Geeky Bob

The United States government made it far too easy for students to take loans, and colleges pounced on students' willingness to take loans and jacked up tuition costs disproportionately to the rest of society - knowing full well that students would eventually bear the full financial weight of their poor choices and the government would be forced to make good on those loans one way or other. With that in mind, it doesn't matter whether you label the US government's current meddling in the college tuition debacle "overcharge reimbursement" or "loan forgiveness," because at the end of the day either way you choose to title such a program is little more than playing games with semantics.

In my opinion, what should be happening is these same colleges should be forced to eat part of the costs; some office of the government should take each college individually and review their tuition costs back to 1970 and compare the rise in tuition with inflation in the rest of society and determine whether each college rose their tuition costs more than inflation, and that's the part of the costs that the colleges should be forced to absorb - WITH NO GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS. If a college has to layoff workers to balance their books, then so be it, because there are ample studies available about colleges hiring an exponential number of non-educators with the increased fees they were charging, so that should take care of itself.

Once the colleges' culpability has been taken care of, the remaining costs are the financial obligations of the students - WITH NO GOVERNMENT BAILOUTS, either. While I realize that colleges were offering easy money to students at a time when most students were too stupid to realize the ill-effects of staggering debt (which is also why credit cards set up shop in student unions across the country), I have zero tolerance for students who claim to be a "victim" when no one was holding a gun to their collective heads. At any time the students could have said no. Instead of a loan for exorbitant tuition, students could have:

1. Gone to a different colleges (which would have encouraged colleges to be competitive).
2. Pursued their base courses through a cheaper, two-year college to save costs (which would have also forced four-year colleges to re-examine tuition costs to attract newer students).
3. Spent more time researching the millions of dollars that are available each year as grants and scholarships (which most students ignored since those involved doing some "work" to discover and apply for, and loans only required a signature).
4. Taken time off between high school and college to save up for school (which MIGHT have encouraged colleges to create more attractive entry-level pricing).
5. Join the military to earn money for college (which is what I personally did).

In addition, students could have chosen a different major, or a different school, or a different career path, or refused to go to college, or myriad other options that were available to them. However, most students took the easy route and chose to sign a loan for their education - AND THAT'S TOTALLY ON THEM. Regardless of whether the school was charging too much, at the end of the day each student made a conscious choice to enter into debt unwisely; the same choice that people make when they sign up for a 33% credit card, or take a loan for a vehicular lemon, or pay too much for a property without doing the requisite market research, etc.

As I said earlier, no on held a gun to students' collective heads. If students signed up for massive amounts of debt, that is entirely on them - the rest of the country should not be forced to pay for their collective stupidity through taxation. On the contrary, the colleges themselves should be forced to reset tuition levels to reasonable rates and backdate loan amounts accordingly, and students should be required to pay off the remainder.

PS - If something like this proposal was rolled out, I would also suggest that whichever office of government went through the books to synchronize college tuition rates with inflation over the past several decades should also be able to force schools to adopt realistic tuition rates going forward, too. If a school is caught trying to jack up tuition rates, they should be penalized in some way.

For more things to think about, see Why is College So Expensive?, New Rule: The College Scam, Is College Worth It?, and Game of Loans.

A few years ago I elected to take a class at the University of Arizona as a refresher for a programming language that I hadn't used in over a decade. I was originally self-taught in the language, and I knew that the language had evolved since I had last used it, so I thought that it would be worthwhile endeavor to study it formally.

The class was going well, but when I turned in one of my assignments, the professor had dropped my grade a full letter because - seriously - he didn't like my variable names. Being an adult - and not an 18-year-old that's fresh out of high school - I have no problems confronting an academic when I think they're incorrect. In addition, as someone who has been in the software industry for years, I have no problems calling BS when I think it's warranted.

I scheduled a time to meet with my professor, whereupon I told him that I thought he was wrong. All my variables were descriptive of their purpose, and I used a consistent format across the entire assignment. In addition, I wanted my grade restored.

The professor looked at me and said, "No one names variables like that."

I replied, "That's called 'Hungarian Notation.' It's a widely-used standard in the software industry."

He attempted to counter with, "That's outdated. No one uses that anymore."

To which I replied, "I work for Microsoft. We write millions of lines of code every day using that notation."

He grumbled a bit more, but eventually he acquiesced and restored my grade.

I later discovered that this particular professor earned his BS in Computer Science, then his Master's, then his Doctorate, and then went straight into teaching at higher education establishments. In other words, he's never worked a single day in the industry that he is teaching about, and yet somehow the software engineers of tomorrow are supposed to learn from him?

A friend of mine just posted the following article to social media:

University of California System can't use SAT and ACT tests for admissions, judge rules

Well, all I can say is - it's about time.

SAT and ACT scores are unfair, because they reinforce centuries-old stereotypes of "smart students," which must - by definition - infer that there are "dumb students," which is a horrible label to adhere to someone.

Next, we need to abolish the A thru F grading system, since grades are an entirely subjective method of assigning values to students, and we all know that someone's inherent potential cannot be measured by something as prosaic and outdated as a comprehensive "test" that covers what someone had an entire semester to learn. And how unfair are "grades" to the student who couldn't study due to their active social schedule? Why should some introvert who spends all their time buried in books have a higher value to society?

We could, of course, replace the A thru F grading system with a system of simple pass/fail scores; but that, too, is unfair - because NO ONE is a "failure." With that in mind, we need to do away with grades entirely.

Next, we need to seriously reconsider requiring students to attend classes. With the increasing invasion of smart phones, tablets, and laptop computers in the classroom, most students only retain 5% of what is covered during a class lecture anyway. Couldn't that time be better spent?

For example, here in Tucson at the University of Arizona, dozens of students gather daily to shout well-deserved insults at the narrow-minded bigot who has the audacity to stand on a stump near the student union building and proclaim that "Jesus is the only way to God." Just think, if students didn't have to attend classes (which are nothing more than a form of academic slavery), we could increase the multitudes yelling at that close-minded "Christian" into the hundreds - perhaps thousands.

A "Christian" is not entitled to an opinion, anyway, because "Free Speech" doesn't extend to someone who says something that someone else might not want to hear, and it is far more effective for students to learn the lesson that an opposing viewpoint is nothing but "violence."

Students should be allowed to learn how to prevent the possibility of civil discussions with people they perceive as opponents while they're young, and before they enter the workplace, where a "boss" will expect them to actually "show up to work" and "do their jobs," and therefore they'll have no more time to vociferously express their important views about these @#$% fascists with opposing points of view who are taking over America.

So in the end, everyone who wants a college diploma should just get one, without any effort or standards, because those concepts are part of a historically oppressive, patriarchal, fascist, elitist, misogynistic, and racist educational system that has only existed to squash the spirit of youth across the globe.

Common Sense is Violence!!!

Educators are Fascists!!!

Fight Global Learning!!!

As we rapidly approach the Christmas season, we are also reaching the end of my semester in Graduate School. With that in mind, I thought it apropos to post a version of the "12 Days of Christmas" for my fellow students who are bogged down with writing academic papers:

12 Pages Of Citations
11 Primary Sources
10 Cups Of Coffee
9 Hours Of Proofreading
8 Advising Hours
7 Rhetorical Questions
6 Quotation Blocks
5 Split-Infinitives
4 Supporting Arguments
3 Complete Rewrites
2 Illustrations
And A Thesis Statement In My Opening Paragraph

UPDATE: This post is one of several that I had written that I later discovered had never been set to "public."