracy before the world wars and after was not the same thing. Before, government spending as percent of GDP was 3 to 5%. Afterwards, it was never less than 30 to 50%, and in some cases it was a high 60%. This included things like funding for universities which previously had to take care of things with private funding, but it also included funding for certifications and other regulations which forced people into having University degrees for certain jobs.
It's easy to blame the boomers for this, but remember even as late as the 1970s, they may have been adults but that didn't mean that they were in charge. A lot of what happened around that time happened when their parents were in charge, or even to a lesser extent their grandparents.
You can see who was actually in charge of things based on who was the president. The first baby boomer president was Clinton, meaning that the postmodern bureaucratic order was completely and totally in place by the time the boomer generation was in charge. Offshoring was already fully established. The hollowing out of the rust belt had long since begun to occur.
One of the things that led to the university system being the way it is today will be the 1944 GI Bill. It's primary recipients would have been the greatest generation who are returning home from the world wars. This would have been the moment that universities stopped being a finishing school for the elite and began being a vocational training center. This was explicitly because after the first World war a giant horde of trained Killers descended on Washington to demand post-war benefits.
You might want to blame the greatest generation then, since they were in charge for a lot of this. Arguably, the 1944 GI Bill wouldn't have been put in by the greatest generation either. It would have been put in by their parents, the ones who fought World war I and the ones who would have been a charge during the world wars. If I had to guess, I'd say that they remembered what happened having all of those soldiers coming home after World war 1, and they wanted to try to prevent the mass suffering that demobilization had caused. Although many of the things that were done after World war II ended up having negative repercussions, I really have to give credit that they were in a lot of cases shockingly clever and humane.
And I will say that even early millennials or late Gen X we're already being warned that they better choose their majors carefully. I distinctly remember sitting down watching Saturday morning cartoons and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came on, and they had an entire episode dedicated to the idea that if you're going to go to university you better very carefully choose your major because you're not going to be able to just party and have an easy life afterwards. I also remember kids in the Hall skit talking about it where there were a bunch of homeless boomers, and they all suggested that they eat their University degrees because that's about all they were useful for.
The answer must be: Realistically, buyer beware.
It doesn't really make sense that universities end up as glorified a job programs. If you get a 4-year degree, most of the classes you're paying for aren't even related to your field.
Until the postmodern age after the world wars, University wasn't intended to be a job training center. It was a fancy school where people with a bunch of extra money would go to play around learning about things that they were interested in. Virtually no jobs on Earth required a university degree. Postmodern bureaucratic norms ended up turning everything into a policy or procedure. Companies stopped training on the job.
Did the boomers do this? It's a tempting narrative to go with, but the reality is world wars represented the end of the modernist era. Before the beginning of World war I, there's been 99 years of relative peace following the Napoleonic wars after the 1815 conference of Vienna. This extended peace had convinced the Western world that the modernist way of looking at the world, rational and logical, objective and Grand, was the correct way of looking at the world. They thought that they had ended war, since for centuries before that there was almost non-stop war. The first world war shattered that illusion, and the first postmodern thinkers were born, but they didn't have total control of the society yet. The second world war, that's what ended up ultimately breaking the modernist project all together.
I think it's important we treat the boomers as what they actually were: People who did get to experience the best times, but who came of age into a decline, much like many millennials who came of age into the 2008 financial crisis.
I'm working on an about this for my third book, effectively what existed as liberal democracy before the world wars and after was not the same thing. Before, government spending as percent of GDP was 3 to 5%. Afterwards, it was never less than 30 to 50%, and in some cases it was a high 60%. This included things like funding for universities which previously had to take care of things with private funding, but it also included funding for certifications and other regulations which forced people into having University degrees for certain jobs.
It's easy to blame the boomers for this, but remember even as late as the 1970s, they may have been adults but that didn't mean that they were in charge. A lot of what happened around that time happened when their parents were in charge, or even to a lesser extent their grandparents.
You can see who was actually in charge of things based on who was the president. The first baby boomer president was Clinton, meaning that the postmodern bureaucratic order was completely and totally in place by the time the boomer generation was in charge. Offshoring was already fully established. The hollowing out of the rust belt had long since begun to occur.
One of the things that led to the university system being the way it is today will be the 1944 GI Bill. It's primary recipients would have been the greatest generation who are returning home from the world wars. This would have been the moment that universities stopped being a finishing school for the elite and began being a vocational training center. This was explicitly because after the first World war a giant horde of trained Killers descended on Washington to demand post-war benefits.
You might want to blame the greatest generation then, since they were in charge for a lot of this. Arguably, the 1944 GI Bill wouldn't have been put in by the greatest generation either. It would have been put in by their parents, the ones who fought World war I and the ones who would have been a charge during the world wars. If I had to guess, I'd say that they remembered what happened having all of those soldiers coming home after World war 1, and they wanted to try to prevent the mass suffering that demobilization had caused. Although many of the things that were done after World war II ended up having negative repercussions, I really have to give credit that they were in a lot of cases shockingly clever and humane.
And I will say that even early millennials or late Gen X we're already being warned that they better choose their majors carefully. I distinctly remember sitting down watching Saturday morning cartoons and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came on, and they had an entire episode dedicated to the idea that if you're going to go to university you better very carefully choose your major because you're not going to be able to just party and have an easy life afterwards. I also remember kids in the Hall skit talking about it where there were a bunch of homeless boomers, and they all suggested that they eat their University degrees because that's about all they were useful for.
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@sj_zero I'm a generation too young to know firsthand, but the narrative I heard was that because of Vietnam, the colleges wanted to pass pretty much everyone, because kids were going to college to avoid being drafted. So the professors had to make everything a lot easier, so you ended up with dumber people getting more meaningless degrees.