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By Professor Doom      The whole country is a�twitter (see what I did there!) about players kneeling in protest of the national anthem. It�s amazing how quickly people forget�do we not remember Tim Tebow?       Actually, it�s quite understandable that we�ve forgotten Tebow, since the mainstream media, for some reason, won�t remind us. Anyway, wayyyyyy back in history past, around 2011, there was this football player, a quarterback even, Tim Tebow.      He knelt at football games. And the media shredded him, poured endless hatred upon him. Talking Head: �If Trump were an NFL team, he�d be 0-16�� --I watch Bill Maher�s Left Wing Hate show every week on HBO, and of course they�re losing their mind over this fracas. It�s amazing the bubble they�re in, nobody on the show pointed out possible inaccuracy here, and the audience cheered at the "correct" analogy. My memory isn�t the best, but it really seems like he won something� ...

By Professor Doom      Employer: �Kid, everyone has a high school diploma. What else you got?� ---over a century ago, a high school diploma meant something, but this is what it�s worth today.      Part of what made a college degree valuable was scarcity�not everyone had one. Once government made high school �free� for everyone, our kids left high school to go get a college degree, and we opened up our campuses to everyone. A natural consequence of sending everyone to college is degrees are commonplace now.      So now we have a bunch of college graduates going out in the world, being told their degrees are worthless�and heading back to school to get a more advanced degree�this lets them delay payments on the student loans, if nothing else. Alternatively, they could flee the country or become prostitutes , but for the sake of argument let�s assume these aren�t good options for everyone.      The same irrespo...

By Professor Doom      As the student loan debt is now getting closer to 2 trillion dollars than 1 trillion dollars 1 , it�s time to consider how it happened.      �Cargo Cult� refers to religious splinter groups that kept forming among the stone-age tribes in the Pacific as they encountered modern civilization, during the 20 th century. The best book to discuss it is Road Belong Cargo , which has a great account and many fascinating insights into why these cults kept finding followers. The basic idea of the cult was that material possessions were acquired not by manufacturing them or by hard work, but as gifts from the gods as a reward for the �right� prayers and rituals.      These rituals were imitations of what the indigenous people were seeing. For example, they�d see a massive cargo plane land, and dispense boxes and boxes of goods. Then the natives would go back to the jungle, carve out a �runway,� weave a �radio� from l...

By Professor Doom             Confessions of a College Dean is a surprisingly popular blog, as he never really confesses to anything. I�ve known a few Deans that were downright criminal. I�ve shown many an upper level administrator engaging in morally reprehensible acts that, even if the Dean didn�t perform the acts as well, at least looked the other way. There really should be a thing or two he could confess to.                         Granted, he�s still working in higher ed, and posting under his real name, so I don�t expect him to expose much right now�but someday when he gets that golden parachute he�ll finally start talking. I hope.             Nevertheless, a relatively recent post came close to revealing what higher education is turning into: Tying th e Peasants ...

By Professor Doom      A few weeks back, another odd story from higher ed made the rounds. A professor decided on a new grading policy: Professor lets �stressed� students decide their own grade      Hey, grades are stressful, even assigning them isn�t fun.As a student I hated getting grades�I particularly hated bad grades, which is why I generally studied hard enough not to get those.       Let me share some personal anecdotes here before moving on.       The worst grade I ever got in college was a �C.� It was in an undergraduate mathematics course, and, for newcomers to the blog, I teach college level mathematics today. In terms of numbers, the professor was generous to give me a C; I failed every test, spectacularly. Actually, almost every student in the class failed every test spectacularly. The professor was a great lecturer but his tests were ridiculous. After I failed his first test, I studie...

By Professor Doom      In times past, faculty interacted with (undergraduate) students in two ways. The most common way was in the classroom, and we still have that.       The other way has rather disappeared, although it used to be the very first significant interaction between students and faculty: advisors. Before a student could register for classes, he had to go to a faculty advisor, who would review what classes the student had already taken, what the student needed to graduate, and then advise the student what classes to take next. The student couldn�t even register for classes until he had a signature from the advisor approving the schedule. Faculty served well in this capacity�we�ve all gone through higher education, have devoted our lives to education, and so we know quite well what needs to be done to get through the system. Nowadays professional administrators with weird, non-academic Ph.D.s �advise� students, quite often to their...