Government Should Not Fund Graduate Education

In the Government Concentrates Section of the October 8 issue of C&E News, AW comments on Graduate School Applications. The Council of Graduate Students reports that universities have noted a Master's Degree enrollment drop of 2.1% from 2010 to 2011, and a PhD enrollment increase of 0.5% for all disciplines. Grad school enrollments in the Physical and Earth Sciences showed an increase of 0.5%. Applications for all graduate programs were up 4.3% from 2010 to 2011.

The Council of Graduate Schools President said, "We must respond with strong investment in graduate programs and student funding."

I strongly disagree with her statement. The figures do not indicate that we have any calamitous decline in production of scientists with advanced degrees. More significantly, I completely disagree with her statement of responding with student funding. Her statement is likely intended to mean taxpayer funding for graduate students through grants or similar funding techniques. This is completely unnecessary. Universities were turning out well-educated scientists well before government even thought about funding graduate students.

Funding can be accomplished by the universities themselves as payment (stipends) for graduate students performing laboratory teaching assistant duties. Private companies (anything non-government) can also develop contracts with professors for research projects involving graduate students, for which the students are paid a small stipend for living conditions.

Good News on the Education Front

Here is some good news on the education front. The Dow Chemical Company has two programs for investing in education. The first is a grant program to MIT to foster a developing interest in science by women and minorities. The second is a program with Texas A&M to support graduate student research through grants.

The significance of this is that private industry takes an interest in supporting education. It is not altruistic, nor should it be. Dow is one among many companies in the business of making a profit through the supply of chemicals. In order to sustain its operation for the benefit of the stockholders, management, lower level employees, and its customers, Dow needs to continually replace employees who retire. In order to have a properly qualified pool from which to draw new, competent employees, it must ensure that that the pool is large enough, with members who are intellectually blessed and have had the advantage of a good chemical education in preparation for new responsibilities in industry.

Industry grants to graduate students help the students maintain living conditions, as they continue their education. A grant is usually tied to a research project or theme in which the sponsor is interested. The research results may be usable in part by the sponsoring company, In addition, this type of apprenticeship gives the company information on the prospects of the student as a potential employee.

Conversely, the US government has different motivations for sponsoring education at the expense of the tax payer. It promotes general education as a benefit to the serfs from the great white (now black) father. Any such distribution of funds, of either direct or indirect benefit to citizens, is a vote getter to retain power. Those recipients do not connect with the fact that the distributions are from their own pockets as taxes.

Like industry, government grants are tied to a program of the sponsor. The program of the industrial sponsor is to gain information from the research and help judge the candidacy of the grant receiver as a potential employee. The insidious part of the government sponsoring agency is to gain information, which can be used to support far-out government ideology and influence the public. The doling out of money also satisfies the ego and yet increases the power lust of administrative officials.

Private industry has properly husbanded its resources and can afford to support its legitimate cost of developing education to further its business of supplying goods and services to the people.. The federal government, on the other hand, is broke and has no legitimate reason for continuing its grant program.. The taxpaying public must find ways to eliminate these obscene expenses for "pie in the sky" operations at taxpayer expense. One obvious way is to throw out the present administration and its congressional supporters in the next

Racist TV programs

Open letter to CNN:

CNN is now running a program entitled, "Latinos in America". As I recall, they previously ran a similar program entitled, "Blacks in America".

I am wondering why the news media in general persists in running racist programs. Don't we have enough division in this country? It seems to me that we are all Americans, and we will all get along a lot better if we do like a bunch of kids playing together. Not worry about who's white, who's black, and who's yellow.

I tried to bring this to the attention of CNN management and spent about a half hour wandering around through their various websites, without success. The management seems to have very fixed opinions on what they want to air and are not much interested in what anyone thinks about it. If it weren't for Lou Dobbs, I think I would give up on CNN.

Pres. Obamas' Address to School Children

Skeet,
You said you had seen yesterday the preliminary of Pres Obama's speech to school children scheduled for delivery today. It sounded fine and innocent, like his other speeches on many issues, but you are still concerned.
Right on! Pres. Obama is a master at manipulating groups. He uses a standard strategy with special speaking techniques of volume control, time spacing, changing countenance, etc., at which he is very good.
The strategy is the dangerous part. In initial address to groups, the message must be light, encouraging, and containing no controversial elements. This is what I expected from Pres. Obama, and which you Skeet confirm having heard as a preliminary.
Once confidence of the audience has been established, such as in school children and their parents, the message starts to deviate in subsequent speeches. The audience is exposed to things that the speaker wants the audience to hear rather than what the audience wants to hear. But, confidence has previously been established and the message changes are done in such a subtle manner that they can easily be accepted and digested.
Subsequent speeches build the strategy by continuing to bring in controversial matters for acceptance.
Two things then happen. Intellectually responsible adults, such as parents, start to realize they have been hoodwinked, but it is too late to do anything about it. The uninitiated, such as children and idiots, never realize what has happened and accept the total package.
There is one sure way to keep your children from being brainwashed. Do not allow even a beginning address by a person who you have known from previous experience to have philosophies dangerously different from your own. This is not fundamentally different than the process that most parents of teenagers use in insisting that they have personally met and conversed with their teenagers' friends.

Pres. Obama and Your Children

Pres. Obama is scheduled to address US schoolchildren this coming Tuesday. If you do not want your children or grandchildren exposed directly to Pres. Obama's philosophies, I suggest you telephone the Administration of your local School District and the School Board President to ask that they NOT accept the message into the school communication system. This is the last day to act.
It has previously been suggested that parents keep their children out of school next Tuesday. However, that may be difficult for working parents, and it may be easier but less certain to look up phone numbers and make two phone calls.
I have heard of one school administrator who has said that parents will not be ALLOWED to keep their children from school. This is an indication of a philosophy that is already being applied in many school systems. It seems to me that as a parent, you have the responsibility to have your child educated in a reasonable manner and not a manner dictated by the President and his staff.

Leadership Training

E-mail 7/3/09 to Ms. Alexy of Iacocca Institute:

Lee Iacocca bemoans the fate of the US. He asks, "Where have all the leaders gone?".
As Director of the Iacocca Institute, with your programs directed to colleges and universities, you are apparently well aware that leaders are generated or at least perfected through a process of education.
Limiting leadership education only to high schools and universities, I believe, does not completely address the problem of generating leaders to our best proficiency. Perhaps you have made some visits to grammar schools and observed the educational process, not the curriculum. If so, you will have seen that the public school educational process demands complete student conformity. Each student is taught indirectly that he will get along better in the school environment if he acts like every other student. This not only is an absence of leadership training, it is training in conformity.
May I recommend your program of developing leadership be extended to lower grades, particularly in public schools? I expect that your efforts will meet basic resistance from the Federal Administrative level, but I believe you will also find many school principals and teachers willing to cooperate. Local school boards may be a more difficult "sell", but I believe this can be accomplished by indicating that the will of the people is such that they do not want their children to be automatons. A School Superintendent will generally follow the philosophies and programs of a strong school board.