Rising costs could push college out of reach

[sunskyfan]

Re: Rising costs could push college out of reach

well put ... I think I'll go watch Alladin now ...

[Nervous Drake]

Re: Rising costs could push college out of reach

.

[phirang]

Re: Rising costs could push college out of reach

truth is, 90% of people don't need college: only specific vocations demand it.

a respectable secondary-school graduate from 1912 was literate in greek, latin, and perhaps hebrew, in addition to german or french.

Frankly, the West has been in decline since Stalingrad...

[ASH]

Re: Rising costs could push college out of reach

a respectable secondary-school graduate from 1912 was literate in greek, latin, and perhaps hebrew, in addition to german or french.

My wife had an Indian math professor in college who demanded to know why the undergrads didn't know Latin. He refused to explain something (I forget what), and referred the students to the original manuscript on the subject... which was written in Latin.

In graduate school, I took a course on basic quantum mechanics from Herbert Kroemer (who shared the Nobel prize in physics in 2000). Herr Doktor Kroemer (or "the Kroemster" as one of his graduate students referred to him) was born in 1928, and was a product of the German education system of an earlier era (his students sometimes thought the Hitler Youth). He had a penchant for designing quiz problems, the physics behind which was very simple, but the solution of which required some mathematical insight -- usually a "trick" that greatly simplified the calculation. Part of it was just that he was smarter -- and knew more -- than his students, but I think the other part is that these tricks were the sort of thing that would have been useful to study back before computer programs like Mathematica and various computation-intensive numerical techniques had been invented. They certainly required much greater familiarity with the theoretical structure of math than is often taught in America today, even to engineers and scientists (although probably not mathematicians). Bottom line: I learned how to integrate hairy expressions with pen and paper once, and maybe I proved a theorem or two in class, but a dude from 1912 (or, say, India) would utterly kick my ass in a pen-and-paper math-off.

However, I bet I'm way better at Halo 3 than a dude from 1912.

P.S. The Hitler Youth reference is intended as a joke, and not to diminsh from the stature of a great scientist and teacher.