Interestingly in July/August of 1981 General Robert Barrow (then CMC) came to Camp LeJeune for a “visit”. All three commanding General’s at Camp LeJeune CG MCB, CG 2MARDIV, CG FSSG and their staff were present at gathering in a conference room at the O Club. One topic that the CMC brought up was the quality of the Marines entering the Fleet, and he asked if there was any noticeable difference of late. Many minds agreed, yes the Marines seemed to be more able from jump street, “brighter” if you will. CMC asked next why they all thought this was the case. No one got the joke. It was in the SRB of every Enlisted Marine reporting in to Camp Swampy. All had a high school diploma or GCT equivalent. CMC then asked why they thought this was important. Many bright and willing answers but all wrong…what General Barrow learned and knew from his days as a DI was that knowing how to finish something is critical. So when he revamped recruiting, he revamped recruit training. Thusly when a young man or woman put their feet on the yellow foot prints no matter how awful or good their personal family background might be or not, the common thread was “they know how to finish.” General Barrow’s words still ring in my ears. He explained that having recruits that didn’t have to be taught the importance of starting and finishing a task was a HUGE saver of time during the recruit training process. The DI’s could focus on training and not baby sitting with black boot polish and rifle cleaning rods and patches.
To answer the question whom would I want to employ? The man or woman that is thinking through to the end, adapts to problems quickly and could care less if they have a college sheepskin or advanced degree. Think how highly trained the Navy corpsman are, arty, aircraft maintenance, even is ground pounders etc etc., need just enough intellectual capacity to get into a problem and get out of it.
Further, with all the advantages of the speed and fullness of the internet and other technologies we are left with the simple axiom of “garbage in is garbage out.” Equally, the corollary is “don’t pass your trash.”
PS in life if someone asks me where I went to college and what kind of degree I have, A. I don’t answer B. I put that individual immediately into the middle basket between “in” and “out” which of course is the “too hard” basket, so why waste time with them….if pressed it’s easy, I was commissioned at the Pleasure of the President in the United States Marine Corps. The greatest learning institution the world has ever seen…
College at this point is a negative. It implies that he will have a negative approach to work ethic and social interaction. The person with the work experience wins, even without any test at all.
I think I'd hire Center o. Bellcurve. He's spent four years actually working and perfecting his trade, instead of studying gender queer basket weaving and Didn't Earn It courses.
<<"If both Professor Caplan and Audacious Epigone are correct, then intelligent people should be looking for alternate ways to showcase their smarts. One obvious way to do this is to take an IQ test. Another is to take an examination, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, that produces rankings which correlate closely with IQ scores.">>
The problem is, in America at least, aptitude tests are "racist" because blacks, as a group, tend to score poorly on them, and trillions of dollars and massively disruptive interventions have failed to close that gap. I don't know what the answer is -- well, aside from repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and eliminating the bureaucracy and administrative law that Act created. Of course, that same Civil Rights Act has led to a lot of the grade inflation at colleges, because it's proof that your university is racist if blacks don't graduate at the same rates as whites and Asians. Then there's the whole business of federal subsidies (including the government underwriting student debt) that has turned higher ed into a big business, so weeding out low performers means losing revenues, and academia now agrees with corporate boards that what matters is the line keep going up on the graphs. The answer lies in something like parallel, decentralized networks using "independent contractors" to avoid the 15-employee threshold that puts you under the purview of the Civil Rights Act.
Interestingly in July/August of 1981 General Robert Barrow (then CMC) came to Camp LeJeune for a “visit”. All three commanding General’s at Camp LeJeune CG MCB, CG 2MARDIV, CG FSSG and their staff were present at gathering in a conference room at the O Club. One topic that the CMC brought up was the quality of the Marines entering the Fleet, and he asked if there was any noticeable difference of late. Many minds agreed, yes the Marines seemed to be more able from jump street, “brighter” if you will. CMC asked next why they all thought this was the case. No one got the joke. It was in the SRB of every Enlisted Marine reporting in to Camp Swampy. All had a high school diploma or GCT equivalent. CMC then asked why they thought this was important. Many bright and willing answers but all wrong…what General Barrow learned and knew from his days as a DI was that knowing how to finish something is critical. So when he revamped recruiting, he revamped recruit training. Thusly when a young man or woman put their feet on the yellow foot prints no matter how awful or good their personal family background might be or not, the common thread was “they know how to finish.” General Barrow’s words still ring in my ears. He explained that having recruits that didn’t have to be taught the importance of starting and finishing a task was a HUGE saver of time during the recruit training process. The DI’s could focus on training and not baby sitting with black boot polish and rifle cleaning rods and patches.
To answer the question whom would I want to employ? The man or woman that is thinking through to the end, adapts to problems quickly and could care less if they have a college sheepskin or advanced degree. Think how highly trained the Navy corpsman are, arty, aircraft maintenance, even is ground pounders etc etc., need just enough intellectual capacity to get into a problem and get out of it.
Further, with all the advantages of the speed and fullness of the internet and other technologies we are left with the simple axiom of “garbage in is garbage out.” Equally, the corollary is “don’t pass your trash.”
PS in life if someone asks me where I went to college and what kind of degree I have, A. I don’t answer B. I put that individual immediately into the middle basket between “in” and “out” which of course is the “too hard” basket, so why waste time with them….if pressed it’s easy, I was commissioned at the Pleasure of the President in the United States Marine Corps. The greatest learning institution the world has ever seen…
College at this point is a negative. It implies that he will have a negative approach to work ethic and social interaction. The person with the work experience wins, even without any test at all.
I think I'd hire Center o. Bellcurve. He's spent four years actually working and perfecting his trade, instead of studying gender queer basket weaving and Didn't Earn It courses.
<<"If both Professor Caplan and Audacious Epigone are correct, then intelligent people should be looking for alternate ways to showcase their smarts. One obvious way to do this is to take an IQ test. Another is to take an examination, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, that produces rankings which correlate closely with IQ scores.">>
The problem is, in America at least, aptitude tests are "racist" because blacks, as a group, tend to score poorly on them, and trillions of dollars and massively disruptive interventions have failed to close that gap. I don't know what the answer is -- well, aside from repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and eliminating the bureaucracy and administrative law that Act created. Of course, that same Civil Rights Act has led to a lot of the grade inflation at colleges, because it's proof that your university is racist if blacks don't graduate at the same rates as whites and Asians. Then there's the whole business of federal subsidies (including the government underwriting student debt) that has turned higher ed into a big business, so weeding out low performers means losing revenues, and academia now agrees with corporate boards that what matters is the line keep going up on the graphs. The answer lies in something like parallel, decentralized networks using "independent contractors" to avoid the 15-employee threshold that puts you under the purview of the Civil Rights Act.