The real problem with academia is that there's not enough gatekeeping anymore. Tuition is all that matters now, because that's how deans get paid motherfucker. So now they let anyone in and call it "improving our diversity" scores. Fuck this gay earth.And people wonder why science is so fucking retarded now. Someone hold my beer while I solve this pointless captcha, holy shit.
>graduating classes used to be like
>>16930756>they let anyone in and call it "improving our diversity"They might say that for virtue points but really they let in all these diverse students because they're often international students and have to pay far higher tuition fees which makes the university far more money
>>16930777"diversity" means overpacking your classroom with non-whites because the government gives them dei grants and you want to soak up as much money as possible
>>16930777the international students are also highly motivated and competent (besides the occasional nepo baby from petrostates) because their parents will beat the crap out of them and disinherit them for wasting their money if they fail, and because they were judged to be worth the investment in the first place.that said, they usually aim to be doctors or engineers or quants rather than theoretical physicists or "the leading expert on monotreme phylogeny", so they won't be producing any groundbreaking insights
>>16931025>made up horseshit
>>16931048It's more of a half truth. But there is a reason the vast majority of US postdocs tend to be foreigners while almost nobody abroad takes US postdocs. The US education system is one of the least efficient there is, and it flat out can't produce enough people to sustain itself. Meanwhile European universities produce excess of the same quality. It's simple economics, and the US academic system would collapse the moment they stop printing money to buy out people. Funding is shit and cost of living in the few places worth going to of you could make it in Europe is rising. It's a bad look.
>>16931025They are also extremely shitty engineers, in any role involving real design or insight. For pure clerical box checking and passing endless toll gates they are satisfactory.This was not always the case. As recently as the early 2000s, engineers in the former British empire still learned the classic British way, becoming fully qualified machinists before even touching theory. These men were quite good, but the process was too slow so the degree mills took over.
>>16931755it's been over a decade since I've lost touch with academia, so it may well be that my worldview is out of date.
