this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
41 points (100.0% liked)
U.S. News
2652 readers
2 users here now
News about and pertaining to the United States and its people.
Please read what's functionally the mission statement before posting for the first time. We have a narrower definition of news than you might be accustomed to.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Post the original source of information as the link.
- If there is any Nazi imagery in the linked story, mark your post NSFW.
- Advocating violence is not allowed on Beehaw in general.
- If there is a paywall, provide an archive link in the body.
- Post using the original headline; edits for clarity (as in providing crucial info a clickbait hed omits) are fine.
- Social media is not a news source.
For World News, see the News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not as though a degree implies competence and critical-thinking skills. Just that you can do what you're told for four years.
True, but in his case he clearly had a complex about not going to college. Not only did he frequently tout that fact on his channel, he targeted college kids in particular to 'debate'. You have to wonder how much of the anti-college rhetoric from the Right in 2026 at least partially trickles back to his and Ben Shapiro's "pwning college liberals" videos circa 2014-16.
idk, I think the research we have on voting patterns stratified by level of education clearly shows that college education does correlate with critical thinking skills. Hard to imagine how someone would continually vote against their best interests (ie working class people voting Republican) unless they were lacking in critical thinking skills. Getting a bachelor's degree is (or at least "was", before ChatGPT) a sign that a person could withstand 4 years of intellectual challenges and keep putting out at least decent work. Having a bachelor's degree in liberal arts means that a person spent 4 years grappling with increasingly complex and controversial ideas, and considering how those ideas mesh or don't mesh with their own ideas. Having a bachelor's degree usually means a person has received at least a little bit of training on how to read scientific studies, and how to evaluate the quality of those studies.
The extent of these skills will vary from graduate to graduate, as we all know that some students apply themselves more than others. But my point is that a college education is about far more than just "doing what you're told". That's certainly part of it, but that's dramatically reductive.
I'm just going off my own anecdotal experience. At my school paper, the worst journalists were those studying journalism.
"But they hadn't graduated yet!" Fair point. And neither had I, yet coming at it from an outside perspective instead of taking any coursework in the field allowed me to assess the newsroom as it was, not what it theoretically should be. When I went professional, that was an asset. In fact, my first editor had a rule that he didn't hire anyone with a journalism degree for the same reasons.
sure, but that's judging things based on the skill of "reporting the news". We're talking about critical thinking, which is a different skill. Not to say that critical thinking is not useful to journalism, but I also think that journalism is a field where the only way to get good at it is just to do it. Or at least, that is my impression.
I fully agree ... you have to do it to learn it. It's kinda like sex in that way.
But the skills taught in classes were functionally useless. Reporters were used to being spoon-fed sources and producing 12" in a week. Somehow, within a year, I was the resident expert on media law despite several other people in the newsroom taking a course on it.
There's a value to college. I'd not put a blanket value on degrees.