Colleges&Universities closing or merging at alarming rate.

Try getting a job as an engineer, teacher, or chemist without a college degree.

 

Sure! You are right. But colleges will die and apprenticeships will take over. Or, when college is FREE for everyone under democrat commie america, those degrees will have basically ZERO value

 

Sound like you've been listening to too much right wing media.. Fact of the matter is thst the drop in college enrollments is more tied to declining birthrates. School enrollments have declining ever since the baby boomers became adults. First there were declines in elementary school enrollments. Twenty, thirty years ago elementary schools were being closed and consolidated. A few years later, Junior High Schools, then followed by High Schools closings and consolidations. The trend has now reached the college level.

Colorado, by the way, is one of the few states where college enrollments are up. But then it is a state that values and promotes education. The high level of education in Colorado has resulted in Colorado sitting at top of the economic hill. The data is clear, Colorado outperforms other states because the people, on average, are more inelligent, more educated, more knowledgeable than the people in other states. And the people are healthier and live longer.

It is not only education that makes Colorado, but the natural beauty and unique Colorado culture. As Joe Walsh wrote, in one of the state's unofficial state songs:

"Spent the last year
Rocky Mountain Way
Couldn't get much higher
Out to pasture
Think it's safe to say
Time to open fire
And we don't need the ladies
Crying 'cause the story's sad
'Cause the Rocky Mountain Way
Is better than the way we had"

 

Colleges have entrance requirements that not everyone can meet. The better colleges have requirements that are more difficult to meet.

One of the purposes of education is to sort out abilities. By the end of high school, the relative abilities of all students are quite evident. The teachers and councilors are aware and guide students appropriately. In good schools anyhow. Looking through the data from student testing, only about 30% of students achieve mathematical understanding beyond simple algebra. Which means that at least 70% of the people would be in over their heads, if they attempted college.

 

The government took over student loans.... This one factor blew open the traditional credit score approach. Many who were not worthy of pursuing a serious education took the plunge into serious debt and ended up failing to finish.

Liberal enclaves create more social problems than what they solve because most of their baccalaureate graduates now enter the work force with a defective PC skill set.
And then there are the PC law schools that haven't taught about, "professional ethics," since the 60s.

No, the market did not dictate the current results.... Progressive engineering did.

 

Like software engineering. Back in the day, programmers were self taught. I'm sure that Bill Gates didn't pick up his programming skills in college. It wasn't even taught, not really. As microprocessors came into being, electrical engineers where taught a little programming. In fact, it seems to me that early on, just about every programmer was an electrical engineer. At some point software engineering became a thing and companies began to require four year degrees for programmers. They did the same thing with CAD (Computer Assisted Design). Draftsmen often learned their craft in high school vocational classes. Suddenly they needed a bachelor degree to do the same thing on a computer. Which seems a bit odd, as CAD allows low skilled individuals to make decent looking drawings.

Yet, at some point it was realized that bright high school graduates could do these jobs with only a semester or two of training. A lot of small for profit colleges have made a lot of money teaching those couple of semesters.

However I do remember an ad I once saw in the Denver Post. It was a full page ad for a programmer. It had a little bit about training not mattering. Some trained programmers were good, but just as likely to be bad at it. Self taught programmers following the same pattern. In the middle of the page was maybe a dozen lines of code in C++. Underneath it was the challenge, "If you can solve my problem, I have a job for you" .

 

Just the market changing. While the above is occcuring, my alma mater (a large public university) is growing. Overall college enrollment is slowly increasing, so if a college or university fails, it's because they haven't managed to engage students.

 

The majority of students these days are majoring in business or some kind of medical career.

 

So you are claiming that how loans originate and are backed somehow eliminates market conditions? I disagree.

 

Same with my alma mater. I think all the large public universities, and all the top private ones are doing just fine. It is the little specialized colleges that are having problems. If one attends a top college, their credits are always valid. Not always the case with a specialized college.

 

Joe Walsh and I have worked together, though I've not seen him in many years. He was not what I would call a happy man then; he was still in search of himself. Hell of a guitar player, though. His uncle was a client of mine, and Joe wound up being one too for one project. I kind of favored John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High".

I think the drop in birthrate should have been more than offset by the increasing need for higher education in a tech world- which would also have a reverse offset to employment or the advantage of that education due to the reduction in quality of many college educations, and the resulting loss of the value of such compromised degrees in the marketplace. Regardless of educational data- people who make good things happen and manage things well, I consider well educated. Functional. They are the economy movers. Life is an educational process- some just skip classes and some thing their degree makes life's lessons irrelevant. Those with educations that think a degree makes them an expert even though they can't accomplish anything.... I don't see as educated in the practical sense. I think we have far too many of those today, and especially too many in places of authority.

Obviously- you live in Colorado. But does Colorado have an intelligence advantage? Average IQ in US States varies from 94.2 in Mississippi to 104.2 in Massachusetts. Colorado comes in at 101.6, a little above median. Your neighbors, Kansas, Wyoming and Nebraska all come in higher. Utah about the same, New Mexico- lower. Colorado also has a homeless problem I wonder about; their rate is 4 times higher than all surrounding states. Not sure why that is so.

I will agree the culture in Colorado tends to be unique; thankfully not in the west-coast fashion. I used to ski Colorado many times a year, and also took several summer trips to the mountains. The beauty- awesome. At least in the mountains, for sure. One of the things I was always disappointed in though was the smog over Denver. Driving down from the Summit area, you suddenly are looking down at a brown haze sitting on the city. I know that it's in part due to the geography of Denver, but I hope they find some way to clear that up.

 

I think I agree with his post. When the gov decided to make it easier for less qualified people to get mortgages, they fostered the mortgage recession. Pretty hard to say that market conditions weren't dramatically affected. Irresponsible financial policy is always a mistake- but it keeps happening.

 

What is six sigma management approach?

 

Would you volunteer to be the property manager?

 

there's a bit more than that (engineering, etc) but we agree in general.

With that said, the majority of students majoring in a business or medical career degree aren't the problem associated with college failures or failures of graduates to get a good job. Its the "others" that are the problem and they are lumped in with the students that thought this through when picking the right major and decided to apply themselves, a process that began in middle and high school.

 

We have less than half the number of company's listed on our stock exchanges today that we had when Clinton was president.That alone indicates that we are not creating job openings like we did back then.Our innovation is in rapid decline.

 

Government is not and shouldn't be a nanny. People understand that when they borrow money, they need to repay it.

The at fault parties include the Universities for offering little ROI on some services, and people borrowing money to purchase services with little ROI. The market is self correcting.

If the students paid cash, it wouldn't have changed the market conditions or the number of institutions with dropping enrollment and bankruptcy issues.

 

It’s essentially micromanagement taken to an extreme. It relies heavily on statistics. It was developed in 1986 to improve quality control on assembly lines in factories. It’s use has been extended to white collar, office environments. At its extreme, it times people while they’re in the bathroom. Some people praise it as ruthlessly efficient. Others contend that professionals such as attorneys and architects should not have a stopwatch on them while they’re relieving themselves in the rest room.

There are lots of videos on you tube about it.

 

Yes as a Master Black Belt, I can tell you it is absolutely NOT a management technique. It is a process improvement tool that has worked and continues to work when applied appropriately.

And while I agree not every improvement process needs to go through full DMAIC it doesn’t mean the tool isn’t useful. But we should always be using the PDSA cycle no matter what.

 

The birthrate is and has been setting new all time low records in the most recent years, as we have well below replacement rates of birth.

 

It may be extremely helpful in factory (assembly line) situations, where activities can be repetitive and efficiencies can be attained.

But it’s crazy to apply micromanagement techniques (such as applying a stopwatch to bathroom time) to professionals with advanced degrees in an office environment.

 

Yeah? That’s not useful practice of Six Sigma, No wonder it left a sour taste for you. That’s the problem. It’s not a management technique. It won’t solve all your problems. Simply RCCA will in most needs. Just 5 why it.

 

90% of them closing would be a good thing.

Let's pump up Technical Institutes again.