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By Professor Doom Admin: �You need to remove explicit functions from your algebra courses. Students have no use for that.�      It�s no great secret that a great number of our college graduates are basically unemployable, or no more employable than they when they graduated high school.      Admin: �You need to remove inverses from your algebra courses. Students have no use for that.�      Now, admittedly, higher education was never meant to be a jobs training program. A generation ago, a college degree, at least at the undergraduate level, signified the graduate had demonstrated knowledge in a wide range of basic topics. A college graduate who couldn�t add fractions, who didn�t know what century the American Civil War took place, who couldn�t compose a decent essay in English, who couldn�t speak at least a little of a foreign language, who didn�t know the basics of scientific principle, who was deficient in just one of the pr...

By Professor Doom      Higher Education really is strange when you start to look at the big picture. Educators have almost no influence on what goes on. Instead, ridiculously powerful, non-education, administrators have taken over our campuses. What are the results? A quick summary:      1) We all know standards have been annihilated to the point that many college courses require no effort; it�s even quite documented .         2)  Social promotion is now a part of higher education. Who cares if you don�t know lower level material because there�s no work in the courses, you can still take higher level coursework.      3)  Grade inflation has made GPA essentially meaningless. The mode grade on campus is an �A� �more students get this grade than any other, and on some campuses more than all other grades put together.      These changes didn�t come from educators. Educa...

By Professor Doom      Admin: �When the economy is bad, people go back to school and retrain. So this is good news!� --administrator�s response to the economic crash of 2008      One thing I�ve heard many times while working in higher education is how it runs counter to the economy�the better the economy, the lower the enrollments. I certainly believed it when I was younger and very trusting of admin, but I�m old enough now to start thinking about things. We�ve had tremendous growth in higher ed, year after year�too many institutions have more than double the student base of twenty years ago, and that�s too much growth to really point at the economy. Across the country, enrollments have been steadily increasing for decades now �surely we haven�t had a consistently terrible economy for the last 40 years?      This trend of growth has reversed recently, in a class of schools that should do well in a terrible economy, or at least...