Major transition

Yesterday was a landmark day in the Sensing manse - Cathy and I took our last child, Elizabeth, to college to begin her freshman year. We are now officially empty nesters beginning our golden years. I do not consider this an improvement.

Liz is attending Tennessee Tech. She was a semi-finalist for one of Georgia Tech's president's scholarships, but as I said in my post, "Is College Worth the Price?" that's as far as financial aid went from Ga Tech, since, "When I called the financial-aid office to plead, the nice lady I talked to said that they do not give financial aid to non-Georgia applicants (though she did not put it quite so baldly)."

Having achieved a 34 on the ACT and graduating high school with a 4.5 (or so), and because Liz understands certain realities of today's job market, such as those I explained in, "Want a janitor's job? Get a degree",  Liz declared an entering major of chemical engineering.

Which is good, because this morning I found this:



Source: "Graduate students with non-STEM degrees increasingly dependent on welfare programs"

Melissa Bruninga-Matteau, a medieval-history Ph.D. and adjunct professor who gets food stamps: “I’ve been able to make enough to live on. Until now.”

“I am not a welfare queen,” says Melissa Bruninga-Matteau.

That’s how she feels compelled to start a conversation about how she, a white woman with a Ph.D. in medieval history and an adjunct professor, came to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz., says the stereotype of the people receiving such aid does not reflect reality. Recipients include growing numbers of people like her, the highly educated, whose advanced degrees have not insulated them from financial hardship.

I personally am a history buff and think that medieval history is a fascinating topic. But why Prof. Bruninga-Matteau thinks that a small community college should pay top dollar to her escapes me. Why should higher education be exempted from the same market forces that affect everyone else? The post's writer is pretty blunt:

She’s irresponsible, because she expects the people who choose to study rather difficult and unpleasant subjects like nursing and computer science and economics to pay for her lifestyle through taxation and “higher education funding”. I do think it’s important to point out that the main driver of higher tuition is increasing government funding of education, and that this increasing funding of higher education is nothing but corporate welfare.

Someday, and I think it will be near term, this bubble is going pop.

Meanwhile, for college students majoring is "soft" subjects, this could be you in the Obama economy:

BTW, you can tell Elizabeth is an artillery officer's daughter with this quote from her "About" page on her FB site:

"If we can confirm its existence, then it interacts with the physical world. If it interacts with the physical world, we can, theoretically, blow it up."

And . . .

"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war."

Well, yeah!