A history professor has advice for aspiring nurses who can't get one of the limited seats in a BSN program. (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/why-it%E2%80%99s-so-difficult-get-nursing-programs)
The explicit advice ignores why many people want a BSN in a region short on BSN holders working in the field.
This is another example of the disconnect between what many students want in a college education (preparation for a well-defined middle-class job with a high probability of stability) and what many liberal arts faculty want students to want.
Eh, with the prevalence of accelerated BSN programs, it's not as bad of advice as it seems at the outset.
I have a number of students doing a 4 year liberal arts BA/BS degrees + a 16-18 month accelerated BSN who have found the path gives them some added additional flexibility and experiences.
It also opens up (for many of my students) the chance to jump to a mid-level practitioner position rather than a BSN as they get into college and explore career options. Given the number of BSN holders who find themselves dissatisfied and end up moving to PA / NP / MD / DO programs but needing to go back to school to fill in pre-req courses that the BSN doesn't have, there's a benefit to the approach.
Just a thought. I don't know how ingrained you are in pre-health advising these days, but it's one of my main jobs.
Ah, yes. We can't sell you what you want, 'cause we don't have any left, so buy something more expensive!
Christ, Wall Street is honest compared to us.
Quote from: eigen on July 20, 2020, 04:22:10 PM
Just a thought. I don't know how ingrained you are in pre-health advising these days, but it's one of my main jobs.
I'm not doing any pre-health advising at the moment.
When I was in charge of the RN-to-BSN program, I expected to have a lot of professionals ready for more. I was surprised at how many people were just in school full-time as they stacked their degrees at different schools to take longer to get to the same place.
When I was advising pre-physical therapy/pre-med/pre-professional health students, almost none of them really had a good plan to get where they were going. Instead, I ended up sending a lot of students to psychology and sport management.
Super Dinky had a category called pre-nursing, but my colleague who advised in that sighed ruefully that in her 25 years, zero students went on to nursing after declaring pre-nursing.
When I was doing scholarship interviews at Super Dinky, it was pretty clear who was serious about nursing qua nursing and who was in a more vague 'wanting to be paid good enough for helping others' category.
I'll believe you that it's not as foolish a suggestion as on first look, but it doesn't jibe with my experiences of a few years ago now when I was up on nursing education.
We have no nursing school, so I'm not as familiar with the RN to BSN tracks as the BS to BSN tracks.
We keep pretty close relationships with the accelerated BSN programs our students feed into, but a lot also choose to do combined BSN + MS programs as the funding can be better / better employment relative to time spent.
There's also the BS+CNA to PA route that's becoming more popular.
From watching our nursing faculty, an MSN can be a solid ticket to success as long as one picks up a couple years of full-time nursing work along the way, regardless of path.
I recommend that the author not write Higher Ed articles about majors or programs that he has no professional training in. The article reads like he googled much of his information.
Damn, I sure miss IHE having a comments section...
Aster is right.
A couple of things stand out:
1) many of the 'alternative' health-related (some more related than others) career paths he suggests are simply vastly different from nursing, and a kid who really wants to be a nurse, well, may just not want to settle for any of these alternatives.
2) he minimizes the reality that while, taken as a whole, the US has a serious nurse shortage, we still have inadequate capacity to train as many RNs as we need, and, similar to med schools (we also do not have enough docs, taken as a whole), this may well be at least somewhat deliberate, designed to increase salaries of these practitioners. Contrast with MLS library schools, for instance, which function as cash cows for unis and churn out literally thousands of new MLSs a year, many of whom simply will not be professionally employed.
I remember when one of the plot lines in the "Sue Barton, Student Nurse" books was whether it was worth it to go to college to get a degree, or just go to nursing school.
One of the arguments was that a BSN was seen as a distraction from "real nursing," which had to do with patient contact, not "knowing all that science."
I also remember working on the CCU floor when the charge nurse got a pay bump for finishing her MSN, which she'd had to contract to do when accepting the promotion (because they didn't have anyone to put in the position and needed her there before her degree was done.
Time difference, uhh...6th grade (so, c. 1960s) to 1990.
M.
Mintz doesn't know what he's talking about.
A large portion of BSN students are in RN-BSN programs (I don't have the data on how large). They already have an ADN and have been working in the field for varying lengths of time. The BSN represents a pay bump, more seniority, and additional job options (e.g., OR nurse on day shift vs. floor nurse on 3rd shift).
Local/regional nursing "shortages" are often solved, at least partially, by immigrants who obtained their nursing training either in the USA or abroad but are willing to work in locales and at salaries that are unattractive to many U.S.-born nurses (e.g., nursing homes).
Quote from: eigen on July 20, 2020, 05:10:40 PM
We have no nursing school, so I'm not as familiar with the RN to BSN tracks as the BS to BSN tracks.
I wonder how serious about the nursing profession those students are if they plan to be a nurse, yet don't start in a nursing program/school.
The CNA/LPN/RN route to get experience and then BSN/MSN to get a promotion/pay raise makes sense to me.
Majoring in the business/administrative side and then picking up a little experience makes sense to me since my last several rural communities were much shorter on excellent hospital/clinic administrators than good front-line nurses, who could in a pinch do what was needed in addition to their formal education.
My experience with 3+2 programs in engineering (small, rural school the first three years for physics and math, good engineering program last two years for specialization) is the students don't want to fully invest in what being an engineer means to their lives. They don't really want to move to where the jobs are and give up their current kith and kin networks. They want a magical job that pays well right out of college, but let's them stay in their home region.
The Super Dinky scholarship interviews often had CNAs who were applying to major in social work or psychology because a year on the job indicated nursing wasn't their life path.
If significant numbers of BS to accelerated BSN folks then go on to graduate work in something else, then that may be evidence that they should have skipped the BSN and should have taken a different allied health career path.
I'm not sure what is so controversial unless Mintz is inaccurate when he catalogs the alternate career paths nursing students might take.
I suppose Mintz could have argued for more spending on nursing programs, which also seems reasonable, which I guess is your point, Polly, although that would serve the 1/3 who don't get in, which is its own boondoggle.
The one thing I would say is that, having seen how central nurses are to healthcare, I would like to see standards maintained in medical education. If we want more nurses, fine, but let's not swell the ranks simply to avoid disappointing those who maybe shouldn't be doing medicine in the first place. In that regard, Mintz makes some sense.
Back when our local Rotary Club held weekly face-to-face meetings, we hosted a couple of local high school students, drawn from the top half of the year's Senior class, each week. By far the most common career goal that they announced was to go into nursing. Apparently a program that puts bright high school students in touch with staff at the hospital has been getting a lot of our students fired up about becoming nurses. That, and it's one of only a small number of educated professions (along with business, teaching, etc.) that the average prospective college student is aware of as a possibility in the first place.
Polly's observation about the attrition rate among would-be nursing students, and similar observations I've heard from others on the old fora, have long made me wonder how many, if any, of these legions of would-be nurses ever make it all the way into the profession.
This article made me roll my eyes, hard. If the author wants to write about nursing, he should do his homework. The biggest limitation to training nurses is spaces in the hospitals for the trainees! So the issue is not one that the universities really have any control over.
I teach one of last pre-req requirements for students applying to our Nursing program. The students who don't make it into nursing fall into tow big groups.The good science students become Public Health or Biology Majors. The rest (and there are many), often become Health Science Admin majors, in an attempt to avoid the math based requirements of either Epidemiology or Physics. Few of any of these students go into Public Health.
Nursing is a popular idea for a career, but the reality is hard. It's hard work, and you have to be on point the entire time. I'm proud of my students who have become nurses, and I'm also glad that we do some weeding. The capacity could be greater, but open it up too much and I worry about the quality of nurses trained.
A great deal of the "nursing shortage" has for decades been very high burnout of existing nurses. Large percentages of licensed nurses just don't stick it out for more than five years. Being a nurse is physically demanding, emotionally exhausting, and financially a lot less secure than the general public thinks it is. So the nurses quit and find work elsewhere. I run into ex-nurses all the time. My mom is an ex-nurse. She burned out in 10 years. The sales lady who sold me a mattress last month is an ex-nurse. She lasted 8 years. One of my real estate agents is an ex-nurse. She lasted 2 years.
This is why the popular mainstream arguments of "adding more nursing schools!", "making it easier to be a nurse!", increasing nurse cohort sizes" are dumb. Making it easier to become a nurse doesn't alleviate the burnout rate. It only makes the burnout rate worse. And that's dumb.
It's a very similar situation for most U.S. schoolteachers. Yes, there is an unmet demand. But the underlying cause of the shortage isn't insufficient education programs, it's the ridiculously high teacher burnout rate.
There's also a huge attrition rate within a year or so of getting one's first job.
Nurses can be overworked, and underpaid for all they do. They're sometimes forced by staffing shortages to do "doubles" (i.e., two shifts back-to-back), or work nights and weekends only for months on end, because schedule preferences are booked by seniority and the older/longer-standing staff get first choice.
There are cute ways a snippy nurse who's all for themselves can make everyone else miserable, too...while smiling and charming the Charge Nurse and her assistant so that complaints never stick because she really couldn't be THAT bad....but, in fact...
They took "The Nightengales" off the air because of complaints that it showed nurses in such a poor light, but I thought their scriptwriter must have visited some of the hospitals I worked in as a unit clerk/lab EA because the plot lines were so eerily familiar.
Nursing was once, with teaching and secretarial work, one of the triad of respectable jobs for intelligent women (now, of course, it's also more open to guys, many of whom Isaw to be very good.).
Once other options opened up, for all genders, though, many of the best folks largely took off.
So student placements may also be exposing people to the Realpolitik and undermining their will to continue, too.
M.
The argument in teacher education for earlier experiences, another area in which I got to advise, was exactly getting a realistic experience early enough to make better choices. Waiting until last semester of senior year to do student teaching meant a fair number of people graduated, but never became teachers out of the Super Dinky program. Changing to require classroom observations every term starting from the first one meant that the cohorts were a more manageable size and the weeding happened much earlier.
Super Dinky had an excellent nursing program, but the size was limited by faculty and the clinical slots that mythbuster mentioned. The standards absolutely should not be lowered, but aspiring nursing students, like premed, tends to attract many people initially who won't succeed in even the initial school part, much less the reality of working with sick, scared, angry patients.
Amen on early realistic experiences. My mom was a nurse administrator for a hospice. She used to get college pre-med student "shadows" every summer. She always instructed the resident they were paired with to find the most unpleasant case in the hospital to start with. See if the student can handle being in the room with the stinky abscess being drained, or C. diff, or the like. Many didn't come back the next day. The shadowing student was never actually asked to do anything, just to be in the room and watch the pros at work.
The students that did make it through the shadowing experience, she could write great letters of rec for, and made sure they knew which experiences to incorporate into their application essays. This is why I laugh at my pre-nursing students who complain about the smells in the Micro lab. Many seem to confuse being a nurse with being the receptionist at the pediatrician's office.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 21, 2020, 08:12:41 AM
I'm not sure what is so controversial unless Mintz is inaccurate when he catalogs the alternate career paths nursing students might take.
Try reading the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/InsideHigherEd/comments/hv8u57/why_its_so_difficult_to_get_into_nursing_programs/ and see if you can identify the problems.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 21, 2020, 04:33:22 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 21, 2020, 08:12:41 AM
I'm not sure what is so controversial unless Mintz is inaccurate when he catalogs the alternate career paths nursing students might take.
Try reading the comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/InsideHigherEd/comments/hv8u57/why_its_so_difficult_to_get_into_nursing_programs/ and see if you can identify the problems.
Yeah, he's a history professor and does not understand licensing or why some nursing programs are limited admissions ("he doesn't mention clinical sites or state boards as major reasons class sizes are capped")---at least he does not mention any of this in his article.
For instance, as pinkfloydman posted:
"He even failed to mention the TEAS test (Test of Essential Academic Skills) that many programs required before you can even get into a nursing school and failed to account for the accreditation standards of having a percentage of students who need to pass the nursing tests in order for the school to remain accredited."
Okay.
And?
So?
None of that detracts from his very simple point that we cannot educate everyone who want to become a nurse, however.
Seems to me some people maybe needed to take more writing and research classes as undergrads so they could think their way through simple arguments.
Maybe it's just the fact that he is arguing for the value of a liberal arts degree? For some reason that really upsets some people.
Or maybe he is commenting outside his discipline and appears not to really understand the discipline he is commenting about. Now THAT we wouldn't want, now would we Polly? We certainly don't want people who don't really know what they are talking about making suggestions without thoroughly and fairly thinking through an issue or taking an unnecessarily lopsided approach to a conundrum. As I said, more argumentation and research would help these folks.
Now, you want to argue because you resent me personally, which is fine, but I am teaching a summer class and working on several articles and a book, so I may not have time to engage in one of our fun discussions. But you have at it. You go girl!!!
Now that I think on it, several years back, when I adjuncted at a local uni that has a well-regarded BSN program, competitive for entry (apparently), but where the uni requires all undergrads to take a year of foreign lang, regardless of what they might have taken in hs, several of my students in Latin 101-2 were nursing majors, and, well, though none of them actually failed the class, some, well... let's just say I do recall openly thinking that a student who cannot really succeed at Latin 101 probably was not bright enough to become a nurse.
Proof by contrapositive: I was sent to temp in a hospital by an awake temp agency rep who noticed I had Latin as one of my languages and said, "You'll be able to do anatomical medical transcription since you know Latin."
M.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 21, 2020, 08:12:41 AM
I'm not sure what is so controversial unless Mintz is inaccurate when he catalogs the alternate career paths nursing students might take.
Let's try an example and see if that helps.
Most people who want to become English professors cannot do so because we don't have enough job slots.
Therefore, entering first-years in college should be encouraged to study chemical engineering instead with the eventual plan to become university institutional researchers.
Being an institutional researcher is much like being an English professor. You're a professional on campus with flexibility in your schedule. You'll do a lot of all reading and writing. As an institutional researcher, you'll attend a lot of meetings and give assignments to people who will ignore basic instructions. You are likely to have a lot of interactions with students at small teaching schools and much less direct interactions with undergrads at research institutions.
Chemical engineering is great preparation because you'll have lots of practice with group work where you have no authority and doing most of the report writing yourself. Only about half of people with a BS ChE go into chemical engineering right out of college and it's not rare for those people to go to graduate school in something else or go through a boot camp for data science.
In short, the article is ridiculous because it doesn't show awareness of either the realities of nursing education or the other realistic options with either a solid liberal arts degree or some other type of degree.
Only someone who doesn't actually know anything relevant could have started from the reasonable fact of more people want to enter nursing programs than slots exist and write that article. The article would have been better if it just stuck to doing something completely different with a different degree.
It is a failure not to get into a nursing program and switching to a liberal arts degree to do allied health is a stupid consolation prize.
In the article is quoted, "CNN report captured the irony of our current situation: "There's an acute nursing shortage in the United States, but schools are turning away thousands of qualified applicants as they struggle to expand class size and hire more teachers for nursing programs." The reality on the ground as I understand, is that there are not enough qualified people to teach nursing, as there are likely fewer Nursing PhDs churned out every year for the number of openings--if you want a job that might guarantee employment in academia, a nursing PhD will maybe fit the bill. This also contributes highly to the amount of nurses being produced, because class sizes (# of students in the room, especially lab and upper division) can only be so big and must meet accrediting standards of excellence.
Also, the author states that PT is a viable alternative to being a nurse. First of all, PTs are now Doctors of Physical Therapy and require a bachelor's degree and then a 3 year graduate program with a research component. The good programs are also pretty difficult to get into and require a large investment in shadowing and volunteering before you are eligible to apply, as well as stellar GPAs in undergrad--> similar to med school. It is almost like saying, "Well if you can't get into undergrad nursing school, there's always Med School as a back-up option plan B!"
However, getting a degree in biology for example, and then getting an MSN afterwards is a fast track to a good job, with potential for advancement to administration. So if you want to be a nurse, or decide to become one at some point in undergrad, there is a very viable alternative to a BSN program. Not all places offer Master's in Nursing, but for those that do, I would assume the barrier to entry in terms of credentials in likely high because of competition for a limited number of slots. Though at that point if someone is qualified, a PA or NP program might be more satisfying? I have no idea how the qualifications needed for PA and for MSN admissions stack up.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 22, 2020, 06:07:49 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 21, 2020, 08:12:41 AM
I'm not sure what is so controversial unless Mintz is inaccurate when he catalogs the alternate career paths nursing students might take.
Let's try an example and see if that helps.
...
It is a failure not to get into a nursing program and switching to a liberal arts degree to do allied health is a stupid consolation prize.
Nope. Still the same basic dynamic on the same simple premise. Thank you for your explanation but it points out what we already know.
All this fella did was make a harmless suggestion----students can take it or leave it (and since few undergrads read IHE his opinion is moot as far as they are concerned) and profs and advisors can take it or leave it.
Lots of students don't get into the college or major that they want; the "consolation prize" is a fact in many areas of life, college and jobs not the least of those. No one is disputing the numbers of people who are turned away from nursing programs. Virtually all need a way to make a living somehow, and if they can't do it as nurses, why not try a consolation prize?----it's better than starving but not as good as being a Rock star.
Mintz simply suggests some self-serving alternatives.
There's no real controversy here, Polly, just that strange defensiveness of STEM professionals about their popular majors.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 22, 2020, 07:19:43 AM
There's no real controversy here, Polly, just that strange defensiveness of STEM professionals about their popular majors.
I stand to be corrected, but I can't recall STEM people on here suggesting
recruiting people who can't get into other programs. Partly because of the math, which most people find hard, there's no point in presenting it as an alternative to students who don't have high enough grades for other things because they most likely will find STEM
worse.
Trying to attract unprepared, unmotivated people to keep the numbers up only works if the standards are so low that they can sleepwalk through it.
Matt Reed's take (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/and-nclex-response-steven-mintz), which I think many here will agree with.
Quote from: pgher on July 22, 2020, 09:49:49 AM
Matt Reed's take (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/and-nclex-response-steven-mintz), which I think many here will agree with.
One of his points is that there is a shortage of faculty. The collective bargaining agreements at many Community Colleges require faculty pay to be equal across fields. That is obviously not reflecting the market reality. If you want to find and keep nursing professors, you have to pay what they would make in nursing or at a college with market-responsive salaries.
I suspect the CC faculty would not mind if their union negotiated the higher salary uniformly across the institution.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 22, 2020, 07:19:43 AM
All this fella did was make a harmless suggestion----students can take it or leave it (and since few undergrads read IHE his opinion is moot as far as they are concerned) and profs and advisors can take it or leave it.
He made a crap suggestion based something that bears no resemblance to reality.
I wouldn't have even blinked if Mintz had flat out said something to the effect of:
So you didn't get into nursing school and are looking for another major. Have you considered history? You'll spend four years <doing whatever a good pitch for history looks like> and then you'll go get a middle-class job. What job? Well, <several paragraphs of recent examples from students he knew>.The problem is exactly that instead of recruiting for a good liberal arts education and a different, but good, path, the author gave crap advice about things he doesn't know and that don't work as he indicated.
It really is a matter of being a public moron about the alternatives instead of a STEM/humanities divide in this case.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 22, 2020, 10:29:16 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 22, 2020, 07:19:43 AM
All this fella did was make a harmless suggestion----students can take it or leave it (and since few undergrads read IHE his opinion is moot as far as they are concerned) and profs and advisors can take it or leave it.
He made a crap suggestion based something that bears no resemblance to reality.
I wouldn't have even blinked if Mintz had flat out said something to the effect of:
So you didn't get into nursing school and are looking for another major. Have you considered history? You'll spend four years <doing whatever a good pitch for history looks like> and then you'll go get a middle-class job. What job? Well, <several paragraphs of recent examples from students he knew>.
The problem is exactly that instead of recruiting for a good liberal arts education and a different, but good, path, the author gave crap advice about things he doesn't know and that don't work as he indicated.
It really is a matter of being a public moron about the alternatives instead of a STEM/humanities divide in this case.
Okay. Thanks for your opinion.
Quote from: Hibush on July 22, 2020, 10:13:04 AM
Quote from: pgher on July 22, 2020, 09:49:49 AM
Matt Reed's take (https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/and-nclex-response-steven-mintz), which I think many here will agree with.
One of his points is that there is a shortage of faculty. The collective bargaining agreements at many Community Colleges require faculty pay to be equal across fields. That is obviously not reflecting the market reality. If you want to find and keep nursing professors, you have to pay what they would make in nursing or at a college with market-responsive salaries.
I suspect the CC faculty would not mind if their union negotiated the higher salary uniformly across the institution.
My state approved additional funding allocation specifically for bumping the salary of professors in specific fields. (I forget the exact terminology, "high demand" or "high priority" or something like that.) Definitely includes nursing, I think also a computing field or two and manufacturing. Union had fun working out a plan for implementing/justifying the increased pay. I think at least part of it included shifting these faculty from a 9-month contract to a 10-month contract, with required summer work.
I say the market will sort all this out. If we have a nursing shortage, then hospitals will bid up the price of nursing labor. Seeing that nursing is now a more lucrative field, more people will enter it. If existing credentialing apparatuses (e.g., colleges) don't cooperate, alternative credentialing apparatuses will be found.
Or we'll just import a hella big nursing cohort from the third world, call them Home Healthcare Aids, and be done with it.
Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..
The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.
All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.
We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.
Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week.
Quote from: Aster on July 22, 2020, 06:48:16 PM
Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..
The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.
All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.
We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.
Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week.
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
Part of that, which is true, has to do with the fact that--sorry, but--doctors sit on the boards of hospitals and routinely devalue nurses (who often do more thoughtful and thorough care) every chance they get, in every way they can. They talk a good game, speak well of them as 'colleagues,' but don't approve higher pay because it would undermine their own value of themselves (what was that term, 'cognitive dissonance'? Yeah, something like that).
There is also, still, a very strong male/female//husband/wife//'big guy'/'little woman' mindset among a number of MDs, especially those with longer tenure, who have traditionally been very conservative males. (I worked with a lot of excellent docs as well, but they stood out as exceptional).
The pay differential reflects this; the structured way nurses have to interact with MDs, deferentially "asking for consideration of xxx treatment given the potential for yyy outcome" indicates it; and having to skate very carefully around MD egos (whether male or female--both try to pull rank in getting RNs to do their job for them on the floor while expecting that same deference) gets tiresome--especially when some irate surgeon throws a chair across the room in the doctors' writing area because someone is sitting in his favorite rolling chair and they outrank him so they aren't going to get up and let him have it (true story--by observation).
The fact is that temp nurses can also come in at a higher cost (given the addition of agency fees) to cover shortages, stay as long as they like, leave when they like, and sometimes bleed the budget dry as a result, because staffing issues are so difficult and pay so low.
But that cost goes on a different line-item in the budget, and is less often questioned or reduced, since it's seen as 'emergency coverage."
Some of these issues have gotten better over the years, but not enough to make the job attractive to people who, for all the math and science required, can get a quieter, 9-5 lab bench job or work for a pharma doing intake and drug trial administration for twice the pay and more job satisfaction.
M.
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 07:02:27 PM
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.
The problem with any pure market-based solution is that short-term price elasticity of the supply for the country as a whole is very low.
I.e. even ignoring capacity constraints, it would take multiple years for higher salary to start affecting supply. On top of that, high school graduates are hardly the best informed cohort in the world, when it comes to major selection. The latter is the reason, why likes of the original article are definitely not harmless.
Quote from: Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert on July 22, 2020, 08:25:45 PM
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 07:02:27 PM
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.
Yes and no: Salaries that look "too high" allow selection according to quality.
If one wants
more nurses of sufficient quality [and I don't think one wants' more professors of X of any quality], one has to pay more.
Life isn't free.
I wonder if AJ is around?
Hey AJ, remember this? (http://thefora.org/index.php?topic=1286.msg34467#msg34467)
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on June 19, 2020, 09:47:54 AM
Quote from: AJ_Katz on June 19, 2020, 05:19:34 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on June 17, 2020, 11:23:39 AM
Quote from: AJ_Katz on June 17, 2020, 08:41:56 AM
It also irks me that there is so much negativity towards expressing an interest in leadership roles / administration. In my opinion, such negativity is particularly frustrating because leadership-building opportunities seem to be provided to faculty based largely on the recommendations of senior colleagues.
I think the general negativity towards people who have an interest in leadership is because of the power-dynamic.
Don't know if you've noticed, AJ, but academia is awash in negativity in all quarters, online and off.
You can put virtually any topic here on the fora and the negativity will soon accumulate. Bring up virtually any subject in the hallways of your department and...well, maybe your department is a lot different from the ones I am familiar with, but I'm betting the topic will summon the powers of darkness.
It's the times.
Right, so we are to just sit back and accept it then. If you didn't notice, Wahoo, these types of broad-stroked, dismissive arguments towards complaints is a systemic problem in academia. Thank you for providing a good example of that.
My, my, my.
I have for a long time been trying to rally the troops. I am one of the few cheerleaders for higher ed on these boards.
You too, my friend, have just demonstrated what I mean when I say "the times."
Do you remember the conversation we had regarding "negativity"?
And I said:
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on June 19, 2020, 02:40:05 PM
I am simply pointing out that virtually any subject regarding the profession (except perhaps people who announce that they've gotten jobs) results in a "negative" response of some kind. This whole thread is an example. So if you bring up administration, it is going to get a number of responses that are negative. Bring up adjuncts: very negative. Tenure: negative. Students: negative. Etc.
We are all frustrated and demoralized. The system is failing.
Well, here we are.
The world seems to have gone bat-shit crazy and we're all spinning around in it.
A history prof pens a mild-mannered editorial about alternatives to a BSN and he's called "a moron" and accused of being "harmful" and a host of comments about how badly one of the most sought after degrees in college is being administered.
Now what do we do?
Quote from: Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert on July 22, 2020, 08:25:45 PM
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 07:02:27 PM
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.
The problem with any pure market-based solution is that short-term price elasticity of the supply for the country as a whole is very low.
I.e. even ignoring capacity constraints, it would take multiple years for higher salary to start affecting supply. On top of that, high school graduates are hardly the best informed cohort in the world, when it comes to major selection. The latter is the reason, why likes of the original article are definitely not harmless.
In addition to this, there's also the question of how many young people are
capable and
interested? As has been pointed out here, many students can't handle the math, and the job demands of physical effort and unpleasant tasks means that lots of people who start a program drop out. This is a problem that gets overlooked in much of the diversity discussion; just because certain groups are underrepresented in a profession doesn't imply that the
interest in that profession is uniform across various ethnic communities and so on. All the changes to hiring practices in the world won't fix the problem as long as the candidate pool is not uniformly "representative".
1) The math and science required for the BSN degree is pretty low as STEM college degrees go. BSN holders are not prepared to get a good bench job compared to someone who has a real biology or chemistry degree.
2) As liberal arts degrees used for immediate job possibilities go, I wouldn't recommend biology or chemistry if the goal is starting at a high salary. Nurses in high demand geographic areas can start at $65-70k while the national average for chemistry and biology (if one can get a job in the glutted for decades fields) has been $35k for years.
BSN graduates from Super Dinky were starting at more than tenured full STEM faculty at Super Dinky and were only a little less than assistant professors in the nursing program. The tenured full nursing professors were making about twice as much as the STEM new hire assistant professors.
However, the recent BSN graduates who wanted to move to the regional big cities were often angry to learn those weren't areas with nursing shortages and therefore the expensive places to live were much lower pay, sometimes below $40k.
3) It's not opinion when it's conclusions based on subject matter expertise. Let's try another example.
Someone states that they are currently in Akron and would like to go to Milwaukee. Someone gives the instructions of:
* Get on a plane to Denver.
* Rent a car and drive south on I-25 to Albuquerque.
* Take the left at Albuquerque and drive on I-40 until Oklahoma City.
* Return the car and fly to Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is a big city in the Midwest that's just as good as Milwaukee and better in many respects. You're welcome.
That's crap advice on all measures.
It may be true that someone who wants to go to Milwaukee cannot go in the most direct method at the moment or should reevaluate their travel plans (e.g., visit Miami as a new place, visit the aunt in Indianapolis and Skype the cousin in Milwaukee, drive from Akron to Milwaukee while flights are grounded, or wait for the weather to get better to be able to fly).
However, giving a roundabout set of instructions to end up somewhere else entirely while asserting it's the same is just wrong.
I just keep flashing to 'that's not how this works.' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq_1l316ow8)
Quote from: Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert on July 22, 2020, 08:25:45 PM
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 07:02:27 PM
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.
And that's obviously true. Mind you, I'm grateful that the market hasn't been allowed to function properly in this case.
Quote from: Aster on July 22, 2020, 06:48:16 PM
Yeah, we've seen the market attempt to fix this before, in the mid-20th century. And it worked kind of, for like 10 years. And then we had a nursing shortage again in the 1970's, which never went away. We're now pushing past 40 years of a continuous nursing shortage in the U.S..
The sorts of things done in the mid-1960's to (temporarily) alleviate the problem are the same things that we've been futzing around with since the 1990's. Increased cohort sizes. Making it cheaper to be a nurse. Making it easier to be a nurse. Creating diet cola versions of nurses.
All that any of those solutions did was just increase inputs at the expense of quality. And when you do that, your new nurse gains suffer diminishing returns against higher numbers of nurses leaving the workforce because they don't like being a nurse. Hospitals don't give a crap; they can replace nurses nearly as fast as they lose 'em. There are never enough nurses, and yet hospitals continue to function decade after decade with with persistent nursing shortages. The lack of nurses is "fixed" within hospitals the same way that it always has been; just off-load the extra workload and duties onto your existing nursing staff. If they quit, fine, another eager young 20-something nurse will get hired next week. Professional nurses are in some ways like the fast food worker equivalents within the U.S. healthcare industry. Perpetually transient.
We've never really done anything meaningful to help with nursing burnout in the United States. On the contrary, for most modern nurses, the job is far $%^* than it was for nurses 30-40 years ago. Today, I know very few professional nurses who are still on the job after 10 years. The only professional nurse that comes to my mind who actually retired from the job as a senior citizen was my grandmother. She put about 40 years in.
Heck, my college can't even hold onto nursing *professors*. They're cycling in and out every 5-8-ish years. We lost another nursing professor just this week.
A lot of this sounds like the contemporary situation with K-12 teachers as well.
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 08:54:49 PM
Quote from: Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert on July 22, 2020, 08:25:45 PM
Quote from: dismalist on July 22, 2020, 07:02:27 PM
Seems to me that wages are too low. :-)
By the same logic, competition for tenure track positions in some fields implies that wages are way too high for the large part of professoriat.
Yes and no: Salaries that look "too high" allow selection according to quality.
Allow or consistently result in?
Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses. (https://insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/you-dont-solve-economy-curriculum)
Quote from: polly_mer on July 23, 2020, 07:34:06 AM
Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses. (https://insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/you-dont-solve-economy-curriculum)
From that article:
Quote
I don't blame students for wanting degrees that lead to good jobs. That makes sense. I blame the rest of us for allowing an economy to make the paths to stability so narrow that the few identifiable pathways to stability get overcrowded. Ultimately, the answer to the excess demand for nursing seats isn't a 'fairer' way to allocate them; it's a fairer economy in which pathways to stability are plentiful.
I haven't the slightest idea what a "pathway to stability" is. Nursing is valuable economically because its value is inescapable as long as there are people needing medical care. The jobs that will be required in a stable economy are those that meet a fundamental need; not ones dreamed up by some committee of academics.
A pathway to stability is what many people in the US had until recently.
In the small town, you got a job with the factory, hospital, or k-12 school and you were fine for your entire working life. It may not have been the best job in the world, but you showed up regularly, played by the rules, and you could have a modest house, food on the table, and free time with family and friends.
That's no longer true in all the dying towns where the main employer has closed, the k-12 schools are dying from lack of enrollment (the second big employer), and the hospital closed (the third big employer in town).
On one of these threads recently, Wahoo asserted that liberal arts graduates aren't destined to be baristas. That's particularly true in towns too small to have more than one coffee shop, especially when the one coffee shop is family-owned with only three non-family employees.
The problem in many places is the feeling of always having to hustle and not having enough stable jobs for everyone.
If the job can be done just as well by a novice with any college degree, then why pay a premium for experience or a specific degree?
If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?
Quote from: polly_mer on July 23, 2020, 07:34:06 AM
Matt Reed has another entry: Why do so many people want to be nurses. (https://insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/you-dont-solve-economy-curriculum)
Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made: "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair. They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele." The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.
A broader education would help this situation somewhat because it would help youths to have enough skills and enough imagination to be aware of a greater number of possibilities. Girls might be able to think of a career to try for besides cutting hair. Boys might imagine a future that goes beyond a lifetime of playing video games and getting high.
Although that still wouldn't solve the problem that polly notes in truly depressed communities where there simply isn't much employment of any kind left.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 23, 2020, 10:00:28 AM
If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?
It's not clear how the economy can be changed to fix this. The jobs that can be done remotely that are lucrative are highly specialized. Jobs that can be automated will eventually. (I don't think there's any point to a Luddite revolution to try and return low-skill manual labour jobs that have been automated; it just can't last.)
Some small communities have managed to carve out unique niches to survive; Elliot Lake was a mining community that rebranded as a retirement community because real estate was very cheap. But, by definition, those have to be unique, so each community has to "work out their own salvation with fear and trembling".
Quote from: polly_mer on July 23, 2020, 10:00:28 AM
A pathway to stability is what many people in the US had until recently.
In the small town, you got a job with the factory, hospital, or k-12 school and you were fine for your entire working life. It may not have been the best job in the world, but you showed up regularly, played by the rules, and you could have a modest house, food on the table, and free time with family and friends.
That's no longer true in all the dying towns where the main employer has closed, the k-12 schools are dying from lack of enrollment (the second big employer), and the hospital closed (the third big employer in town).
On one of these threads recently, Wahoo asserted that liberal arts graduates aren't destined to be baristas. That's particularly true in towns too small to have more than one coffee shop, especially when the one coffee shop is family-owned with only three non-family employees.
The problem in many places is the feeling of always having to hustle and not having enough stable jobs for everyone.
If the job can be done just as well by a novice with any college degree, then why pay a premium for experience or a specific degree?
If the whole town dies and you don't have knowledge, skills, or experience that are valuable enough for someone to pay you to relocate for a job, what do you do?
One of the big reasons small towns are dying is because people are getting degrees and leaving. No one has to be a barista in the family coffee-shop if they can get a job in the big city.
And, for specific communities, losing the small college is going to be further devastation.
This fella makes the impossible, quixotic argument (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/break-up-the-liberal-city.html?r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Opinion&action=keypress®ion=FixedLeft&pgtype=article) that we should move government offices and prestigious universities out into the countryside to reinvigorate rural America.
Oh, I have no answers for what society can do when we have more people who need good jobs than good jobs to be done. That's a problem that's been looming and been ignored in many quarters.
That's another annoyance with the original article: the caretaking jobs that will remain unautomated aren't ever going to pay big money in general because there's not enough money in the world for a job that a normal intelligence middleschooler can do with some explicit training.
On preview, the brain drain doesn't help, but there's a big problem with moving to the city and getting paid too little to be middle class as well.
As I alluded to up-thread, many people THINK they want to be a nurse (or a doctor, lawyer, vet etc). But they don't have a realistic understanding of what these jobs are.
When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a vet. So I worked at vet's office for several years. What I learned in doing that job is that self-employed small animal vets spend more time worrying about kibble sales than the animals they care for. This experience, as well as several summer internships in research, led me away from the vet school route, and towards research science.
Prospective students NEED these types of hands on shadowing experiences to give them a sense of what the job is really all about. Which gets us back to the training capacity of the hospitals.
Nurse burnout is in part because of lack of understanding of the realities of the job. It's also about the ridiculous patient load the average floor nurse has. If they fixed the patient load, many nurses would stick around longer.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 23, 2020, 10:42:24 AM
On preview, the brain drain doesn't help, but there's a big problem with moving to the city and getting paid too little to be middle class as well.
That's one reason--besides cultural considerations and a desire to stay near to family and friends--why some people want to live in the smaller places if they can. Had I stayed in the big city where I began my library career, I'd surely be making more than I am now. I'd also be paying twice my monthly mortgage payment to live in a one-bedroom apartment. Or living an hour's commute away to save on housing. No thank you!
If I moved to New York or LA I'd doubtless be making more still--and very possibly living in my car.
Quote from: apl68 on July 23, 2020, 01:22:53 PM
If I moved to New York or LA I'd doubtless be making more still--and very possibly living in my car.
There are plenty of places not NY or LA. We actually have two public librarian friends, both married in two-income couples, living in one mid-sized and one enormous Great American cities. They both live comfortably in bedroom communities and commute.
From the article:
Quote
Education is a public good. When we treat it as the personnel office of the economy, it's easy to forget that.
As a public good, it is inherently, inescapably, political. That doesn't mean "partisan," necessarily, but it does mean that it both reflects and enacts some collective priorities over others. The term "republic" comes from the Latin res publica, meaning "public thing." A public thing like a community college has to participate in the life of the republic. It can't not. Reducing a public thing to a constellation of private goods is missing its reason to exist. We support education as a duty to the future. We need to rethink the economy for the same reason.
I don't blame students for wanting degrees that lead to good jobs. That makes sense. I blame the rest of us for allowing an economy to make the paths to stability so narrow that the few identifiable pathways to stability get overcrowded.
IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter
I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.
It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups. That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around. Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 24, 2020, 06:01:54 PM
IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter
I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.
It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups. That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around. Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.
While I can't disagree with what you wrote, we need to be careful about saying there's not enough slots to accommodate different populations. If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots. We no longer allow colleges to exclude Blacks because there aren't enough slots and Blacks require additional resources. (It seems to me that this anonymous author is trying to solve a different problem than either of the other articles addressed. They just saw an opportunity to add to an ongoing discussion, tangential though their point may be.)
Quote from: pgher on July 25, 2020, 08:23:16 PM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 24, 2020, 06:01:54 PM
IHE published a letter to the editor regarding disability and nursing programs: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/07/23/fear-and-decision-making-nursing-discipline-letter
I will mark this post of mine opinion since I don't have much additional information.
It seems like the author of the letter is less concerned with ensuring a solid population of highly qualified nurses and more concerned with representation of all checkbox groups. That seems to ignore the problems of already not having enough resources to go around. Adding more people who will need additional resources (possibly forever to do the job) doesn't seem to fix the nursing shortage in the community or the problems with not having enough slots in the training programs.
While I can't disagree with what you wrote, we need to be careful about saying there's not enough slots to accommodate different populations. If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots. We no longer allow colleges to exclude Blacks because there aren't enough slots and Blacks require additional resources. (It seems to me that this anonymous author is trying to solve a different problem than either of the other articles addressed. They just saw an opportunity to add to an ongoing discussion, tangential though their point may be.)
I didn't get from the letter a viewpoint like 'let's be sure we have the educational equivalent of parking slots and ramps'. I was much more picking up a vibe like 'rah, rah, everyone should get to try and who are you to say that the blind, paraplegic can't be anything they want?'
One of my continued frustrations now is trying to get people to focus on the solutions that will solve the problems (e.g., enough elementary/middleschoolers on track to actually be ready for college so they can successfully major in engineering and related fields) instead of just picking at those who point out the lack of qualified people in the pool who have given checkbox characteristics.
I've spent enough time with really inclusive environments and a variety of workplaces to have a finely tuned BS detector for those who aren't in touch with the reality of reasonable accommodations being different for the classroom parts of school and the day-to-day work place.
Even the parking slots argument doesn't work if the day-to-day job is mostly hiking to the remote parts of the installation where trails cannot be built since the point is the undisturbed wilderness. Standard test accommodations related to time and quiet seem at odds with most front-line nursing jobs day-to-day,
Quote from: pgher on July 25, 2020, 08:23:16 PM
If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots.
I was sort of thinking this way, but noticed something strange in the article.
Quote
Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the marginalization of underrepresented populations, especially students with disabilities. If a supervisor at a clinical site perceives a student's needs to be burdensome, it may impact that person's willingness to accept additional students from the institution. Similarly, accommodations for third-party examinations may be more difficult to control and monitor than accommodations for instructor-developed assessments, leading to fear of a negative impact on pass rates. In dire need of clinical placements and good pass rates, administrators may feel torn between what is right and just for individual students and what will sustain the program.
What struck me about the first highlighted sentence is that the concern of a student's needs being preceived as "burdensome" could lead to unwillingness to hire, not someone with that
disability, but someone from that
institution. Given the other two highlighted sentences, it occurred to me that the issue may really be grade inflation; specifically, if an institution with low pass rates tries to fudge by labelling lots of students as having "learning disabilities", and then being really generous about "accomodations", their students' weaknesses would show up in clinical evaluations. That would explain why it would deter accepting students
from that institution in future.
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 26, 2020, 06:51:31 AM
Quote from: pgher on July 25, 2020, 08:23:16 PM
If someone is disabled in a way that prevents them from succeeding in the relevant career, then I'll concede your point. However, we don't allow places with limited parking to not bother with handicapped spots.
I was sort of thinking this way, but noticed something strange in the article.
Quote
Perhaps the most disturbing implication is the marginalization of underrepresented populations, especially students with disabilities. If a supervisor at a clinical site perceives a student's needs to be burdensome, it may impact that person's willingness to accept additional students from the institution. Similarly, accommodations for third-party examinations may be more difficult to control and monitor than accommodations for instructor-developed assessments, leading to fear of a negative impact on pass rates. In dire need of clinical placements and good pass rates, administrators may feel torn between what is right and just for individual students and what will sustain the program.
What struck me about the first highlighted sentence is that the concern of a student's needs being preceived as "burdensome" could lead to unwillingness to hire, not someone with that disability, but someone from that institution. Given the other two highlighted sentences, it occurred to me that the issue may really be grade inflation; specifically, if an institution with low pass rates tries to fudge by labelling lots of students as having "learning disabilities", and then being really generous about "accomodations", their students' weaknesses would show up in clinical evaluations. That would explain why it would deter accepting students from that institution in future.
To keep accreditation, the nursing program must have almost perfect NCLEX pass rates by graduates.
To get graduates, the program must have sufficient clinical slots at local hospitals etc. Being harder to work with than other nursing programs in the area will mean lower priority for those limited slots.
Being unreasonable regarding the day-to-day accommodations (e.g., on the job) will be a mark against the college program and they won't have the necessary clinicals during the program, let alone the ability to place graduates.
Quote from: apl68 on July 23, 2020, 10:21:37 AM
Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made: "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair. They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele." The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.
This reminds me of a piece in
The New Yorker or
Harper's some years ago. The subject was the permanent-disability system and the extent to which getting on it represented the only life-goal for many of the article's subjects (in eastern Kentucky). One woman, who was trying to claim permanent-disability because she couldn't stand up all day (to be, e.g., a cashier), was asked to imagine a job that would allow for occasional sitting. She could only come up with one answer: working at the disability office.
Perhaps education is the answer, but I sometimes wonder if we're asking education to do too much.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 06:55:58 AM
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.
By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.
I don't know what the least bad solution is.
Quote from: quasihumanist on July 26, 2020, 10:02:32 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 06:55:58 AM
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.
By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.
I don't know what the least bad solution is.
Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.
Quote from: writingprof on July 26, 2020, 09:15:48 AM
Quote from: apl68 on July 23, 2020, 10:21:37 AM
Reed's comment about the demand for a cosmetology program reminds me of a comment my own barber once made: "Half the little girls in town who don't know what they want to do for a living go to [the local beauty college] to learn to cut hair. They don't realize how hard it is to open your own shop and build your own clientele." The market for hair stylists is permanently flooded because there's only room for so many, and yet, such is the lack of imagination among youths looking for a career, there are legions who can't figure out what else to try to be.
This reminds me of a piece in The New Yorker or Harper's some years ago. The subject was the permanent-disability system and the extent to which getting on it represented the only life-goal for many of the article's subjects (in eastern Kentucky). One woman, who was trying to claim permanent-disability because she couldn't stand up all day (to be, e.g., a cashier), was asked to imagine a job that would allow for occasional sitting. She could only come up with one answer: working at the disability office.
Perhaps education is the answer, but I sometimes wonder if we're asking education to do too much.
Hence, "career day" in school. People came to talk about what they did and why they enjoyed it. Kids thought about jobs, and job satisfaction, and envisioned themselves in jobs they never knew existed.
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 10:09:35 AM
Quote from: quasihumanist on July 26, 2020, 10:02:32 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 06:55:58 AM
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.
By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.
I don't know what the least bad solution is.
Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.
I think the problem with remediation as it is often
practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need
at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.
But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 26, 2020, 10:37:22 AM
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 10:09:35 AM
Quote from: quasihumanist on July 26, 2020, 10:02:32 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 06:55:58 AM
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.
By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.
I don't know what the least bad solution is.
Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.
I think the problem with remediation as it is often practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.
But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.
Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 11:24:40 AMFine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?
1) Fixing K-12 education to really be education instead of some box checking that is mostly warehousing of the youth.
For example, Career Day doesn't work when there really are very few jobs in town other than teacher, police officer, farmer, road crew, and medical personnel at the hospital.
I grew up in that town and we were the big town for almost 50 miles. Technically, there are other jobs. For example, there was a dentist office with a receptionist and two dental hygienists in addition to the dentist. However, much like the cosmeticians upthread, it's not a growth market that more supply will meet. The handful of people who work at the county courthouse aren't going to substantially grow in number and turnover is low. There were a couple restaurants in town that were family-owned that needed additional help in the summer due to the tourists. However, the town couldn't support one new restaurant per year and there was never going to be a market for fine dining.
It's not necessarily a lack of imagination on what else can be done when one is realistic about a small enough town where even becoming a secretary means having real skills that are rare enough (e.g., short hand is still a thing; making pivot tables with Excel; wrestling the database into submission) that people will pay extra.
2) Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going. That's not an education problem. That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done. The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary. Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms. A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.
That's even more true of people who don't have the social capital to get into the networks drawing from the elite enough institutions where a college degree in anything is really more a marker of social class than a desirable skill set.
This is the nursing thread. The reason many people want to be nurses is a clear path becoming a solid member of the middle class with the ability to get a similar job if a given employer closes. The sad reality is many rural hospitals are closing. However, moving as a nurse is possible, if not personally desirable. Advertisements for nurses exist and it's quite reasonable for someone who is willing to move to get hired at a place where the individual knows no one. That's not at all true for many other positions that are never advertised because the pool is already big enough with relatives, neighbors, friends, and others who can be given an interview and someone is hired without ever a formal advertisement.
Academia is unusual because nearly every faculty position for longer than one term will be advertised nationally. Most other industries don't work like that.
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 11:24:40 AM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 26, 2020, 10:37:22 AM
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 10:09:35 AM
Quote from: quasihumanist on July 26, 2020, 10:02:32 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 06:55:58 AM
On a different thread recently, people have asserted that resources cannot/should not be diverted to help those who need additional help to succeed in college.
It's true that the word 'Black' does not appear in that post, but the net effect is few people of color who come from low SES get a good college education or indeed any college education.
Diverting college resources to nursing to be checkbox inclusive seems like a bad idea when the goal should be more nurses graduated or more anyone getting a college education by being more inclusive of what college students need to be successful.
If a student hasn't had much of a K-12 education (even if they do okay on the standardized tests), then 2 or 4 years of college cannot do the work of 14 or 16 years of education.
By the time someone has graduated from high school, there is no good solution for this problem.
I don't know what the least bad solution is.
Well, giving up on people seems worse than trying to remediate their education so that they can become productive members of society.
I think the problem with remediation as it is often practiced, is that it is seen as something trivial that can be done with minimal impact on the time to finish a degree. So, a person with a lousy high school experience will maybe take one "remedial" course in first year and it's supposed to magically get them up to speed. In reality, they probably really need at least a complete year of remedial work to get them close to ready for first year.
But for all kinds of reasons, that's not a popular option.
Fine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?
Honestly, I think it's more like four to six years of remediation. Maybe more. I see first year students coming in without even the notion that humans can think rather than just memorize facts and procedures from stone tablets, and I'm pretty sure I'd progressed beyond that in elementary school.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 12:22:11 PM
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 11:24:40 AMFine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?
Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going. That's not an education problem. That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done. The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary. Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms. A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.
Maybe...kind'a...or not.
I know that you are well informed enough to have seen articles like this (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/18/machines-will-create-million-more-jobs-than-they-displace-by-world-economic-forum-says/) and this (https://chiefexecutive.net/how-emerging-technology-is-driving-job-creation-new-industries/).
And there is a study (I don't feel like searching for it right now) that looks at the attitudes toward agricultural technology at the turn of the 20th century----people had very much the same fears about automation that we do, yet overall employment and wealth increased because of all the new machine-based jobs steadily created since the industrial revolution.
In other words, it is doubtful that we have killed opportunity through cyber-technology. Elder jobs (such as telephone operators) are extinct, obviously, but other jobs took their place. We should see the same phenomenon again. The problem, it seems to me, rests with people (coal miners, loggers) who cannot adjust and lack the capital and foresight to do so. Agile minds make for better Darwinian possibilities. This is where education comes in: hail education!!
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms. Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying. They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining. Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine. Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future. Same as us.
But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us. This is what having an agile mine is all about. The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 26, 2020, 08:03:11 PM
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms. Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying. They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining. Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine. Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future. Same as us.
But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us. This is what having an agile mine is all about. The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.
In farming country, the identity issues are similar. While farm productivity is up, the need for labor is down. Some of the big grain farms are 4,000 acres with two operators. At that density, to get a town of 10,000 people, you would need an area the size of Missouri. Obviously, that is not a socially functional scenario. Those regions will empty, with individual cities existing because there is a need for a city
per se, not a commercial base for the farmers.
The difference is the desirability of the employment. Hardly anyone outside of agriculture wants to be a grain farmer. High financial risk, low profit, isolation, stress, danger....
Young people in agriculture also don't want to be operators. Mostly they want to move to the city and live a secure life among people.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 26, 2020, 08:03:11 PM
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms. Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying. They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining. Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine. Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future. Same as us.
But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us. This is what having an agile mine is all about. The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.
Just like all of the smaller educational institutions going under, and for the same reasons.
It will be interesting to see how academics "move on".
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 26, 2020, 06:24:22 PM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 26, 2020, 12:22:11 PM
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 26, 2020, 11:24:40 AMFine. A year, then. Maybe two. What is the alternative?
Sighing heavily about the increasing reality that we don't need the majority of the adults in US society to work to keep the rest of us going. That's not an education problem. That's a problem that results from a combination of automation, better technology, and changes in mindset about what needs to be done. The secretarial pools are basically gone as each person enters their own data and types their own email until you get high enough to have an executive assistant, which is far more than a secretary. Many of the clerk positions are gone, again as the clients/students/public enter their own data into the online forms. A lot of the entry-level positions that allowed one to climb a corporate ladder are simply gone because we don't need them any more.
Maybe...kind'a...or not.
I know that you are well informed enough to have seen articles like this (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/18/machines-will-create-million-more-jobs-than-they-displace-by-world-economic-forum-says/) and this (https://chiefexecutive.net/how-emerging-technology-is-driving-job-creation-new-industries/).
And there is a study (I don't feel like searching for it right now) that looks at the attitudes toward agricultural technology at the turn of the 20th century----people had very much the same fears about automation that we do, yet overall employment and wealth increased because of all the new machine-based jobs steadily created since the industrial revolution.
In other words, it is doubtful that we have killed opportunity through cyber-technology. Elder jobs (such as telephone operators) are extinct, obviously, but other jobs took their place. We should see the same phenomenon again. The problem, it seems to me, rests with people (coal miners, loggers) who cannot adjust and lack the capital and foresight to do so. Agile minds make for better Darwinian possibilities. This is where education comes in: hail education!!
What education exactly do you suggest for people who are of below average intelligence and thus will not be able to learn the new complicated things?
We're already seeing the problems in the next transition when what most people can do is not sufficient to be competitive for the next set of jobs because education alone is insufficient to grant the creativity and other aspects of the jobs that cannot be automated and that will continue to be paid well. The care taking jobs are taking longer to automate, but you should keep an eye on the Japanese caretaker robot industry. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/virtual-reality-robots-interactive-apps-other-new-tech-help-people-with-dementia-and-their-caretakers/2019/12/13/f6231efe-06fe-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html)
Yes, the cries have been coming for decades, just like they have been coming to point out that a PhD alone is not enough (one of my favorite books that should be dated and isn't: https://www.amazon.com/PhD-Not-Enough-Survival-Science/dp/0465022227).
The question isn't whether automation will kill a lot of middle class jobs. The question is when will we hit the point at which average people cannot get a middle class job, especially those who don't start solidly middle class as kids? https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-middle-class-is-slowly-being-wiped-out-2018-07-23 overviews much of the problem.
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?
1. Move. It's what I did.
2. Retrain
3. Take advantage of the social safety net (most of them vote against the social safety net)
To a large extent, these workers were raised in an environment that told them they were "not the academic type" and "don't need education". They were brainwashed from a young age. Trust me on this. I lived through it. Many of the kids I grew up with drank the Kool-Aid.
With the automation that's taking place over the next few decades, the only available jobs will require many years of education. We need to recognize that. Maybe not a history degree, but education. There's no alternative.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 27, 2020, 06:55:45 AM
What education exactly do you suggest for people who are of below average intelligence and thus will not be able to learn the new complicated things?
We're already seeing the problems in the next transition when what most people can do is not sufficient to be competitive for the next set of jobs because education alone is insufficient to grant the creativity and other aspects of the jobs that cannot be automated and that will continue to be paid well.
The question isn't whether automation will kill a lot of middle class jobs. The question is when will we hit the point at which average people cannot get a middle class job, especially those who don't start solidly middle class as kids?
Sure, but I think you've just pointed out the basically unfair nature of the world. There is no guarantee that anyone is going to prosper, particularly in capitalistic societies. Intelligence is often a limiting factor, as is sanity, upbringing, substance abuse, etc. etc. New technologies may actually leave some people locked out of the brave new world. The old factory jobs of the industrial revolution were not necessarily any more demanding than agricultural work, actually I think they were much easier physically albeit more monotonous and dangerous. People adjusted.
I'm just pointing out that we've been here before and all the news is not all bad. Capitalism tends to go through waves of contraction and expansion, the invisible hand and all that. I don't know enough to conjecture about "the point" you refer to above. All we can do is hope and keep our heads. Oh, and vote Democrat.
From https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-middle-class-is-slowly-being-wiped-out-2018-07-23
Quote
For teachers with children, the problem is compounded by a decrease in salaries, benefits and general job security. The situation is equally dire for teachers of grade school, high school or college.
"These days, professors may be more likely than their students to be living in basement apartments and subsisting on ramen and Tabasco," she writes.
At the professorial level, more colleges than ever, driven by bloated administrative bureaucracies, are relying on adjunct professors who receive low wages and no benefits. In the book, Quart cites one survey that found that 62% of adjunct professors earn less than $20,000 a year from teaching.
If education is the lynch-pin on the future, we're sure blowing it.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 08:52:09 AM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 27, 2020, 06:55:45 AM
What education exactly do you suggest for people who are of below average intelligence and thus will not be able to learn the new complicated things?
We're already seeing the problems in the next transition when what most people can do is not sufficient to be competitive for the next set of jobs because education alone is insufficient to grant the creativity and other aspects of the jobs that cannot be automated and that will continue to be paid well.
The question isn't whether automation will kill a lot of middle class jobs. The question is when will we hit the point at which average people cannot get a middle class job, especially those who don't start solidly middle class as kids?
Sure, but I think you've just pointed out the basically unfair nature of the world. There is no guarantee that anyone is going to prosper, particularly in capitalistic societies.
As opposed to communist societies, where it's almost guaranteed that
no-one (outside party members) will prosper.
Quote
Intelligence is often a limiting factor, as is sanity, upbringing, substance abuse, etc. etc. New technologies may actually leave some people locked out of the brave new world.
Historically, serfdom and poverty were the norm for most people. Advances in technology have eliminated many unskilled physical labour jobs, but the average standard of living is vastly better than it was even a century ago.
Universal Basic Income in some form may be the hext logical step in the developing social safety net in developped countries.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 27, 2020, 05:41:34 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 26, 2020, 08:03:11 PM
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms. Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying. They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining. Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine. Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future. Same as us.
But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us. This is what having an agile mine is all about. The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.
Just like all of the smaller educational institutions going under, and for the same reasons.
It will be interesting to see how academics "move on".
Some will and some won't. Whatever adjunct ranks remain will probably be populated by people with years of experience, degrees, etc. Other academics cut from the herd will refit themselves to something else. Some will simply retire or land on whatever safety-net is available. Those old logging towns are still up there in the hills. Some now can't afford police departments. Same with the mining towns. And a few people still log and mine. Nothing new.
Really Marshy, do you think you've made a point there?
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 27, 2020, 09:08:02 AM
As opposed to communist societies, where it's almost guaranteed that no-one (outside party members) will prosper.
Quote
Intelligence is often a limiting factor, as is sanity, upbringing, substance abuse, etc. etc. New technologies may actually leave some people locked out of the brave new world.
Historically, serfdom and poverty were the norm for most people. Advances in technology have eliminated many unskilled physical labour jobs, but the average standard of living is vastly better than it was even a century ago.
Really!? Wow Marshy! Glad you pointed those out.
Sheesh.
Quote from: Hibush on July 27, 2020, 04:21:56 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 26, 2020, 08:03:11 PM
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do? That they did not have the 'foresight' 30 years ago to predict what would happen to their industries, whether or not that is a blameworthy thing to hold against them, is water under the bridge, any more than similarly aged PhDs like myself, who believed the propaganda and bad predictions regarding the supposed vast increase in available professor positions set to arise by the late 90s, can do anything to change their choices, as well... now what?
I'm from logging country. 30 years ago the timber industry sounded all sorts of alarms. Not all loggers, but many, simply refused to believe that their livelihood was endangered and then reacted with fury and obstinacy when the logging towns began dying. They threatened, they held rallies, they slaughtered spotted owls. They refused to leave their towns or receive retraining. Surviving now in an industry which is teetering, I understand some of this----and I appreciate your predicament the same as mine. Logging was not just a job, it was a lifestyle; it was where one lived, what one did with one's life, who one associated with, how one dressed, the environment one worked , what one did with one's future. Same as us.
But this sort of scenario is not a choice we make but a choice that is thrust upon us. This is what having an agile mine is all about. The "now what" is one's ability to move on. Otherwise I am not sure what your question is about.
In farming country, the identity issues are similar. While farm productivity is up, the need for labor is down. Some of the big grain farms are 4,000 acres with two operators. At that density, to get a town of 10,000 people, you would need an area the size of Missouri. Obviously, that is not a socially functional scenario. Those regions will empty, with individual cities existing because there is a need for a city per se, not a commercial base for the farmers.
The difference is the desirability of the employment. Hardly anyone outside of agriculture wants to be a grain farmer. High financial risk, low profit, isolation, stress, danger....
Young people in agriculture also don't want to be operators. Mostly they want to move to the city and live a secure life among people.
And everybody is becoming concentrated in a handful of huge urban areas just in time for those areas to collapse because they've become environmentally unsustainable. One of the world's disastrous trends.
Quote from: apl68 on July 27, 2020, 11:00:38 AM
Quote from: Hibush on July 27, 2020, 04:21:56 AM
In farming country, the identity issues are similar. While farm productivity is up, the need for labor is down. Some of the big grain farms are 4,000 acres with two operators. At that density, to get a town of 10,000 people, you would need an area the size of Missouri. Obviously, that is not a socially functional scenario. Those regions will empty, with individual cities existing because there is a need for a city per se, not a commercial base for the farmers.
The difference is the desirability of the employment. Hardly anyone outside of agriculture wants to be a grain farmer. High financial risk, low profit, isolation, stress, danger....
Young people in agriculture also don't want to be operators. Mostly they want to move to the city and live a secure life among people.
And everybody is becoming concentrated in a handful of huge urban areas just in time for those areas to collapse because they've become environmentally unsustainable. One of the world's disastrous trends.
One of the silver linings of covid is that it's made some people reconsider whether they really want to live in a big city, especially if their work can be done largely virtually. The longer we have to go until a vaccine, the more significant this trend may become.
Quote from: tuxthepenguin on July 27, 2020, 08:13:49 AM
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 26, 2020, 07:50:29 PM
What exactly do you suggest that those coal miners and other middle aged working class folks from dying industries do?
1. Move. It's what I did.
2. Retrain
3. Take advantage of the social safety net (most of them vote against the social safety net)
To a large extent, these workers were raised in an environment that told them they were "not the academic type" and "don't need education". They were brainwashed from a young age. Trust me on this. I lived through it. Many of the kids I grew up with drank the Kool-Aid.
With the automation that's taking place over the next few decades, the only available jobs will require many years of education. We need to recognize that. Maybe not a history degree, but education. There's no alternative.
I have to disagree a little bit. There is a large market for workers in the skilled trades that take both brains and mechanical aptitude, admittedly not a universal combination. There is a growing market for plumbers, electricians, master carpenters, HVAC, robotics repair, welders, autobody techs, etc. Many of these trades can pay vastly more than a lot of white collar work, and are in demand. The problem seems to be that there is a barrier to entry, not of years of formal education, but rather in years of hard work as an apprentice or junior technician. There is no skipping the line from high school to plumbing contractor, you have to pay your dues. I think that some people these days do not want to get dirty or work hard physically which keeps them from considering alternatives to 4 year degrees in something at the local college.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 08:52:09 AM
Oh, and vote Democrat.
<snip>
If education is the lynch-pin on the future, we're sure blowing it.
1) Education is not the linchpin for the future, even if college is changed to lower barriers for those who start a lower SES.
2) Voting Democrat doesn't fix the underlying problems of the growing fraction of the adult population who can't do anything that is worth middle class incomes. The resources just aren't there. Often, even among the Democrats. who have the power, the will to change society is honored more as campaign talking points than actual plans that would solve any of the problems. High-ranking Democrats benefit from the current systems every bit as much as current high-ranking Republicans.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 27, 2020, 04:11:00 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 08:52:09 AM
Oh, and vote Democrat.
<snip>
If education is the lynch-pin on the future, we're sure blowing it.
1) Education is not the linchpin for the future, even if college is changed to lower barriers for those who start a lower SES.
2) Voting Democrat doesn't fix the underlying problems of the growing fraction of the adult population who can't do anything that is worth middle class incomes. The resources just aren't there. Often, even among the Democrats. who have the power, the will to change society is honored more as campaign talking points than actual plans that would solve any of the problems. High-ranking Democrats benefit from the current systems every bit as much as current high-ranking Republicans.
There is no panacea. I cannot believe how many times I've posted something to this effect.
Education is one of the linchpins. Always has been. Sometimes, for some individuals, it
IS the linchpin.
And electing Democrats is a better choice than Republicans at this period of time (even if there is no panacea). Despite their family-values/working-class rhetoric, the Republicans are simply bad for the underlying problems facing working families.
"1. Move. It's what I did.
2. Retrain
3. Take advantage of the social safety net (most of them vote against the social safety net)
To a large extent, these workers were raised in an environment that told them they were "not the academic type" and "don't need education". They were brainwashed from a young age. Trust me on this. I lived through it. Many of the kids I grew up with drank the Kool-Aid."
This sounds like the standard 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' claptrap that you would hear from numerous conservative 'pundits' etc. Moving 1) takes money 2) requires you to go somewhere that would somehow allow you to get a better job than you could get where you were coming from, regardless of your qualifications, experience, etc., as well as with your not having any local connections, references, etc., to assist your job search (think the same sort of advice I was given when I interviewed for library school, and asked the dean what my chances were of getting gainful library employment with the degree, and was told 'virtually 100% if you are willing to relocate'-- this was not true, largely because it was very hard to get people in areas that I had no connections to, to consider hiring me over candidates with local ties). Retraining, moreover, requires 1) aptitude for whatever one is going to seek retraining in 2) some interest in potentially pursuing that credential (people really do not want to do things that they really have no interest in, after all, esp i f they are middle-aged career changers) and 3) some knowledge of what realistic options there would be for such a change (as opposed to the useless and often impossible to take (and often unsolicited) job advice that they may well be getting (a well-meaning 80yo man in my church, for instance, has repeatedly advised me to find some business in my area, and volunteer to work for nothing in order to 'get my foot in the door', as though this were the 70s (he has an example of someone he knew doing that then), and as though I were 24), heck, and 4) money. Indeed, it is very very difficult to turn on a dime, and rearrange your entire social and political network, often going against one's cultural, religious, etc., connections, preconceptions, and attitudes (I recall this from Anthro 101 almost 35 years ago, in answer to the 'why don't they move' question someone asked of out of work auto, steel, etc., workers.
Now you are very very right about the idiotic, well-propagandized and mesmerized allegiance many of these selfsame folks have to the GOP, and apparent sincere belief that things like social safety nets which would very much benefit them, are bad things to be opposed. There are many and complex reasons for this, one of which is that most of these folks are indeed less educated and adept at critical thinking and reasoning than people like us are, and another of which concerns that tribal identity politics and extreme difficulty with asserting, or even quietly assuming, views that are contrary to those of one's group.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 04:43:10 PM
Education is one of the linchpins. Always has been. Sometimes, for some individuals, it IS the linchpin.
Education only matters to the extent that it gives someone sufficient competitive advantage to be able to get the necessary resources in a given situation.
When resources are mostly allocated according to family status, personal connections with the powerful people, or other characteristics that aren't substantially within one's personal control, then individual education in the formal-go-to-school-as-a-mandatory-minimum doesn't matter.
The school system that currently provides an education-like experience has only existed for about a hundred years. Any claims of (formal) education always being key ignores nearly all of human history and indeed even much of the world right now.
Individual stories, including mine, are not arguments for the value of mass education for everyone. Few of the people who graduated high school with me have the kind of life I do. Almost none of my friends from college have the life I do. In fact, most of them here in middle age have jobs that don't require a college degree or are teachers, nurses, or scientists/engineers.
Lacking literacy or numeracy at an eighth grade level is a big problem, but more formal education, unless it is specialized enough to be a competitive advantage compared to similar people, is not necessarily anything more opportunity and other costs that will not be recouped.
Tell us again about your jobs as an adult other than faculty jobs.
I ran across https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-24 today and it seems really relevant here. "No panacea, but vote Democrat" as a blanket prescription is asserting we should try unreasonable scenarios instead of dealing with reality.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 27, 2020, 11:19:48 AM
Quote from: apl68 on July 27, 2020, 11:00:38 AM
Quote from: Hibush on July 27, 2020, 04:21:56 AM
In farming country, the identity issues are similar. While farm productivity is up, the need for labor is down. Some of the big grain farms are 4,000 acres with two operators. At that density, to get a town of 10,000 people, you would need an area the size of Missouri. Obviously, that is not a socially functional scenario. Those regions will empty, with individual cities existing because there is a need for a city per se, not a commercial base for the farmers.
The difference is the desirability of the employment. Hardly anyone outside of agriculture wants to be a grain farmer. High financial risk, low profit, isolation, stress, danger....
Young people in agriculture also don't want to be operators. Mostly they want to move to the city and live a secure life among people.
And everybody is becoming concentrated in a handful of huge urban areas just in time for those areas to collapse because they've become environmentally unsustainable. One of the world's disastrous trends.
One of the silver linings of covid is that it's made some people reconsider whether they really want to live in a big city, especially if their work can be done largely virtually. The longer we have to go until a vaccine, the more significant this trend may become.
The environmentally and economically optimum population density is really quite high. Some cities are above it, so there are some examples of going too far. But wise urbanization is good for the environment as well as meeting many people preferences.
Infrastructure is a lot cheaper at high density. There is a reason internet is bad in rural areas. District heating is super-efficient for northern cities where there is enough demand within a mile or two of the heating plant.
Transportation, if planned well, is shorter and mass transit is effective. Rural people (I am one) waste an enormous amount of resources driving to work, the store, entertainment. School districts spend an enormous amount of money on busing (~$20/student/day) and waste an hour to an hour and a half of each child's day. Vast area are paved over and maintained to store cars.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 04:43:10 PM
Education is one of the linchpins. Always has been. Sometimes, for some individuals, it IS the linchpin.
Education only matters to the extent that it gives someone sufficient competitive advantage to be able to get the necessary resources in a given situation.
When resources are mostly allocated according to family status, personal connections with the powerful people, or other characteristics that aren't substantially within one's personal control, then individual education in the formal-go-to-school-as-a-mandatory-minimum doesn't matter.
Paying a premium for an education that provides access to people with high family status and personal connections with powerful people would be a good investment for and individual hoping to get better resources in the future.
The Varsity Blues parents are and extreme pathology of this principle, but it should work for anyone who uses the opportunity intentionally.
Can schools that do provide that opportunity be deliberate about it? Even at the level of having first-generation college students get in with a college-educated crowd and feel like they belong and maintain those relationships.
This discussion has drifted toward a topic I actually know something about. It is very difficult for a system of mass education to overcome the effects of inequities that are built into other social institutions. It's much like the focus on the affordability of medical care when medical care accounts for only about twenty percent of the general population's health status. Environment, household income, and diet have a far greater effect.
Data indicate that a child's immediate neighborhood has a profound effect on their future earnings: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/upshot/maps-neighborhoods-shape-child-poverty.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/upshot/maps-neighborhoods-shape-child-poverty.html). And there is some evidence that, as discussed in the article, providing housing vouchers to poor families so that they can live in non-poverty trap neighborhoods generates big dividends for society. Policies like this might lead to far greater benefit than the "you must go to college and get a degree no matter what" mantra.
Quote from: Hibush on July 28, 2020, 05:50:22 AM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 27, 2020, 11:19:48 AM
One of the silver linings of covid is that it's made some people reconsider whether they really want to live in a big city, especially if their work can be done largely virtually. The longer we have to go until a vaccine, the more significant this trend may become.
The environmentally and economically optimum population density is really quite high. Some cities are above it, so there are some examples of going too far. But wise urbanization is good for the environment as well as meeting many people preferences.
Infrastructure is a lot cheaper at high density. There is a reason internet is bad in rural areas. District heating is super-efficient for northern cities where there is enough demand within a mile or two of the heating plant.
Transportation, if planned well, is shorter and mass transit is effective. Rural people (I am one) waste an enormous amount of resources driving to work, the store, entertainment. School districts spend an enormous amount of money on busing (~$20/student/day) and waste an hour to an hour and a half of each child's day. Vast area are paved over and maintained to store cars.
True points. However, certain primary industries (agriculture, forestry, mining)
require space, so there will always be part of the population working in rural areas, and probably living there. Also, technology has made the cost premium due to lower population density much lower than it has been in the past for several things. Covid has made this apparent, with many people working remotely, and things like telemedicine allowing doctors to consult with patients remotely.
Furthermore, cities tend to have very big income disparities; the bigger the city, the wider the range between the poorest and richest neighborhoods. Rural communities tend to be much more homogeneous. And, as covid has shown, all of that centralized infrastructure means that things like natural disasters can paralyze cities by knocking out services relied on by everyone. And again, as covid has shown, an epidemic in high population density areas is devastating. (The same would go for water contamination, chemical spills, etc.)
Summary: urbanizing as much of the population as possible is not the best solution any more than moving everyone to the suburbs (or the country).
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 27, 2020, 11:28:35 PM
"1. Move. It's what I did.
2. Retrain
3. Take advantage of the social safety net (most of them vote against the social safety net)
To a large extent, these workers were raised in an environment that told them they were "not the academic type" and "don't need education". They were brainwashed from a young age. Trust me on this. I lived through it. Many of the kids I grew up with drank the Kool-Aid."
This sounds like the standard 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' claptrap that you would hear from numerous conservative 'pundits' etc.
Not really. They're the only options. If you can't find a job where you are, you can move to somewhere they are hiring, you can change to a different field where there are jobs, or you can get government or private support to pay your bills. There's nothing else.
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 27, 2020, 11:28:35 PM
Moving 1) takes money 2) requires you to go somewhere that would somehow allow you to get a better job than you could get where you were coming from, regardless of your qualifications, experience, etc., as well as with your not having any local connections, references, etc., to assist your job search (think the same sort of advice I was given when I interviewed for library school, and asked the dean what my chances were of getting gainful library employment with the degree, and was told 'virtually 100% if you are willing to relocate'-- this was not true, largely because it was very hard to get people in areas that I had no connections to, to consider hiring me over candidates with local ties). Retraining, moreover, requires 1) aptitude for whatever one is going to seek retraining in 2) some interest in potentially pursuing that credential (people really do not want to do things that they really have no interest in, after all, esp i f they are middle-aged career changers) and 3) some knowledge of what realistic options there would be for such a change (as opposed to the useless and often impossible to take (and often unsolicited) job advice that they may well be getting (a well-meaning 80yo man in my church, for instance, has repeatedly advised me to find some business in my area, and volunteer to work for nothing in order to 'get my foot in the door', as though this were the 70s (he has an example of someone he knew doing that then), and as though I were 24), heck, and 4) money. Indeed, it is very very difficult to turn on a dime, and rearrange your entire social and political network, often going against one's cultural, religious, etc., connections, preconceptions, and attitudes (I recall this from Anthro 101 almost 35 years ago, in answer to the 'why don't they move' question someone asked of out of work auto, steel, etc., workers.
Now you are very very right about the idiotic, well-propagandized and mesmerized allegiance many of these selfsame folks have to the GOP, and apparent sincere belief that things like social safety nets which would very much benefit them, are bad things to be opposed. There are many and complex reasons for this, one of which is that most of these folks are indeed less educated and adept at critical thinking and reasoning than people like us are, and another of which concerns that tribal identity politics and extreme difficulty with asserting, or even quietly assuming, views that are contrary to those of one's group.
A major problem is age discrimination. It's only gotten worse since the economy died. There are no easy answers to that in the absence of a form of UBI.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 27, 2020, 04:43:10 PM
Education is one of the linchpins. Always has been. Sometimes, for some individuals, it IS the linchpin.
Education only matters to the extent that it gives someone sufficient competitive advantage to be able to get the necessary resources in a given situation.
Uh, yeah. As I said, sometimes education is the linchpin.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
When resources are mostly allocated according to family status, personal connections with the powerful people, or other characteristics that aren't substantially within one's personal control, then individual education in the formal-go-to-school-as-a-mandatory-minimum doesn't matter.
A little more care with rhetoric would help.
I disagree. Most of the world lacks family status or personal connections to powerful people. This is another reason that education, among other factors, can be a linchpin.
You know that this is exactly what Marty Nemko argues? You should really check out the depth of his intellect.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
The school system that currently provides an education-like experience has only existed for about a hundred years. Any claims of (formal) education always being key ignores nearly all of human history and indeed even much of the world right now.
What the hell are you on about?
The 20th and 21st centuries are radically different from all of human history. This is when we live. Who cares what (formal) education meant in the 17th century or whenever!?
Much of the world is radically different from the Western / Industrialized world. Unless you are somewhere radically different than where I imagined, you work and philosophize in the Western / Industrialized world.
And in the 21st century Western / Industrialized world education is often----not always, but often----key. Your own posts regarding the technological future we all face bolsters this.
Are just venting? Is there any point to these forums?
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Individual stories, including mine, are not arguments for the value of mass education for everyone. Few of the people who graduated high school with me have the kind of life I do. Almost none of my friends from college have the life I do. In fact, most of them here in middle age have jobs that don't require a college degree or are teachers, nurses, or scientists/engineers.
Okay. Your story is still an argument for the value of mass education, whether or not you believe it.
When did I or anyone ever debate the value of mass education anyway?
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Lacking literacy or numeracy at an eighth grade level is a big problem, but more formal education, unless it is specialized enough to be a competitive advantage compared to similar people, is not necessarily anything more opportunity and other costs that will not be recouped.
Nope. We've looked at this already. That's absolutely wrong. Degrees make a big difference in all sorts of ways.
And again, please maybe do a quick edit.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Tell us again about your jobs as an adult other than faculty jobs.
Um...why?
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
I ran across https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-24 today and it seems really relevant here. "No panacea, but vote Democrat" as a blanket prescription is asserting we should try unreasonable scenarios instead of dealing with reality.
Nothing unreasonable about voting Democrat, particularly when the current administration is taken into consideration.
Voting Dem is dealing with reality.
The Dems always support education.
You seem to be having a little temper tantrum, Polly. I don't get you.
Age discrimination is awful, and I know for certain I have suffered from it in recent years-- back in 2017, for instance, over the course of three months I had two separate job interviews for positions teaching Latin at a couple of Christian schools, of all places, where in each case the interviewer (boss), men 8-15 years older than myself, asked me variations of this question 'given your age, how would you convince parents that you could relate to their kids?'. I did not get offered either job, needless to say. But what can be done about it? It is already illegal, but impossible to prove, so impossible to enforce.
I get that moving may well be one of the three possible solutions to not being able to get work where you are at now, but moving is just not an option for a lot of people in this situation, for exactly the reasons I mentioned. It is almost impossible for a 50+ man (or woman, for that matter), to just up and decide to leave everything that they know, all their friends and family, support network, etc., to go to previously unknown locale x, in a vague hope that work would be available for them there. If one does make that step, exactly what is supposed to happen when/ if that person fails to get remunerative employment in that new locale? And, of course, this is indeed all moot, if the would-be relocator lacks the financial wherewithal to make the move in the first place.
Now it may well be a good idea to decide we've no choice going forward but to place large numbers of these aging and not particularly employable people onto some sort of quasi-permanent UBI. Certainly it is unambiguously true that our 3d world-style social 'safety net' needs wholesale revision and substantial improvement. But it is also true, as stated upthread, that many of these same sorts of people are stunningly well-propagandized into refusing to support such actions, and supporting GOP politicians who are their worst nightmare, economically. What to do about this is also highly problematic.
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 28, 2020, 10:16:12 PM
I get that moving may well be one of the three possible solutions to not being able to get work where you are at now, but moving is just not an option for a lot of people in this situation, for exactly the reasons I mentioned. It is almost impossible for a 50+ man (or woman, for that matter), to just up and decide to leave everything that they know, all their friends and family, support network, etc., to go to previously unknown locale x, in a vague hope that work would be available for them there. If one does make that step, exactly what is supposed to happen when/ if that person fails to get remunerative employment in that new locale? And, of course, this is indeed all moot, if the would-be relocator lacks the financial wherewithal to make the move in the first place.
Indeed Kay, this scenario is terrible and true for many.
Unfortunately the world is not always willing to accommodate our conveniences and limitations. Sometimes we just don't have a choice.
My wife and I are in the preliminary steps of drawing up contingency plans and potential employment alternatives; we're gauging where we could go (Chinese, Turkish and Arab Emirate schools have hired people we know) or how we can market ourselves and what new skills we would need to change careers. The alternatives are a little bleak on that front, especially if we have to start all over again. We're giving ourselves a year or so just in case the bottom falls out. Our present situation is actually pretty solid at the moment, but one never knows.
You are right in your objections---I'm just not sure these are circumstances one can raise objections against.
Maybe the objections do require acknowledgement and workarounds, but I'm guessing the underlying issue is the more cavalier tone of, "Well, you can just...." in those making the suggestions.
Some of us may be obligate sessile polyps with fewer options than others...that suggests a need for more empathy and a little less breaziness in the dismissal of difficulties to be faced (I don't mean you, WR).
M.
Quote from: mamselle on July 29, 2020, 08:07:16 AM
Maybe the objections do require acknowledgement and workarounds, but I'm guessing the underlying issue is the more cavalier tone of, "Well, you can just...." in those making the suggestions.
Some of us may be obligate sessile polyps with fewer options than others...that suggests a need for more empathy and a little less breaziness in the dismissal of difficulties to be faced (I don't mean you, WR).
M.
I totally dig.
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 28, 2020, 08:57:06 AM
Quote from: Hibush on July 28, 2020, 05:50:22 AM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 27, 2020, 11:19:48 AM
One of the silver linings of covid is that it's made some people reconsider whether they really want to live in a big city, especially if their work can be done largely virtually. The longer we have to go until a vaccine, the more significant this trend may become.
The environmentally and economically optimum population density is really quite high. Some cities are above it, so there are some examples of going too far. But wise urbanization is good for the environment as well as meeting many people preferences.
Infrastructure is a lot cheaper at high density. There is a reason internet is bad in rural areas. District heating is super-efficient for northern cities where there is enough demand within a mile or two of the heating plant.
Transportation, if planned well, is shorter and mass transit is effective. Rural people (I am one) waste an enormous amount of resources driving to work, the store, entertainment. School districts spend an enormous amount of money on busing (~$20/student/day) and waste an hour to an hour and a half of each child's day. Vast area are paved over and maintained to store cars.
True points. However, certain primary industries (agriculture, forestry, mining) require space, so there will always be part of the population working in rural areas, and probably living there. Also, technology has made the cost premium due to lower population density much lower than it has been in the past for several things. Covid has made this apparent, with many people working remotely, and things like telemedicine allowing doctors to consult with patients remotely.
Furthermore, cities tend to have very big income disparities; the bigger the city, the wider the range between the poorest and richest neighborhoods. Rural communities tend to be much more homogeneous. And, as covid has shown, all of that centralized infrastructure means that things like natural disasters can paralyze cities by knocking out services relied on by everyone. And again, as covid has shown, an epidemic in high population density areas is devastating. (The same would go for water contamination, chemical spills, etc.)
Summary: urbanizing as much of the population as possible is not the best solution any more than moving everyone to the suburbs (or the country).
To that I'd add that arguments that prioritize efficiency above all else are the cause of a great deal of the job loss and upheaval that posters have spent so much time talking about on this thread. Modern society's prioritizing of economic efficiency is a big part of why so many can no longer find decent work, many urban areas are badly overgrown, and our environment is in a big mess. That kind of thinking, divorced from other considerations of what best serves human needs in the long term, is one of the great banes of our world.
Let's be careful about damning efficiency. We surely don't want to be inefficient! Those galleons required lots of manpower and were completely adequate for ocean transport! And those washing machines are what saves women from walking around stooped over. Churns for making the butter, anyone?
The environment has likely not been cleaner since the time before trees were burnt for fuel. As for CO2, we can always go nuclear. :-)
Re de-ruralization thread within a thread.
Rural areas where much of the land base is dedicated to agriculture don't actually have that many people directly involved in agriculture. Typical numbers would be in the 5-10% range (including farmers and ag-support businesses.) If 80% of the people in these communities were to move into cities (think small or medium cities in the region), the agricultural function of the are would continue as well or better. Why make a big, expensive effort to keep people there who don't want to be there?
The efficiencies that obtain with having a city of 10,000 or more include being able to have a school district, a public water system, a public sewer system at a reasonable cost. Where houses are distributed at 1 to 10 per mile of road, those things are crazy expensive.
Regarding income inequality, it is lower in rural areas because there are no super-rich as there are in big cities. There is plenty of poverty, in large part because of lack of economic opportunity. The BSN programs look mighty attractive, in part for serving the many who are aging in place.
Sure, everyone in Corny County, Nebraska, does not work in ag or directly ag-related businesses, but many of the others work in places that are necessary for civilization to continue to function in those places. Those farmers need docs, banks, hardware stores, movie houses, etc., just like folks in Trumpy Suburb do.
APL is exactly right. In the name of 'efficiency', as well as related names such as 'free market', 'individualism', etc., corporate and crony capitalism, and globalization, has hollowed-out many places in America, not only in Corny County, but also in Coal Holler, Darkened Smokestacks, etc. We must address this wholesale, head-on, and pdq, and, regardless of how we do that addressing/ accounting, it will cost money, money that will largely have to come from the folks (and corps.) who have gained by far the most from what has been allowed to occur in recent decades, like it or not.
Now one more thing, wrt why it is that these people have largely bought into economic (and other social) policies that are more or less exactly the opposite of their best interests, policies advanced by people who have been snookering them and have no interest in really helping these their 'base' supporters. This is essentially the same problem those science authors I referred to earlier this evening were talking about, wrt scientific illiteracy-- people like the Trump base voters see themselves as largely being looked down upon (and they, let's face it, are usually more or less right about this) by people like us, and this greatly helps the Trump element snooker these folks, because it makes the base bumpkins essentially say 'f*ck you, libtards, we know better, and will do exactly the opposite of what you want us to do'.
Question for Wahoo: what keeps 21st century US so special where education matters instead of having the situation devolve into the norm for world history and indeed much of the world now?
I live close enough to a reservation to know that half of the folks there live without electricity or running water. Modern education does nothing for them unless they move and get an entirely different kind of life, which they have to do without the networks or education that make such a move feasible.
The kind of life I have cannot be had by large numbers of people, even if they can go to school and become just as proficient as I am in the relevant specializations. The jobs just aren't there in those numbers. That situation has been a problem for decades for some biology and related graduate specializations.
The competitive advantage disappears when everyone in the qualified pool is good enough and outnumber the jobs so much that practically no one in the pool will get a relevant job. Much like adjunctification for general education in college, the jobs available then are not middle-class or better jobs because they don't have to be to get good enough workers.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 30, 2020, 07:13:05 AM
The competitive advantage disappears when everyone in the qualified pool is good enough and outnumber the jobs so much that practically no one in the pool will get a relevant job.
And this is the big political problem. Everyone wants to have a "0ne-size-fits-all" solution for employment, but it's completely impossible for this reason. The way to have a good shot at employment is to be well qualified
in a small candidate pool.
In other words, the
only viable solutionms are mostly individual.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 28, 2020, 04:32:30 PM
Quote from: polly_mer on July 28, 2020, 05:38:52 AM
Tell us again about your jobs as an adult other than faculty jobs.
Um...why?
Because, for Poly, there is no such thing as an honest disagreement. They believe that once they have staked out a position, it is the correct and right one. People who disagree, or even take a slightly different perspective on an issue, can't just be interpreting the evidence differently. They must be ignorant of the evidence, even if there is no evidence this is the case. If someone is coming at something from a different perspective than the one Poly has adopted, it can't be a chance to have a discussion, it must mean that person's life experience means they are unqualified to weigh in on some issue. So, that becomes the justification for making everything personal. If you had worked some other job, surely you'd agree.
The whole thing is unpleasant and makes this fora a much more unpleasant place.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 30, 2020, 07:13:05 AM
Question for Wahoo: what keeps 21st century US so special where education matters instead of having the situation devolve into the norm for world history and indeed much of the world now?
I live close enough to a reservation to know that half of the folks there live without electricity or running water. Modern education does nothing for them unless they move and get an entirely different kind of life, which they have to do without the networks or education that make such a move feasible.
The kind of life I have cannot be had by large numbers of people, even if they can go to school and become just as proficient as I am in the relevant specializations. The jobs just aren't there in those numbers. That situation has been a problem for decades for some biology and related graduate specializations.
The competitive advantage disappears when everyone in the qualified pool is good enough and outnumber the jobs so much that practically no one in the pool will get a relevant job. Much like adjunctification for general education in college, the jobs available then are not middle-class or better jobs because they don't have to be to get good enough workers.
I have great respect for you, Polly, and I even like your persona. You're fun.
But this commentary is so...silly that I can't even fathom what you are thinking.
"Devolve into the norm" of...feudal warlords? You "live near a reservation" with no electricity or running water...and that has to do with education? Is that desirable?
Have you ever read
Brave New World?
Getting back to the topic of nurse-training as a profit center, there is a news item today (https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/federal-grand-jury-returns-indictment-charging-tennessee-state-senator-katrina-robinson) about what appears to be a grifter running a "for-profit college that provides training programs for certified nursing assistant, phlebotomist and licensed practical nursing" called the Healthcare Institute in Memphis. She got herself elected to the state senate, used that position to get grants for her for-profit institution. The twist (grifters gotta grift!) is that she embezzled those funds for personal expenses. At least that is what the indictment says.
The lesson may be that while administrators of actual schools of higher education see nursing programs as revenue generators, so do grifters. They get into for-profit health-career training because is it easy money, for a while. When you read about these places, it is good to distinguish which is the motivating principle for their existence.
Not that this is a grifter story, exactly, but I just saw a TV for University of Phoenix nursing. 5 week programs from home and the angle is that one can study nursing while raising a family.
Do Phoenix nurses actually get hired?
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 31, 2020, 09:00:20 AM
Not that this is a grifter story, exactly, but I just saw a TV for University of Phoenix nursing. 5 week programs from home and the angle is that one can study nursing while raising a family.
Do Phoenix nurses actually get hired?
Yes they do. The for-profit's spit out a bazillion nurses every year. I would say that at least half of the nurses that I interact with have picked up their degree from a for-profit institution.
To get a job as a nurse, Step #1 is mostly all about passing the NCLEX exam.
Ew. University of Phoenix's NCLEX exam pass rates are pretty low.
https://www.azbn.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/2011-2019%20Statewide%20NCLEX%20Results.pdf
Quote from: Aster on July 31, 2020, 01:39:52 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on July 31, 2020, 09:00:20 AM
Not that this is a grifter story, exactly, but I just saw a TV for University of Phoenix nursing. 5 week programs from home and the angle is that one can study nursing while raising a family.
Do Phoenix nurses actually get hired?
Yes they do. The for-profit's spit out a bazillion nurses every year. I would say that at least half of the nurses that I interact with have picked up their degree from a for-profit institution.
To get a job as a nurse, Step #1 is mostly all about passing the NCLEX exam.
Ew. University of Phoenix's NCLEX exam pass rates are pretty low.
https://www.azbn.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/2011-2019%20Statewide%20NCLEX%20Results.pdf
Well, the two for-profits and one cc have the lowest graduation rates of 70 to 77 per cent. The year to year variation is also high. Those pass rates
per se are not a problem, I think.
Does anyone get a job with a Phoenix degree, in more or less anything? Heck, who or what organization is responsible for accrediting Phoenix, and is it currently accredited in good standing?
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 31, 2020, 10:13:46 PM
Does anyone get a job with a Phoenix degree, in more or less anything? Heck, who or what organization is responsible for accrediting Phoenix, and is it currently accredited in good standing?
No, no, the point is that there is a general test
independent of accreditation, and that that test is passed by many individuals. If people who passed don't get jobs, that's a sign of a bad test, not a bad educational institution.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. :-)
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 31, 2020, 10:13:46 PM
Does anyone get a job with a Phoenix degree, in more or less anything? Heck, who or what organization is responsible for accrediting Phoenix, and is it currently accredited in good standing?
The Higher Learning Commission accredits the University of Phoenix, the same as most other institutions of higher learning in the center of the country: https://www.phoenix.edu/about_us/accreditation.html
Per the required link on the accreditation page, Phoenix is indeed in good standing with the relevant accreditors including CCNE, the nursing accreditor.
Note, though, what isn't listed as accredited. They have no comment regarding ABET (engineering). Their business program is ACBSP, not AACSB (the gold standard).
A fair number of graduates from Phoenix get jobs because the requirement is either "meets requirements of the external accrediting body like CCNE" or "plausibly can follow instructions and stick with an activity for an extended period of time".
The relevant question is more "how many good jobs have that low a bar and don't need either the personal polish and social network that comes from attending an elite school or the specialized skills like engineering?"
A nurse from Phoenix will be as good as a nurse from anywhere else. That's what the CCNE accreditation certifies because they are very cognizant of their responsibilities.
Phoenix is as good as the regional comprehensive or small private for demonstrating "competent adult who likely can be trained" to an employer who really just wants an easy sorting mechanism to get office workers. Those jobs aren't very likely to be great, middle-class careers with substantial intellectual rewards, but those jobs are likely to come with benefits and be more stable than a string of minimum wage jobs. Going from $10/h to $35k/year with sick leave, vacation, and regular pay raises is a goal for many who enroll in Phoenix lured by the idea that education leads to a better job.