Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502160006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WENCIL STANEK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For example, higher education. You continue to talk about the need to fund colleges and tenured do-nothing staffs because a college education will cost more than $100,000 in 10 years. This is pure poppycock. At the most, the best college educations will cost $10,000, and our welfare rolls will swell with the addition of formerly tenured college staff members.
Our best-educated elite will come out of a new system instead of those attending dumb-down systems of uselessness. In this new system, it won't be possible to receive a college diploma, even though you're illiterate with an IQ of 70, just because you can crush the body of another person or can jump a foot higher in the air than anyone else. So-called college sports, which are really more pro than the pros, will have to be fully funded as the paid sports they now are, and not supported by taxpayers.
We now have the capability of getting education electronically. The initial stages are already under way with such things as the cable-station Mind Extension University. This will expand rapidly, and the new system will be available in probably five years. The greatest impediment will be the refusal of giant, brain-dead corporations to change and recognize where their new talent will be available, so these graduates will move mostly into small companies and companies of their own.
Our current, brain-dead institutional colleges will not survive because, as for any other large organization, the change will come so fast that they'll be unable and unwilling because of access to tax funds to change. These might survive if now we removed the tax funding and made them function as business enterprises with live-or-die decisions every day. They might even forget about such things as political correctness and other useless pursuits.
Pension plans and retirement plans lost billions of dollars betting on IBM. It had the highest employment rate for Ph.D.s of any company in the world, but was brought to its knees and almost bankrupted by a college dropout working in a dingy attic room.
Anyone who wishes to make the effort will have the best college education available without taking Scholastic Aptitude Tests, or requiring elite parents with money and pull to get them into college. The coasters and non-self-starters will be left behind, as always happens eventually, regardless of special circumstances.
Instead of the bleak future portrayed in your editorials, this one looks the brightest of the bright with opportunities at everyone's finger tips.
Wencil Stanek, of Roanoke, is retired manager of marketing at Norfolk Southern Corp.
by CNB