Academia is organized information. Not such a bad thing.

Not bad at all. And the whole "ivory tower" pejorative directed at supposedly out-of-touch academics is completely outdated. It ignores the fact that most major and cutting-edge research nowadays takes place in our universities.

Buuuwwwwwaaahhha ha ha ha! Well that "cutting edge research" sure did miss the mark with that efficient market theory!

Thanks for proving my point, General, about those who could benefit from higher education sometimes being the most vociferous in attacking it.

As Balducci accurately pointed out, many of those "ivory towered academics" rejected the efficient market theory long before Buffet did.

And that's another thing you don't seem to understand about academia- they WELCOME competing ideas.

But don't let facts get in your way. Stay inside the ivory tower of simplistic platitudes that you've clearly constructed for yourself.

Definitely not universally true. I had a number of professors in law school whose primary goal seemed to be political indoctrination and didn't want to hear about competing facts, let alone ideas.



Sadly, no.


Unfortunately, some disciplines involve more pontificating than cutting-edge research.


I think that there's a variety of reasons, and many of them are not valid. However, it is true that academics can tend to be not-particularly-pragmatic. As Sowell said, it's institution where ideas don't have to work in order to survive. It was more than a little frustrating as a future attorney to be taught criminal law by someone who had never practiced as an attorney and was apparently blithely unconcerned that her students were hoping to. Much time was spent explaining what's wrong (in her opinion) with the criminal justice system, and one entire session was spent attempting to convince the class to vote against the "Three Strikes" ballot initiative that was upcoming at the time. Similarly, I had a torts professor (who was a socialist) who spent a lot of class time trying to indoctrinate students to "abolish the market," and a constitutional law professor who hated the constitution and federalism, and spent a lot of time pontificating on "our blunder" (the constitution). My feminist legal theory professor gave me an unjustifiable B on a paper about libertarian feminism (which has a long history in the USA), and shut down any class discussion that veered into any alternative perspectives on feminism (not just from me). As professional schools go, it wasn't terribly professional at times.

That's not to say that all of the "ivory tower" criticisms are valid. But some certainly are, even to this day. (Well, at least until May, 2007). The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.

The point, Lobo, is that I'm sick of people belittling and making fun of higher education and academia while at the same time living in little ivory towers of their own.

Yes with higher education they could all learn the Muffin plan.

The way the information is organised, is all the professors live on conditional grants, from the Rockefeller & Co, which is also how it is all controlled. Only them in high places get high educations. The likes of you down there, you get trained to generate tax for the man on the hill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDtK7xUIDxk

Yes, tommy, we all know that in your little ivory tower the Rockefellers control everything and the truth only is revealed by Alex Jones.

But, for the most part, those who deride education the most are usually those that have the least of it. Anti-intellectualism has increased significantly in the United States, partially explaining why the rest of the world is beginning to pass us by in all areas of academic achievement.

Actually that's not so. Take yourself for example.

Bob,

Most people just don't have the luxury to get an education simply for the sake of education. You're average everyday joe struggles to pay the bills, struggles to get ahead and struggles to feed the family. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. People just simply cannot afford to get an education just for the sake of education. Most people don't have the money for that in the real world. So people go to school in the hopes that their education will pay off to help them make more money later on down the road and get ahead. However, colleges and universities in my experience are about the money and not about preparing people for the real world to help them get ahead and appears more to be a scam to get peoples money rather than giving them any real education to help them get ahead.

Your best teacher and educator is not the university, but rather experience. Experience is the teacher of all things. Depending on your major in college, you might learn how to analyze and solve problems a little bit better such as with engineering and the computer sciences, but even then, in my experience, when I graduated, I wasn't adequately prepared by the university to be a good computer programmer (and really, I am much happier being a magician anyway and I am more of a people person that is not suited well for the profession of the computer sciences).

You look at most people graduating college these days and they have crushing student loan debt. That's not getting ahead. Some of them will essentially be indentured servants for the rest of the lives to student loan debt unless Congress and the President do something about it, which I doubt that will happen anytime soon giving the political climate and continued inability of Congress to get anything done with all the gridlock and lack of compromise. I think part of the problem with education these days is the same problem that Washington has: it's about the money. Washington is not about legislating like it used to be, it's about making money. Colleges and universities aren't about educating and preparing people for the real world anymore, it's about the money.

Some of the most successful businessmen such as Bill Gates for example, were college dropouts and didn't even complete college. And it really brings into question, when you see all this with the staggering student loan debt and college graduates unable to pay their bills and are worse off then their parents were and then you see a college dropout like Bill Gates with billions or Warren Buffet running circles around college professors about their "efficient market theory" it leaves you scratching your head and thinking "Did I just get scammed out of my money and/or suckered into crushing debt when I went to college?"

Are you yourself proof of what not getting an education can lead to?

I am an example of what getting an education can lead to: broke, poor and dumb! I should have dropped out of college when I had the chance. I might have ended up with a better chance of being a Bill Gates.

Wow that is how you view education? Seriously?

Ivory towers have springy beds.

Whatever, William.

“We all know that light travels faster than sound. That's why certain people appear bright until you hear them speak."

― Albert Einstein

Or in some cases write.

"The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, first published in 1949, is a widely acclaimed book on value investing, an investment approach Graham began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently refined with David Dodd."

"Value investing was developed in the 1920s at Columbia Business School by finance professors Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, MS ’21."

http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/valueinvesting/about

But it was learned through hard experience before it was published in a book or taught at any school:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham

If you are famaliar with any of Benjamin Graham's work, you know that poverty was a great teacher of wealth for Benjamin and that he found the secrets to wealth while experiencing poverty. Not only that, but he also worked on Wall Street too, in the real world. It's why he believed in bargain shopping for stocks (much like poor people do while shopping for every day items at the store, looking for bargain buys, no different when buying ownership into companies, look for bargain buys when buying stock).

So, it's not like he just went to school and then all the sudden he became enlightened on the best way to invest just because he sat in a classroom. It was learned through experience and living in the real world and experiencing life. Poverty is a part of life for many people. Keep in mind that what Benjamin taught in business school went against the grain of what was taught by most academics at colleges and universities in his time and for many years after his time. So Benjamin did not really represent the establishment in academic circles when it came to economics and investing. He represented what was learned through experience and in the real world and was one of the few who was able to refine and then teach it to a classroom later on.