Credentialism and Civil Rights in Higher Education
By Jonathan Bean • Monday January 5, 2009 9:56 AM PDT • 5 Comments
Over at my FreeU blog, devoted to higher education issues, I posted a column on “Credentialism and Civil Rights in Higher Education.”
The dirty little secret of the “diversity” industry is that it doesn’t produce the results: blacks are still graduating at rates far below whites and Asians—and now a college degree is needed for ever more jobs that simply don’t require the knowledge and skills learned only in college.
Tags: Education, Employment 
Think about it. You’re a prospective employer. It really doesn’t matter what the company does. Several candidates apply for a job, and one of them has spent (wasted?) four long years and tens of thousands of dollars acquiring a degree in ethnic or gender studies. No one in his right mind would hire this person. No one.
These people have made themselves practically unemployable, and since they like to rant about how life is unfair to their specific group, it becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well, there’s always the fast food industry. “Would you like fries with that?”
Steve Hogan | Jan 5, 2009 | Reply
While I understand Mr. Hogan’s response with regards to employability, I think he and many others seem to forget that college is about receiving an education, and not just job training. If it were just job training, college would be unnecessary, since everyone could apprentice those skills and procedures they need to know. College is about thinking, about using one’s mind to contemplate various issues and ideas. This trains the mind to apply critical analysis to whatever the subject might be, and in the case of ethnic studies, it might help someone in Human Relations employment actually understand more about their potential and current applicants. To dismiss knowledge of culture is to say we are all automatons of the industrialist world, whose only function is to learn to serve our corporate masters. While leaders of business may like this sort of employee, it is not education the employee needs, but mind control
Kenneth Prowell | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Most college graduates leave with a degree, not an education. If college students were learning to think critically, they wouldn’t accept the indoctrination that they receive from their professors. Mr. Prowell’s invidious comments on corporations, business, and industry are a perfect example of the “well reasoned” conclusions reached by what passes for “critical thinking” at most colleges. In other words, he can parrot the “accepted” and politically correct propaganda presented in most liberal arts courses.
Pete Conrad | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
“All those who have experienced the hijacking of their nations to communism – from Cubans, to Vietnamese, to Hungarians – know the archetype of the Communist Party member and activist: the failed professional who becomes the professional failure. They resent being bested by others who are more talented, industrious, or virtuous. So they nurture a malignant grudge against the world, or society, or ‘the system.’” (Humberto Fontova, Exposing the Real Che Guevara, p. 129)
RDP | Jan 7, 2009 | Reply
While I support Mr. Prowell’s ideology of college as an education rather than job training, it no longer correlates with reality. Colleges have become, overwhelmingly, diploma mills, that encourage binge-and-purge “learning,” focused on the end rather than the process. Critical analysis is eschewed in favor of regurgitation.
Jessica Kunkel | Jan 7, 2009 | Reply