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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

A cynical view is that US universities teaches you the opinions and manners you need to assume your role in the ruling class.

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Haha, as if the average US university graduate is joining the ruling class

Haha, as if the average member of the ruling class didn't graduate from university.

As a counterexample, Gina Rinehart who is Australia's wealthiest woman and number 7 worldwide, never graduated. So there are exceptions, but I get that it is not the norm.

> average member

> but I get that it is not the norm.

And most available evidence suggests she did not get there through high intelligence, in lieu of a university education, but rather, complete and utter greed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDAwGqlIp7E

As such, it is not a counterexample!

Edit: you keep editing your comments, but I was replying to the self-quote, which, at the time was your entire comment.

Sure, bad choice of words on my part. I'm pointing out, perhaps badly, that there are other attributes other than intelligence & education that can get someone there, eg. luck, greed, being a sociopath etc.

General rule of thumb is to post a new comment or declare an explicit edit if the change is non-trivial and substantially changes the purpose/point of the comment.

Sure. Have a nice day.

Yeah. I'm a slow thinker and sometimes I need the entire edit window to string a sentence together. Sorry about that.

Who would say such a thing?

If there's a "ruling class" conspiracy theory it's more reasonably rooted in the ivy league/Harvard/Yale/Princeton, not so much US universities at large. That just covers too many people.

I think that’s more SciencesPo which grooms the political/ruling class. It’s too diffuse in the US to say so.

I prefer that US universities teach you have to learn. What you learn doesn't really matter.

Until they try to get that first job out of college...

Ah yes, the infamous “entry level” position that requires 3 years experience of Java|C++|C#.

My first entry level job required C# knowledge. So I went to the nearest Barnes and Nobles and read the Microsoft guide cover to cover. I was not a C# major in uni but being able to study, abstract, and internalize concepts was something I did learn.

Yes it sucks from both ends. Companies aren’t willing to invest in teaching employees because they know as soon as they do, the employee will leave for greener pastures and the employee can’t get experience without a job or a job without experience.

The usual retort is why not bring someone in as a junior, train them, and give them a raise to market rates? But then you’ve invested x amount of dollars on someone and y amount of time to bring them up to speed when you can find someone who already has the skill you need and they can hit the ground running.

But the whole point of entry-level positions is you get someone inexperienced at below market rates. What they are really aiming at is getting someone experienced but desperate enough to take an underpaid position. Then hope they don't leave for a better paying job elsewhere.

Bringing in someone inexperienced not only costs the amount of salary you’re paying for someone who doesn’t bring in business value, it also takes time away from experienced developers - costing even more.

Even worse, some junior developers do “negative work”. Work that is so bad, you have to take more time to undo the damage than just doing it yourself.

Whether it’s right or not, the only way for a potential employee to break that cycle is via side projects that they can show as experience.

How does one make it to the age one normally goes to university without already having learned how to learn?

It is literally the exact opposite. The ratio of leftist to right professors in university is 12:1, even more pronounced among faculty. 1 out of 5 professors in America identify as Marxist.

Whoa! I used ti lean left and professors tilted left, I hadn’t noticed it was so pronounced.

I gotta think they are more idealists than bona fide marxists though; I mean, if they read enough, they must know the drill (they wouldn’t have influence and any countertevolutionary ideas and they are sent off).

Marxist, so even more in favor of a ruling class above all.

I know you're just trying to be snarky, but how does that make any sense?

I guess it's a reference to George Orwell's "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

Probably the idea that instead of class divide by wealth it would be class divide on political hierarchy (which would undoubtly divide on wealth as well)

In command economies, someone needs to do the commanding. Unsurprisingly, the revolutionaries that install such systems often choose themselves for that role.

Yes, the Left is the ruling class. Or the establishment if you like.

Maybe a reference to collectivization in Soviet Russia.

The peasants did not go willingly.

This sounds pithy, but is inaccurate. Marxists (in particular Leninists, because Marxism is a broad church) think that there is a ruling class, that in capitalist societies the ruling class is the minority of owners of capital, and that, in order to transition to a classless society, the capitalist ruling class needs to be replaced temporarily by a ruling class composed of people with the interests of the working class in mind.

The purpose of this period of working class rule is to eradicate the capitalist class and its ideology (not necessarily through violence, although in practice what ruling class yields to another without compulsion?), and develop the productive forces of the society in order to enable communism.

This last point is one of the big things that distinguishes Lenin's theories from Marx's, because Marx thought that revolution would naturally arise in the most advanced technological societies once the industrial base necessary for a transition to communism was already pretty much in place. As we know, the revolutions occurred in places with a lower level of development, thus requiring this theoretical modification and extending the period of rule by the working class beyond the brief duration that Marx envisaged.

The USSR, while it existed, always said they were "building socialism" and never said they had arrived at the destination, which is a classless society. The PRC says that it is "building socialism" and that the process might take a hundred generations. The purpose of their rule, according to their own theoretical framework, is to eventually give it up.

So no, Marxists are not "even more in favour of a ruling class above all."

>1 out of 5 professors in America identify as Marxist.

I wonder how they're distributed among the various disciplines.

Here is a helpful chart that gives this data:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...

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