Robot Marriage

It’s a slow news day, apparently, and so Slate has graced us with a truly bewildering piece about how people will fall in love with and marry robots in the near future (like, the next 50 years), because human interaction has gotten too damned hard. Robots, author Daniel H. Wilson tells us, will offer humans (men, it is heavily implied, though there is a token mention of women) simpler, more old-fashioned interaction, that will bring relief to “romantics” wearied by “impersonal, digitized relationships” with other humans.

What a pack of nonsense.

“Is It Worth It To Go to College?” Part Y: Some Misconceptions That Need Clearing Up

I want to say at the outset that the whole raging discussion about whether or not it “pays” to go to college is bogus. It pays to go to college if what you ultimately want to do for a living either requires a college education or makes it substantially easier to get ahead. If you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an airspace engineer, the whole question is moot: you HAVE to go to college, or those fields will be closed to you. By contrast, if you are kind of just floundering about, not sure what you are good at or what you want to do with your life, it’s important to realize that as a time-killing endeavor, college is both really expensive and, in many instances, too damned hard.

I suspect, however, that the “controversy” is really meant for people who aren’t particularly good at anything, and aren’t particularly interested in anything, so the only issue for them is whether college represents the easiest way towards the most amount of money. Short answer: it doesn’t, but then, nothing does. Yet for what it’s worth, I feel that these people get bombarded with a lot of misinformation, and so there are a few misconceptions that should be — but aren’t, usually — addressed:

“Is It Worth It to Go to College?” Part X: Majors that lead to unemployment

It has become fashionable of late to disparage college education and college-educated. For awhile, the prevailing societal ideal was to give everyone, regardless of financial status, socio-economic background, aptitude or intelligence a chance to get a college degree, and thereby an entrance into the heretofore exclusive world of well-paid jobs and intellectually and socially rewarding careers. However, decades of pushing millions of people through college with little regard to whether it was right for them resulted in college education losing its patina of exclusivity, and with that, the power to open doors and fill money coffers. Mickey Mouse degrees proliferated and standards for obtaining a college degree, some college degree fell so low that employers could no longer regard it as proof of skills and competence. At the same time, skyrocketing demand, coupled with inflation, drove the prices up, so that in the end, college degrees became prohibitively expensive while being, at best, only the first step towards establishing an academic or professional career.

These days, we are living through a period of reaction, when pundits have gone to the opposite extreme, furnishing “proof” upon “proof” that one should not go to college, except for a STEM degree.