Save Your Money. Save Your Mind.

How to get how to get ahead without going to college.

From The College Fix:

Texas wants to know how it can help workers in gaining skills without getting a college degree.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s latest “Interim Legislative Charges” document asks the state senate’s Higher Education Committee to study “workforce education” developments.

Patrick . . .  wants a report on “state efforts to support access to work-based learning and microcredential [sic] opportunities” such as “apprenticeships, industry based certificates and certifications.”

The committee should examine “competency-based education” and evaluate “the potential benefits of expanding access to work-based learning, apprenticeships, microcredentials” as well as “industry-based certifications.”

The certifications should be “aligned to workforce needs and provide in-demand workforce skills and competencies.”

This disappointingly jargon-filled document, (shame on you, Texas), bears a striking resemblance to the English-product used in modern academe. Its premise seems to be that skills used in the workplace can only be learned in institutions of higher learning, which is precisely wrong. Work skills are learned in the workplace or, if they are particularly complex, in technical schools, found in most towns not long ago before the myth everyone should go to college came to being.

Your Tatler, using his gift of prophecy, predicts the unsurprising recommendation of this study will be, should Texas waste the money and go through with it: skip college and get a job. From day one you’ll be up a hundred grand or more, which will go a long way compensating for your possibly, though increasingly unlikely, meager starting wage.

Even if your job is merely a sales clerk at Walmart, you can still relish the satisfaction knowing your work is of much greater value to society than that of the brain-dead idiot with a quarter-million dollar PhD in Women’s Studies, or any of the other what historian Alfred Muir Whitehill referred to as the “fraudulent disciplines” (which nowadays, sadly, at many institutions, must include the so-called hard sciences).

Dear people of Texas: please don’t squander taxpayer money on this silly and unneeded study. Spend the money on something far more beneficial to the working class in this country: more walls on the Mexican border.