The Meh List

[JazzTuck]

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I can't say I have anything to contribute to this thread, except comment that this picture is awesome. After all, I'm just a weirdo with a BA in Biology 🙄

 

[lostbunny]

hey wtf, where did this picture come from? That guy is my ex boyfriend!

 

[princesspeaches]

hey wtf, where did this picture come from? That guy is my ex boyfriend!

I don't know how it started but I've seen it all over the internets: http://www.ranker.com/list/the-very-best-of-the-college-freshman-meme/kel-varnsen

 

[twelvetigers]

hey wtf, where did this picture come from? That guy is my ex boyfriend!

No way. If that's for the lolz, you said it way too serious-like. If not, then holy crap.

 

[lostbunny]

No way. If that's for the lolz, you said it way too serious-like. If not, then holy crap.

lolz. I don't know that boy and haven't dated him lol!! (and won't ever. ... 😎)


... okay on the topic... is that what a 'meme' is? If so.... how much would your life such if you ended up as a demotivational. bah ha ha ha... *goes and deletes all FB photos*

 

[twelvetigers]

A meme (meam, not me-me, btw) is any sort of internet 'phenomenon.' A picture, a video. Rick-rolling. Yanno.

 

[Nutmeg]

Ok, I can accept that generalization, BUT that is not really an indictment of the BA (for the record I got a BS in Economics, my wife a BA in English)...
Just because people can coast through school and get a degree doesn't mean the degree itself isn't worthwhile. Like many other things in life, to some degree you get what you put into it.

I am just not a big fan of professionally focused education. Putting on my old man hat... in my day, the biggest thing about going to school was learning how to think, how to write, how to analyze, and all of those skills are applicable to any career/profession. And a GOOD BA program helps to provide that to students.

People with a purely professional focus are often so narrow minded that they are unbearable (spend some time in the Lounge and you can find plenty of those types).

Since y'all mentioned English majors, for example...they often end up being both successful lawyers and businesspeople. A lot of Wall Street firms would rather hire a philosophy major from Princeton than a Business major from UVA or Notre Dame even those are great undergrad biz programs.

From my experience, the ability of people to write coherently, and make a reasonably constructed argument is hugely lacking from the focused BSers, and at least slightly better from the BAers.

If you are going on to graduate school, then what you learned in undergrad is almost superfluous, and if you are going out to work in the business world, then there is hardly a degree that matters. You are going to learn what you need on the job. I went to what (at the time) was by far the best undergrad biz school. Very little of the details of what I learned was meaningful to me. Maybe some of the math and statistics, but that was about it.

Wanna get a good job? Go to a good school, get good grades, and make good contacts over the summer.

Last point.. .for those of you who think English is such a joke, take an upper level theory class, then try reading the literary theories of Lacan, or Kristeva for example, and then come back and tell me how easy that stuff is. I can honestly say that some of the most challenging material to really understand that I have come across is in literary criticism and philosophy.

How old of an old man are we talking about, and when did you first go to college?

I ask this because while I completely agree with your post in theory (problems of the over-focused, you get out what you put in, coherent arguments and communication important, etc.) I have little to no inclination to believe that BA programs today actually do that in general. The sort of person that goes in to school intellectually curious and broad in their perspective will likely get these things whether they aim for either a BA or a BS. But the BA classes--I just haven't seen where they apply anything like the sorts of rigorous standards necessary to refine your thought processes.

I say this in all sincerity: I've learned far, far more about communication, composition, and critical thought arguing in the SPF than I did in college. That's largely because your political opposition there doesn't depend on your teacher recommendations, and there will always be someone to criticize you harshly for a poorly thought out argument, bad data, etc. But college? Who gets severe critical feedback in college? Professors are too busy with grant writing, publishing, research, etc., and the GSIs are only a few semesters ahead of you.

In the time since I graduated (2004), the College of Chemistry has shredded the standards for the ChemE BS degree. But even still, the standards remain somewhat rooted in the difficult nature of the subject itself. But BA programs, the dumbing down has been almost entirely unabated, it started far sooner, and there are far fewer natural objective barriers to rock-bottom.

My own take is that there's a subsection of the population--let's use W.E.B. DuBois' phrasing and call it the "talented tenth"--and by and large, these people have the curiosity and self-direction needed to become at least novice intellectuals, educated voters, and literate readers of developed ideas and dialogues. I think in general these people will engage in that degree of education either by themselves for their own reasons, or through schools. But now we have far more than a tenth of the population going to school, and thus you dillute it out. But do I really feel if I look to older generations that I see any greater degree of analytical capacity or critical thought than I see in my own generation? No. My generation (and the subsequent) simply have more college-educated idiots, fakers, and feet draggers than the older generation. The enrichment of true thinkers among college grads was higher, as was the number of deep-thinkers that never went to college at all. Now, increasingly the real thinkers almost all go to college, but there's a lot of people no one would have seen as college material in the '60s or '70s that are going to college anyhow.

As for your experience with arguments among BAers and BSers, that may be, but that might also be an ad hoc fallacy, with the verbally skilled going to BA programs more and the mathematically inclined going to BS programs, so it becomes self-selected. However, since the people who suck at both tend toward BA programs, you end up with the relaxation of standards being greater in the BA programs than the BS programs. I'd say that your observation still has it's contrasting side, where the BAers are far more likely to buy a bunch of non-scientific or pseudo-scientific bullcrap and swallow it whole. Who's worse: the guy that thinks Tolstoy is boring and that Family Guy is no different than South Park, or the guy that thinks Jenney McCarthy has a good point about vaccines and autism, and that tomatoes in a can will kill us all?

As for vocation-relatedness, the truth is that today, most people are focusing more on the employability of a college degree-holder with regard to the HS graduate or less. The difference is with regard degree to which your major actually increases your employability, and in that regard, the BSers are more successful in general. And no, I don't count a Business major as being vocationally relevant anymore than I do communications. Accounting or economics, that's something else, but business? Hell no.

I was digging for stats at the start of the OWS dealie and trying to see the trends in majors. What I found was that there's a HUGE over-representation of business majors.

Business is over-represented and growing, while the traditional BS fields of engineering and science (save health sciences) are barely growing at all. As for the rigors of business, this article pretty well sums up my take on the challenges.

Finally, regarding critical theory--the real question is whether it's all a joke. Can the professionals even separate the wheat from the chaff? I went to school at the same time as my English major sister, and lived with her for the last few years, so I'm well aware of the content of upper division English curricula in at least one elite (yet public) university. I saw nothing in that time that disabused me of the notion that Bill Waterson nailed it here:

 

[Nutmeg]

Case in point: I looked up Kristeva on Wiki and got the following quote:

As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which correlates words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of "abjection" (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality."​

Now for a moment, let's give that the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a real, significant, and important philosophical insight. Who is going to be able to grade meaningfully an essay that makes a real, original, and valid challenge to it? No one. Hence you bury an half-assed, regurgitated point in a bunch of reference loops, citations, and jargon, and hope you get a decent grade. In action, that's where the BA undergrad education lies.

You see it a lot with philosophy majors. The most important accomplishment they get out of four years of intense study is a language barrier that prevents them from arguing anything meaningful or communicating anything new to the uninitiated, all while fiercely defending their edifice of crap logic, counter-intuitive parlor trick arguments that defy reality, and self-congratulatory delusions.

 

[Nutmeg]

Wow, that's deep, man. Semiotics of social networking. Wow.

 

[Dsmoody23]

 

[twelvetigers]

I guarantee that SOV has a few years on you, meg.

And that's all I got.

 

[StartingoverVet]

Nutmeg -

I did go through school "quite a few" years before you, so perhaps my view of a "liberal arts" education is a bit dated.

Having said that, there is little that I find objectionable in your initial post.

In the 2nd post, I would say the following:
1) I doubt few if any undergrads would have anything original to add to a work such as that, so, to me the point is not that relevant... therefore ..
2) The point of reading a work like that is to see what, if anything, a student could actually glean from the work. I think the effort itself has some value in learning to fight through a difficult text and slowly uncover some little bit of understanding.

But, as you stated, in the end, there is a small % of the college-going population that gains much from the process, so it is probably a moot point.

For what it is worth, I used to think most of these kinds of works were garbage, but for what little I have now been exposed to ...I find they often have pretty thought-provoking concepts once you wade through the jargon.

Thanks for stopping by the pre-vet forum!

 

[sunnex3]

not much to add really because i think we are just going in circles in this thread

so...just gonna say that a) Dsmoody this picture is hilarious and yet so true -- at my school probably 1/2 the pre-med students 1st semester were either economics or health and societies second semester

and b) my BA in biology (i know, sort of an oxymoron???) was pretty heavy in lab coursework. just sayin' 🙄

 

[RadRadTerp]

Case in point: I looked up Kristeva on Wiki and got the following quote:

As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which correlates words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of "abjection" (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality."​

Now for a moment, let's give that the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a real, significant, and important philosophical insight. Who is going to be able to grade meaningfully an essay that makes a real, original, and valid challenge to it? No one. Hence you bury an half-assed, regurgitated point in a bunch of reference loops, citations, and jargon, and hope you get a decent grade. In action, that's where the BA undergrad education lies.

You see it a lot with philosophy majors. The most important accomplishment they get out of four years of intense study is a language barrier that prevents them from arguing anything meaningful or communicating anything new to the uninitiated, all while fiercely defending their edifice of crap logic, counter-intuitive parlor trick arguments that defy reality, and self-congratulatory delusions.

I have a BS, but I did complete a philosophy major too, and I have to say that you make a lot of assumptions in all of your posts that cannot be substantiated.


Who is going to be able to grade meaningfully an essay that makes a real, original, and valid challenge to it?

This is actually what phd students do most of the time. Sure, they're working on their theses, but they have to do tons of grading for undergrad courses. Also, at the 400-level of many universities, philosophy classes, such as the ones I took on Hume and Spinoza, only had 8-12 people in them, so my professors actually read my papers and gave me quite a bit of criticism. People do get Cs and Ds in Philosophy, contrary to the tone of your post. Admittedly, I was not into post-modernism and took mostly courses in the philosophy of science, epistemology, and more "science-y" branches of philosophy/linguistics, since that's my inclination and the leaning at my undergrad school, so my experience may not be the same as yours.

I do share your contempt on some of the silly sides of philosophy; see: the Sokal hoax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair), but your elitism is showing, dawg.