Comment Re:College admissions is not a life-value system (Score 1) 389
If you think "inane, stupid, and soul-crushing" ends at high school, you've been sheltered.
While the goal if college per se is not to churn out office drones, there is a lot of drone-ery to be done, and someone in college can do worse than to fall into one of those jobs. It's a good fallback plan for, say, the history major who just can't find in-field work. For those people, a college degree proves you can show up every day, do a task of moderate complexity, and meet deadlines reliably. That's also exactly what being anything other a straight C student demonstrates.
But most History and Philosophy and Liberal Arts departments around the country don't feel (or at least can hope) that they are training people who will stick with and contribute to the field. At that point, you can argue that you need some creative skills to break new ground. Unfortunately, opportunities for ground-breaking is foreseeably rare, and it's not going to be done if you don't have the necessary information and tools to create. Even a kid making a building-block tower needs to be given building blocks. They need students who are going to absorb that information and grow through participation. Which is exactly what C students have failed to do.
For other fields -- such as engineering -- where you can reasonably expect to get a job in the field, and then to flex your creativity once you're there, "innovation" means being basic competence, coupled with experience. Innovation as people imagine it today -- that the fruits of hard, long work can be cheated out through something cheaper and easier -- is a myth.
I would gladly concede that we need to do more to give our C students real options for becoming productive, prosperous members of society. I just don't think the rest of us are missing out for lack of their "creativity".