Preparation

As time has gone by, I have questioned more and more the value of my college education.  I never had such qualms about law school; I knew by the end of my first year I'd made a rum investment I was unlikely to see a decent return on, and the years have proved me exactly right.  So ram all your donation requests sideways, Michigan Law.  But it took quite awhile to start questioning the value of my time at Utah State.  My posts here and here, though, show that I finally got around to it.  My attitude is even worse now.  Apart from Alder giving me the worst advice I've ever followed, the place simply did not prepare me for anything.  It did not prepare me for finding a way to make a living, going to law school, or dealing with my law school classmates.  It did not clue me in on the problems a kid with my background would have to identify and overcome (Sorry to the late Bob Cole, you may have grown up on a farm, but you did not come from the kind of hardscrabble background I did.  And to the extent you did, you came out at a time when there were opportunities by the bargeload.).

And I have to say it goes beyond my own time there.  I have to ask just what the place is teaching in general.  So many graduates, people with alleged science degrees, are climate change deniers.  Several of them I know personally, but I'll just leave that right there.  None of them have degrees in climate science, which means that if they were intellectually honest they would admit they were operating outside their expertise regardless of their science backgrounds.  Instead, they rant away with an arrogance and butt-ignorance that matches the worst QAnon clowns.

I will say right up front I am not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist. I have read a number of their comments, though, and they boil down to this: 1) We have a pretty good geologic and biologic record of climate changes over a pretty long stretch of time; 2) the rapid changes have overwhelmingly (and effectively uniformly) been caused by some catastrophe such as meteor strike or increased volcanic activity; 3) we are experiencing rapid change now; 4) there has been no catastrophic event; 5) the only identifiable difference between this rapid change event and all the others is the existence of H. sap. and its industrial activity. Nevertheless, the deniers know better. In the Winter 2020 alumni magazine, Frederick Su, a retired physicist (specialty: optics) who received his bachelors and masters from USU, claims that because we can not do control and variable experiments on climate, it's all bunk (I wonder what his attitude is on astrophysics.). This of course ignores the archeology and the fact that human activity is the one data point different from all other climate events. Yes I know correlation is not causation, but when you have just one correlating data point.... Anyway. It should come as no surprise that this guy is a raving ammosexual (He once said that the NRA is "the greatest civil rights organization in the world".) and LDS (He once actually wrote, "Hence, the Constitution was born, the greatest document ever conceived by man. The Founders were touched by God."). Just wow.

Then there is Bruce Nieveen, a civil engineer who I assume received his degree from USU, who in the Fall 2020 alumni magazine claims that we should not listen to climate scientists because they use models and models are wrong, quoting George E. P. Box out of context that, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." It's a fun aphorism, but as Box himself, who created a great many mathematical models in his time, would explain, its real meaning is, "All models are incomplete and therefore wrong at some point, and it is necessary to be mindful of their limits for them to be of use." Nieveen then accuses USU and climate scientists in general to be taking bribes to reach their conclusions. Talk about reaching a conclusion with no evidence.

USU, like Michigan Law, should not be expecting a positive response to any of the donation solicitations it sends me.

Continuing with the Screw-Ups

We all receive lots of lousy advice.  It's part of life on Earth.  What makes the difference is whether you follow it, either because you see it's crap but you're stupid, or you just don't see it's crap.  I like to believe that, in this instance at least, it was the latter.

Doug Alder was a History professor and the head of the Honors Program when I was at Utah State.  He later became President of Dixie and has since retired.  His son, Nate, whom I have known since he was a little fritter and actually shorter than me, is a past Bar President (Fat lot of good that connection has ever done me, although Nate is far from unique in this, and that's a load of bile for another day.).  Doug was really grooming me for grad school, and along the way gave me the bar none worst advice I have ever followed: He told me not to get a teaching certificate.  He said it would look bad to graduate programs I applied to.

I ate that up with a big spoon.  My parents were teachers, so naturally I wanted to advance beyond that, so why waste time doing otherwise?  Dad was the generation past blue collar (in this case farming) and Mom was the generation past decayed, Southern aristocracy, so it was time to advance the family to white collar, upper-middle class status.  With hindsight, I can see the fallacies were as thick as fleas on a hillbilly hound.

First, Doug had no idea what he was talking about.  Although he tries to deny it or at least hide it, he is a silver spooner with precious little knowledge of anything outside academe.  He pokes fun at his bourgeois father, but that's where the money cushion came from that allowed Doug to become The Great Scholar with minimal pain to him and his.  And that's the thing about academe: If you're going to be in it in a non-tech field, it really helps to have a trust fund.  I most assuredly didn't, and I could see that five years of grad school followed by a questionable quest for an assistant professorship was unlikely to be a good idea without such a supplemental income.  After deciding not to pursue grad school, though, and not having a teaching certificate, my choices ran the gamut from law school to law school.  Hobson's Choice is not a good strategy.

Second, my assessment of my situation was, shall we say, overly optimistic.  Some might say delusional.  Contrary to my frankly uninformed read, the family had not really had that middle class generation that is necessary to launch into a contact-based profession, of which law is the ultimate example (Finance, accounting, architecture, and business are others.).  My folks had only managed to grub out an unstable, lower-middle class existence that gave me no connections nor any of the skills needed to acquire some.  STEM professions (engineering, health sciences, etc.) would have been tough, but at least they would have been in the realm of the possible.

Let's do a compare and contrast.  My best friend, Dave Weeks, was a year ahead of me in high school and was likewise the eldest son of two teachers.  His parents too were the generation that moved from blue collar (his mom off the farm, his dad out of the stone quarries).  He bummed around through college and finally got a Life Sciences degree.  Then he became a pharmacist, and now he's a successful MD.  He went STEM, and even with a slow start he took off.  I went humanities without connections, and I've spent three decades slowly spinning in the doldrums.

And so I have hammered on my kids to avoid my egregious mistake: Get the teaching certificate!  In my in no way humble opinion, if you get a non-STEM degree and no certificate, you just pissed away college.  Even if you get a STEM degree, the certificate doesn't hurt.  Have they listened?  Hmm.  Well, Daughter One really isn't the school type and is now married, but at least she found a Navy nuclear tech, so they have a STEM hook.  Daughter Two is in biology, so she's in STEM, moving slowly, but at least she's moving.  Daughter Three, the jury's still out, she has decided that she isn't doing STEM if she's in school, and we'll see where her probable husband is able to take her.  As for Boy, his interests are artistic, but he knows he'll need a day job, and he thinks EMT could do it for him.  Works for me.  In this economy, why bother with college?  Get technical training, preferably something with STEM.  EMT would be portable, flexible, and provide a paycheck, benefits, and a pension.  Good luck finding all that with a liberal arts degree.