Slow Learners

h/t Daily Timewaster

"A man who carries a cat by the tail
learns something he can learn in
no other way." - Mark Twain

College, Loans, And Reality

 h/t McThag

Angus has some oft-repeated thoughts on the college loan debacle. Give it a gander. Our reply was far too long to post there, so we post it here:

I think you're yelling at the wall. And you should probably let it go. And this is me talking. Just saying.

You learned a hard truth, and you got screwed over hard in the process. But your story is not every kid on the hook for $100-200K, who thought majoring in kick boxing or Vogon poetry at night school at Wossamotta U. would get them first dibs in interviews for Harvard Law, Silicon Valley, or Wall Street.

Last I looked, Congress took over student loans, mainly as a boon to leftist colleges and universities, during Obama's first term, with a Democrat congress.

Nobody's parents voted for it, and neither they nor students sure as hell didn't ask for college tuition to skyrocket 500%, which it's done continually after Uncle Fed took over the whole thing.

(The list of things that didn't turn to shit 5 seconds after the feds got involved could be written with a Fat Sharpie inside a thimble. But you know that already, because you've got VA health care.)

This is the mortgage crisis all over again, except with college tuition.

Let it crash.

Stop trying to float a lead balloon.

Colleges will take a dive. Good.

Idiots who majored in stupid majors will eat a fat one too. Boo frickin' hoo.

TANSTAAFL applies, in spades.

I got the degree I have now as an adult, for pennies, from the local JC.

The same programs are available now, and with five times as many slots.

I only delayed that because I hadn't figured out what to be when I grew up earlier in life, and because despite having other choices, I decided to sign up to potentially kill people for Uncle when I could have ridden the wave from college into corporate America. I don't regret either choice. The one college loan I ever took out I got deferred, first while serving in the Corps, and then being a full-time student.

I paid it off after that with a minimum wage job in about two years.

I could have paid it off in 8 months while I was still in the Corps, years before it was due, but I didn't have to, so I didn't.

But anyone, any time, anywhere, who can't figure out that taking out $200K in loans for a job that pays a quarter of that per year is too stupid to go to college to begin with.

Is that predatory? Hell yes it is.

Let the whole silly-assed program die, and let the banks and the universities take it in the keester.

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of loan sharks.

And as you mentioned a couple of posts later, apprenticeships in the trades are begging for candidates.

So don't give away squat.

Let the smart and hardworking kids who got worthless degrees go learn plumbing or welding on their own hook, and pay their own damned loans back themselves, with no further assistance. Like the smart ones will.

The lazy millennials who thought they were going to get a Ph.D. in Victim Studies and get rich, and are waiting at Starbuck's until that tenured professorship opens up?

Fuck them, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Caterpillar trains people to repair heavy equipment every year, and the salary two years after graduation is well into six figures.

And they haven't filled all the training slots once in any year in the last 30 years.

(That's an example straight out of Mike Rowe's message, btw.)

Because it's hard, and dirty w-o-r-k, and you have to go where people are using heavy equipment to build things, which is generally hundreds of miles from Hipsterville, and with lousy internet. Boo frickin' hoo.

The government fucked up something it touched? And they lied to people?

Stop the presses.

I see 50 "Help Wanted" signs every day.

The only kids I see taking entry-level slots at McDonald's and Burger King are Asian kids, working their way through college. I can count the hispanic and black kids I see in those jobs on my thumbs.

What I never see are "French Poetry and Victim Studies majors needed" signs.

That hasn't been news to anyone paying attention since...ever, AFAIK.

OTOH, the friend I went to school with, who got kickedTF out of high school in our junior year the day after they found out he signed up for the GED test?

He both entered and graduated college a year ahead of any of us with a degree in electrical/electronic engineering from the local JC and State U., at 1/10th the price of private tuition-based schools, went to work for Texas Instruments, and he's retired years early, after making senior VP. After getting rich over decades of hard work.

I'm pretty sure he never voted to have Uncle Sugar hand out fat college loans to every swinging dick who thought they could be president of Warner Brothers or Activision at 23, or sign with the Celtics or the Cowboys in the first round.

And the total college loan takeover? That kicked in in the 2010, and the kids who signed up for that - as legal adults - were almost completely Millennials*. And that's exactly who's crying about their current situation now. Color me shocked.

The Boomers and even Gen Xers had graduated long before that happened.

People who owe money and aren't lazy, stupid, or both, will ultimately pay it off.

Those who won't are neither bright, nor industrious.

That's just how it is, no matter how big the pitfall that was set before them.

Dean Wormer's advice to Flounder is timeless.

*(That's before we get into the ocean of difference between Boomers from 1946 versus 1964. Generalizations on arbitrary "generations" are ultimately specious. I have more in common with John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or Tom Selleck - not a one of whom is a "Boomer" btw, than I do with most of those who are. The only thing kids in a given generation share across the board is similar birthdates, in 20-year swaths. Like you'd expect.)

Masterpiece Theater

 

When someone nails an essay to your door, you're
about to have a very bad day.

I haven't read any of Larry Correia's books (AFAIK), and I don't visit his blog, but I know from previous comments that a number of readers here do. My previous inattention may have been an oversight.

I say that, because for some reason which I cannot recall, I happened to drop by there the other day, and scrolled down to this post from Feb. 22:

Who Needs High School English When You Can Have Social Justice Instead?

Bearing in mind who's telling you this, and our own bona fide credentials in this sport, in case you are one of the ten or so people in the English-speaking world who apparently hasn't read what appears there, hie thee thenceward, in order to witness quite simply one of the most beautiful and masterful rants in the English language, from someone who is clearly a maestro of the genre.

He simultaneously deconstructs the offending indoctrination, defends the teaching of our mother tongue, and plays whack-a-mole like a ten-armed Kali with a bag of sledgehammers on every silly ass notion and retarded argument in a performance the like of which has not been seen since Michael York debuted as D'Artagnan in  The Three Musketeers.

★★★★★ Five stars. Highly recommended. (Correia's rant, and the movie.)

College ≠ Education

 

Doctor of Thinkology

John Wilder has some thoughts on choosing a path in life. RTWT.

We've broached this subject ourself, a time or two.

College is potentially a fabulous opportunity, but mostly intrinsically worthless.

There are only three things you need to know in life, none of which are taught in college:

1) What do I really like doing?

2) What am I really good at doing?

3) What can I make decent money doing?

When those three legs of that stool come together, you've found where you're supposed to be, and what you ought to be, in life. Period. (For porn stars, thieves, liars, prostitutes, journalists, politicians - but I repeat myself - and such, your morality, or lack of it, determines whether that is something you ought to be doing.)

But those legs need a seat to plug into, and those three questions must connect to one other thing, to be truly worthwhile:

Is this something that cannot be shipped to Shi*tholia or Trashcanistan and done for 5¢ on the dollar to wages here?

Why? Because if it can, it will be.

Loyalty is deader than canned tuna.

The days of 40 years, a gold watch, and a pension until you die left the building 40 years ago.

Employers (stupidly) expect, or even foolishly demand, loyalty to their interests, but never send any loyalty the other way.

They are as loyal to their employees as they are to used toilet paper, and always will be, for every position from janitor to CEO.

So answer those three questions, and then the fourth one, and ROWYBS.

If (as in about 5% of cases) that indicates a specific college course of study, go for it.

As to specifics:

Being a lawyer requires law school, not college. College is just to weed out the lazy and the really stupid f**ktards. (Looking at judges shows you how poorly it does at the latter.) Major in any damn thing you want to. Whatever it is, it will help you as a lawyer.

Including the anthropology of French basket-weaving poets. All that matters is an LSAT score to get in, and studying your ass off to get out. But only those who graduate from top-tier law schools will get top-tier salaries. The rest can make a living. Some can't even manage that. (Getting to SCOTUS from night law school is a very narrow and unlikely road.) Things are tough all over.

Medicine requires college, especially physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics. (See if you can guess what subjects the MCAT focuses on.) But once again, that's just to weed out those with no aptitude for finishing medical school, because letting somebody in means telling 100 other bright young wannabees to eff off, so if they let you in, they have a not-so-vested interest in making sure you won't screw the pooch and flunk out, thus wasting a chair that could have gone to any of 99 equally qualified candidates.

Engineering is all about college. To get you in the door with an engineering company.

But not all science degrees are equal. In the six months before I bailed out of computer science, I correctly recognized the scam. Computers were the hot thing, promising scads of jobs. But the course load was so bloatedly over-packed with prereqs and mandatory classes (in programming languages that are about as useful now as Aztec and Sanskrit), and impacted by too damned many applicants, that it took an extra year - maybe even two years extra - to get a basic four-year degree. At the same starting salary coming out as the guys in business and engineering. Dumb idea, and I ditched it ASAP. Bonus: All the guys I started with made good money - for about a decade. Then they spent another ten years as waiters and barristas when all their jobs were shipped to India, Singapore, Pakistan, etc. The guys ahead of them pulled up the ladder, and sold them out in a heartbeat.

The architects, civil engineers, and electrical engineers made a good living. The aerospace engineers spent more time on unemployment than actors, with the booms and busts and constant consolidation of a once diverse employment industry.

Nursing? Hard to get in. But after losing out on a NROTC scholarship that would have sent me to Stanford or MIT for free, if only I hadn't been white (they told me this to my face), then saw me unemployable in the fire and police departments for the same reasons, walking into the nursing department as a guy made me the same kind of diversity hire as if I was a handicapped gay black female: 2% of the field. Dean's list grades, and top 1/2% SATs meant they knew I wasn't going to flunk out, unlike 90% of their actual diversity selectees. Bonus: Can't ship the job anywhere. Ever. Permanent shortage of them from now until Forever. What does college - even my nursing classes - have to do with my job? Damned little. It only guarantees that on Day One, there's an 80% chance I won't kill my patient out of outright stupidity. Nothing more is certain. The real education started after I had the license, and hit the floor. Sucked to be told that after I graduated. Really pissed me off. Sucked even harder to find out it was true.

College for anything else? 

Okay, if they require it.

Major in whatever-the-hell you want, because it literally doesn't matter.

The utility isn't what you learn in college (which is always damned little, trust me.)

The value is in learning how to think, how to learn, and most important of all, how to teach yourself anything and everything, and how to teach it to others.

Someone that can learn, think, and teach others can (and will) excel in any business on the planet. That's what businesses are hoping they get when they hire college graduates. What they mostly get instead is over-educated children who can't tie their shoes, dress themselves appropriately, answer the phone without a 6-month training class, can't show up on time, nor work long and hard without a boot in the ass from a boss with a high school diploma, and a Ph.D. from the School Of Hard Knocks, subbing in for idiot parents and rent-seeking public school teachers.

A horrible instructor teaches you what to think. (This describes 90% of all colleges, everywhere, at all times, BTW.)

A mediocre instructor teaches you what you should know. (This is maybe another 8%.)

A good one teaches you how to think, not what to think. (This is Top 2% stuff, and can be gotten anywhere, at any school.)

A great one teaches you how to integrate and synthesize that learning and integrate knowledge from diverse subject areas, and convey it to others. (In most cases, this is supposed to be what Master's programs are all about, but seldom are).

Doctorates are supposed to be for those actually expanding the edge of knowledge beyond what is already known, plugging it into what's already known, and presenting it to everyone else.

College that fulfills that mission is worth the investment, if you need it, or want it for its own sake.

College just to get a job may as well be accomplished online or at the JC, for pennies on the dollar to Harvard or Stanford. (And both schools know that too.)

And you can make more money than college grads if you have aptitude for the trades.

A high school classmate, solid C student, nice guy, was a total gearhead. Not college material in any way, shape, or form, and he knew it. But a good guy, and good with transmissions and engines. Three years out of high school, he bought his boss's shop. Ten years out, he owned ten auto shops. Was married, paid-off house, and worth $1M. Before age 30. Never even bothered with the SAT. Knew what he liked, did what he wanted. None of the college grads (which was 95% of my class) could touch that at the 10-year reunion.

A guy fixing air conditioners, transmissions, or furnaces and water heaters is going to make a good living anywhere but Trashcanistan, and the entry requirement is a GED, aptitude, and a work ethic.

Mike Rowe annually pounds the drum that Caterpillar every year has unfilled openings for people willing to learn how to repair bulldozers, cranes, and graders, has a full apprenticeship program, and that in 2 years, you'll graduate with zero debt, and skill that can take you worldwide, and pay $100K a year within a couple of years after graduating, and can't be shipped overseas, unless that's where the broken bulldozer is. And they go begging for applicants, because people would rather mortgage their entire future and not get their fingernails dirty.

College is not for everybody, probably not even for most people, and totally unrelated to one's education, or one's career, in most cases. It's the biggest scam and unexploded bubble market in the world at the moment, and it's going to pop sooner or later.

What never goes out of fashion is being able to learn, and knowing how to think. With or without a sheepskin. Brighter folks figured that out by the end of The Wizard Of Oz.

Mafz Iz Hard Department



"If you can't set up the equation properly, you'll never get the right answer." - every math teacher I ever had, in the days long before Common Core

For example:

" Never before has there been as much “official force” in America as there is today. It comes in many forms:

• active-duty military;
• military reserves (i.e., National Guard);
• federal law enforcement agencies;
• state police;
• local police;
• lots of federal, state, and local government employees who go about their daily business armed. "

 Following which is an otherwise well-formed essay on a host of ills that have befallen America, and some that may. But another part of a decent classical education is knowing that opening arguments matter, and even more so when they are factually so far wrong as to be risible.

My rebuff to that error:

Please.

"Never" before?
You're much, much better than that.

Use the categories you listed, and google the active duty military strength of the US in 1945. Then as a percentage of the US population in 1945.

We are at a fraction of that level of official strength today.

In light of that, you want to restate that premise a tad, I suspect.

 Gentle Reader, I have no more access to the www realities than yourselves, so let's cut to the chase:
Had the addressee taken the few mouseclicks to do that, they would have determined that US population in 1945 was about 140M, and the number of US troops in uniform was some 16M, or  about 11.5% of the entire country. Essentially 1 in 6 men of military age was in uniform in this country from 1942-1945. These are still actual facts, even for those who didn't know them beforehand, because History is Still A Thing.

But they did not do that minimal homework.
Instead, just doubled down.

No, Aesop, I stand by it. Read the sentence again, carefully this time. You'll get it on your second pass.

Riiiiiiiiight. The facts, aren't, and it must have been my mistake to misunderstand that sentence. So, let's do the math.

So, look kids, 11.5% of the US population now would be (330M x 0.115=) 38M people.
(Almost like I knew whereof I spoke, and left bread crumbs the size of baguettes to that reality in my first reply.) So you'd have to have more government force enforcers than that to be at a level we have "never" reached before.

Then, let's bear in mind that the 16M number is only the military component of that equation. It doesn't add in every cop or other enforcer, from local, state, and federal agencies, in 1945. Which only makes this worse, if someone's sole intention was to pile on.

Unfortunately, right now, we're at a fraction of that level of governmental "force" enforcers.
There are about 2.1M US military active/reserve/NG, total, and roughly 3M LEOs at all levels, best guess, without taking a week to gather all available source material. Even if we add in park rangers, dog catchers, and the SWAT team for the Department of Agriculture.

That's about 5.1M. Not 38M. Whoops.

But to sweeten the pot, I'll even round that up to an even 6M.
And then double it, to 12M, just to be sporting. And even with that rhetorical largesse, you'd still be yuuuuuugely short of that 16M troops number of actual bodies from 1945, not counting civilian "force" then, and not even 1/3 the 38M, if we wanted to look at this in equally proportional percentage of the population terms, for comparison between 1945 and 2020.

3/8. 1/3. These would be called "fractions". Justifying my earlier use of the word, with mathematical precision. Just to keep things honest here. 

QED

I posted all that information, and more, in an unpublished (as of yet, and probably ever) second response.

Are there far too many civilian agencies with guns, badges, and a wannabe SWAT/Delta Force mentality with a Paul Blart Mall Cop level of actual capability?

O Hell Yes there are.

Are there so many laws, at all levels - local, state, and federal - that the weight of them alone could be expressed as double-digit multiples of the body weight of the late Andre The Giant, to the point of nuclear megatonnage overkill in a supposedly free republic?

O Hell Yes there are.

(Hint: Those two things are the actual problem.)

But have we "never" reached the level of "official force" as we have about us today?
Mathematical logic inarguably says O Hell No. As the equation was laid out, things were much worse 70 years ago. Except they weren't.

Topic sentence shot to hell.
And the reason why, in an essay, "never use 'never' " is a pretty good rule in most cases.

The way to fix that metric to make that point would be to
1) drop military forces from that equation (because, unlike in banana republics, they aren't pertinent to the topic)
2) focus on civilian badged orcs, and the tonnage of jurisprudential effluvia that enables them
at which point you'd hit a rhetorical home run, with no Brobdingnagian factual errors to hamstring your effort.

I didn't point out the obvious error to belittle anyone, but to suggest that by eliminating the error, they might sharpen their rhetorical hatchet.

So maybe, when someone points out such a glaring factual error, and suggests a minor course correction that you might better make your point, particularly one with which we tend to otherwise agree, maybe the snippy initial response was uncalled for, and it isn't aided by what sounds to these ears like ladling on a steaming case of butthurt. (But, yet again, maybe I'll get it on the second time through, right?) This is about the factual, not the personal. Anyone who can't separate the two more readily probably needs some time on a sunny beach, AFK. Ditto anyone who thinks erasers on pencils are for other people.

Errare humanum est.

Just saying.

OMFG

h/t Silicon Graybeard



Just kidding. It has no chance in hell.

And I just used that pic as an excuse to post this clip, for the giggles:

No, Gene, not John.


So Imagine you're an idiot, and imagine you have an impeccable Ph.D. and no common sense.
But I repeat myself.

As proposed in a recent scientific paper, the new airships would be 10 times bigger than the 800-foot Hindenburg — more than five times as long as the Empire State Building is tall — and soar high in the atmosphere. They’d do the work of traditional oceangoing cargo ships but would take less time and generate only a fraction of the pollution.

“We are trying to reduce as much as possible emissions of carbon dioxide because of global warming,” said Julian Hunt, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, and the paper’s lead author.

Go to SiG's place, and RTWT.

WARNING: Level III Beverage Alert!!

And the fucktards who came up with this were serious.

No, really.

Waitwaitwait...

1) they want to make a dirigible filled with highly flammable hydrogen gas (which worked out so well in 1937).

2) They want to make it four times longer than the World Trade Center towers were tall (which worked out so well in 2001).

3) They want it to carry 21000 tons of cargo (which worked out so well on Lake Superior in 1975).

4) Then they want to take it up into the jet stream, dirigibles historically being notably so agile, nimble, and structurally sound (the Hindenburg maxxed out at 84 MPH, btw) in winds from 60-200 MPH (which also worked out so well with dirigibles like Akron and Shenandoah).

5) then they want them piloted by AI (two lies for the price of one, it being neither thing), computer hardware and software being so well-written, and impermeable by attempts to hack it and maliciously use it (as everything computerized has demonstrably worked so well from 1970-five seconds ago, and onwards to infinity).

And what could possibly go wrong with flying the Megahindenburg fleet, each one multiple times the size of the World Trade Center, and carrying a payload the size of the Edmund Fitzgerald hurtling along wrapped in flammable gas at altitude, where each payload consists of 625 containers grossing at 33.6 tons@, roughly the same payload of nine B-52H models?!?!?!? (And I'm being sportingly generous, and only going by number of projectiles, noting that the Megahindenburgs' cargo will be non-explosive, albeit still coming down in 33 ton blivets from 40,000'.)


I'm going to be lenient and sentimental here:
Whatever fucktard(s) burped out this idea seriously should have a sack thrown over him/them NLT sunup Monday, be institutionalized for criminal clinical insanity, and locked in a pit deeper than the national nuclear waste repository, such that food and daylight would have to be pumped into their subterranean crypt(s) for life, some mile or more beneath the earth's surface, until they have expired in oblivion some decades hence.
We should lock them in, and throw away the prison.

Anyone who repeats the idea should be skinned alive, and then dipped 12 times an hour into a vat of salt water and rubbing alcohol, until the urge passes, or the screaming stops. If the urge continues, switch the dunk tank to gasoline, and set it alight.

Then they should hunt down and exterminate their combined families, to three generations, and fifth cousins. Just to be sure.

That's unquestionably Fucktard Of the Year material, right there.
I'm going to guess there's an Ivy League Ph.D behind this, somewhere.
Nothing less would do unless dealer-quantities of hallucinogenic narcotics are involved.

I am willing to compromise, though.
Track down all the schools beyond high school level that granted those authors their credentials, burn them all to the ground, slaughter their combined faculties, and graze cattle and goats there, by law, for at least 200 years.

And whoever wrote the proposal that got those soopergeniuses a monetary grant should be treated with the same hospitality given William Wallace in the final minutes of Braveheart. But only if they sterilize the implements first this time, and use them while they're still red hot.

This nonsense should have been in a Chuck Jones flick starring Wile E. Coyote.
And it's almost as well-thought-out.

Climastrology is a death cult, and it's going to have to be purged from the earth with fire.

And with that final nail pounded home, the prosecution rests, Your Honor.

This One Year, At Re-Education Camp...

"Did someone say 'Nose pencils?
Captain Blackadder reporting for duty. Wooble. Papaaaa!"

College Socialist Re-Education Camp, deconstructed by Wilder, i.e 4th Generation Warfare, Part Deux:

the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically. 

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically?  Education.

Go hither. RTWT.

Long-term?
All tulipomania bubbles burst, eventually.
And Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is going to break this one with a hard right cross to the jaw. Economics is merely the gravity of money, not the sociology of unicorns, and the inviolable rules are "TANSTAAFL", and "What cannot continue, won't."
Mind the backsplatter when this one goes off.

On Craft

OldNFO shares his travails doing the tedious research for an upcoming book project (and then, as is his wont, generously shares an excerpt).

In his missive, he shares that he's "not trying to be Louis L'Amour here".

Au contraire, mon ami.
That's exactly who you're trying to be.

The reason L'Amour was L'Amour was his auto-didact doctoral-level encyclopedic research, especially primary sources, and wide-ranging knowledge of his subject matter, and a not inconsiderable amount of life experience living it out beforehand.

{cf.: Thoreau, W.H. Dana, Melville, ad infinitum}

In the writing world, there are the L'Amours, in whatever genre, and there are the hacks.
Anyone can get rich being a hack if they compensate with other skills, mainly because the pool of dim lights buying their b.s. has grown by leaps and bounds.

But the 'net has cut pretty deeply into the ability of hacks to pretend expertise, leading to an epidemic of butthurt, and no shortage of hacks entering ancillary employment.
(Which explains Hollywood, for example, since pretty much forever.)

Research for a novel is like planning for an invasion.

No craftsman worthy of the title ever skips sharpening his tools or oiling the machinery because it's "tedious" or "annoying", any more than any pilot who wants to become an old pilot skips pre-flighting his aircraft.
That's why it's called craft.

Good on anyone for doing that work.

Literary Moment

\

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley


I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

"My name is OzymandiasOzymandias Pharaoh Rameses II (reigned 1279-1213 BCE). According to the OED, the statue was once 57 feet tall., King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

American Epic



Learnin', incoming. At about 3200fps. Keep pushing.

National Education Association, Call Your Office...

h/t Kenny

This Sign Took 3/5ths Of An IQ Point: All He Had

h/t to Gun Free Zone for the pics

But don't think the white kids were any brighter:

And those posters are proof that school teachers in the public schools should get an across-the-board 50% pay cut, and continue getting a 10% cut each year that their students can't think at grade level.

Education, College, and Economics

h/t Peter

I was going through the queue of articles posted on other blogs that piqued my interest but didn't have time to look at or get into (which is far too many for any given day), and got back to this one at  Bayou Renaissance Man, regarding professors kicking and bitching about being objectively evaluated:

Gee!  You mean, professors can now have their actual job-related performance measured accurately in comparison to the requirements of their positions, and the performance of their peers in universities and colleges across America?  Why would they object to that, I wonder . . . NOT!!!

I think we all know why the academics are upset at being accurately assessed.  They can't get away with "fudge factors" any more.  They might even have to stop fashionable, politically correct protests and other extracurricular activities, and get down to the business of teaching - which is, after all, the reason they were employed in the first place.  Clearly, as far as they're concerned, accountability is very low on their list of priorities - but for people like you and I, forced to pay exorbitant fees to study under them, it's rather more important.

RTWT. 

My thoughts:

1) If instructors graded on a rigid scale, grade distribution would be valuable. On a sliding scale, it's meaningless. If everyone masters the data to >90%, why should there be a bell-shaped distribution of As, Bs, an so on? If no one does, there shouldn't be any As. Which is why grade curves were invented to begin with: participation trophies for the mentally incapable.
2) Peer evals would be utterly worthless, unless those peer professors regularly audited each others' classes. Never happens in recorded history.
3) What you want is student evals, weighted based on final grade.
Twenty bad evals from F students = 0 weight.
One good eval from an A student = 5 pts.
Then look at the tallies year over year, and you'd quickly note who was covering the material well, and who was merely ticking off the snowflakes and getting a rep as a tough nut.

I was always an excellent student, and the hard-but-fair instructors with a mastery of their subject and some skill at teaching it were universally my favorites in both high school and university.
The majority of the instructors at both levels were mediocrities, as one would expect.
And some should have been shoveling tar on a road crew.

And I'd have the students rate them only upon graduation; they'd have the benefit of hindsight to disclose who prepared them best for subsequent classes (vs. the "easy A" types), and the drop-outs and ne'er-do-wells' comments would be self-selected out.

Professors hate objective measurement for the same reason students do: no one likes to be evaluated. It's uncomfortably painful, and the truth would affect their livelihood.

Of course, if students were actually footing the bill for an average $100/hr lecture (in a nominal $40k/yr degree program)*, their scrutiny would be a lot more valuable.

*{$40K/yr gets you $20K/semester, figure a 4 class load=$5K/class, each class meets notionally 3x/wk for 16 weeks, so one class session is about 100 bucks a period. Obviously, state schools are less than private ones, but only because your education is being subsidized by everyone in the state who doesn't go, whether they like that or not. So, on average, you're paying your prof almost as much as the guy who fixes your plumbing or transmission, and for something you could have taught yourself better on the internet for free. The degree is worthwhile in many cases (certainly not all), but the coursework is a joke, and the entire exercise a horrible value by any intelligent and objective standard.}

Expanding on that, and the professor-wrote-the-textbook-racket at most institutions, a college degree is a Ponzi scheme we're all paying for, like Social Security.

The fact is there are only five or ten subject matter experts at anything at any given time, who should be writing the textbooks for everyone else. Ditto for lecturers. And in most subjects, everyone knows who they are. Teachers and educators are always bitching they don't get lionized like sports stars and entertainers.

Okay, bitches, let's put you on the same grading scale as they are: let's put you on the equivalent of Teacher's Got Talent, and see if you rock the house, or suck @$$ and get deservedly X'ed off the stage in ignominious defeat. How much would Clayton Kershaw get if he served up nothing but home runs instead of strikeouts in front of 50,000 fans, hmmm? Not so easy now, is it, you bunch of whiny mediocrities?

For only one case in point, Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics (for only $26, new) should be the go-to primer on the subject for every student in every university from coast to coast, probably for 50 years or longer. The same is doubtless true in just about every other subject.

When you get to places like medical schools, there are always only 2-3 texts that every one of them uses for a given subject, because there's no point trying to gild the lily and butter their own bread by trying to reproduce (poorly) some other masterwork on a given topic.

But universities let professors shill their own virtually self-published mediocrities in every other subject, and lard on the books of their favorite fellow talentless hacks and pet authors, with predictable results.

You could self-teach yourself most subjects far better - for free, other than book cost and time invested - than damned near any degree program in the country, and for at least 30-50% of those out there, you could do an old-school medieval defense of your knowledge that ought to be sufficient to get credit for knowing the subject.

I could probably ably sit for degrees in history, poli sci, religion, biology, film, military science, and pull off minors in art, sculpture, music, and foreign language. So could anyone who put in a reasonable amount of time and effort, and all without sitting in a classroom for one day, or doing anything but cracking a friggin' book or three.

But there's no tuition in recognizing that obvious reality, and no royalties for reading the classic texts or great authors instead of talentless hacks, so colleges aren't in that business.
And professors don't work for students, they work for themselves first, then the university's interests, and little to none for the students, the parents of the students, or the state, all of the last three of whom are actually footing the bill.

See if that makes any sense to you.

If, tomorrow, the state granted college degrees on its own hook the same way I got my nursing license (sit in a room and take a pass/fail 80% mastery exam via adaptive testing**), and they charged a flat $100 forever to take any exam, to weed out the timewasters, and maintain the database and testing facilities, with a bombproof accredited degree granted to all who passed - exactly as they should do - brick and mortar colleges, not to mention for-profit diploma mills, would collapse overnight, and the 50 or so left and worthy of the name would be the top institutions on the planet, bar none. And you'd have to test into them, not get Affirmative Action Equivalency points.

Want to undo the academia strangle-hold on the culture, put the Usual Suspect communist profs back on the street looking for paying gigs to eat, and grant degrees based on merit, rather than SJW criteria?

Push for THAT system.

**{Briefly, adaptive testing: the first three non-graded questions measure your ability. They ask C-level (average knowledge) questions. Get them all right, the computer starts grading, and asks a B-level (mastery) question. Get it right, it asks a A-level (really detailed hard stuff) question. Answer enough A-level questions right, it shuts off, you ace the exam, you're done.
Get the first three wrong, it asks a D-level (dumbass easy) question. Get that one wrong, it asks F-level (total dumbbell) questions. Get enough F-level questions wrong, it shuts off, you flunk, you're out of there.
Struggle along barely at C-level, going up to B and down to C and D, then back to C and B, and it will ask you the maximum number of questions, and/or for the maximum amount of time, and depending on whether you were above or below C-level (literally and figuratively),  you do the Bataan Death March exam that lasts hours, and depending on where you were up- or down-wise, you either pass or fail, by the skin of your teeth.
So when the computer shuts off fast, you either passed or binned it. You don't know.
You find out regardless a few days later, but there's no immediate feedback while you're testing.
And multiple studies have discerned that versus taking a two-day, 14-hour 8000 question written exam, adaptive testing is just as accurate to assess mastery or something, which was how nurses used to get their licenses.
Now you can be passed or flunked, (and have to wait several weeks to re-test) in as little as about 90 questions.}

We could do every class and every degree that way. We could cherry-pick the best and brightest (and least horrible and boring) lecturers on every subject known to man. Imagine if every law student, hell, every college student, had Alan Dershowitz and Antonin Scalia on the Constitution. And so on, for every subject known to man. Royalties would ensure participation, and capitalism weeds out the hacks and quacks.

The only excuse for hands-on would be labs, which by and large are run by graduate TAs anyways, and could be done on weekends at the vacant former universities and colleges.
Ditto for high school, with sports and PE on Tues/Thursday, and Saturday for teams. MWF would be set aside for classes. Or field trips. Or playing video games, and being stuck as a Starbucks barrista for life. (Aesop's lecture for Freshman high school/college Day One: "Class, repeat after me: 'Would you like fries with that?' Good. Now when you flunk out, I don't have to worry about you starving for the rest of your life." I sh*t you not, that'd be my opening lecture, forever.)

And all it would take would be the will and the internet bandwidth. For those remote, you could buy K through Ph.D. years on CD-roms and DVD/BDs, and get your education at your own pace, in UHD, 3D interactive, with bonus features included for AP/Honors.

You can already get the entire National Geographic (and Mad Magazine) on disc. Why can't you get the Louvre, the National Gallery(ies), etc., the Smithsonian, the National Air & Space Museum, etc., with one-click features giving you sidebar commentary and documentaries by experts on the topic? Who wouldn't want to see Glamorous Glennis while listening to Chuck Yeager describing breaking the sound barrier for the first time? How about Yo Yo Ma describing Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 on the commentary track, while he's playing it? Music appreciation, with commentary from everyone in the Rock & Roll Hall Of fame, and the conductors of every world-renown symphony orchestra. Modern political history from former presidents and prime ministers. And on and on, endlessly. Every subject known to man, and produced like a Best Picture Oscar Winner, with an all-world all-star cast of people who know what in hell they're talking about.The sales revenues on the discs would keep those places open for damned near free, in perpetuity, and you already paid to build them.

Then get Mike Rowe involved as your spokesperson, and do the same things for every trade there is, from air conditioning to zookeepers. Sell it on Amazon, and let the trade organizations teach the hands-on, and test for mastery. Done. Over. No barriers to doing anything but your own interests and ability, and student and admin expenses would be a fraction of the current costs.

Make education the equivalent of learning in The Matrix, minus the giant metal port in the back of your head. Racking up education could/would be lifelong, and just like collecting Boy Scout merit badges.

Instead of the fornicated archaic Ponzi scheme that mainly just subsidizes mediocre assbags doing either socialist indoctrination, or simply wasting everyone's time and billions of dollars, all on the public teat?

First multi-gazzillionaire that does that, blows up the Leftard iron triangle forever, and I'm joining his march and subscribing to his newsletter. It would undo the Education Collective the way the internet blew up the recording industry.

Do that, and I could even settle for not getting my personal jetpack and flying car.
Barely.

The fact that some guy tinkering in his bicycle shop might now qualify for three Ph.Ds might mean that he'd design and build the jet pack and flying car anyways.
Win-win.