This is easily bypassed by having “college” programs that are literally just puppy mills for cops.
We just call them Police Academies.
Most of the people I worked with in that career field had “degrees” from online programs or schools in the middle of fucking nowhere
There’s definitely an attitude that the small town and community colleges are just diploma mills for local schmucks. And that degree inflation has made them a kind of young person tax on the way to earning a decent salary.
But I do recoil a bit at the notion smaller schools and “hand-holding” curriculum somehow don’t produce more educated people than the post-high school educational sucking sound of service sector/blue collar employment. That you need to be in a weed out course in order to prove you retained information. Or that TAs aren’t there to hand-hold students who are stuggling in a subject and only exist to fuck you over arbitrarily.
The idea that education needs to be painful or stressful in order to be useful produces a lot of schools with obscene drop out rates and - let’s be frank - suicides to get you to a place that a slower pace, more generous grading curves, and smaller class sizes with more attentive teachers could easily avoid.
That’s not to defend cops, of course. But it seems absurd to suggest the product of a more casual and cheerful time in college is hordes of glass-chewing thumb-headed fascist psychopaths.
I think you’re misunderstanding the point I was making. I’m not advocating the gatekeeping of higher education, I believe that the taxes I pay should enable anyone to go to college or a vocational program if they choose.
My point is that these colleges that cater specifically to law enforcement programs aren’t even remotely equivalent when compared to normal community colleges, let alone a university. They do the bare minimum to meet the legal requirements, teach the bare minimum required by the state law enforcement licensing board and instead substitute rhetoric and pseudoscience that reinforces mindsets in graduates that the streets are a warzone, minorities are cartel members, and that authority is more important than empathy.
Functionally, many of these specific programs don’t give any real education or experience above a GED where it matters, yet they parade that they do. They often call them “Law Enforcement” degrees, not criminal justice degrees, as they are not equivalent and can’t legally call them the same thing. But, they do conveniently tick the box of requiring a degree and do weed out anyone too who might question system too much or show too much empathy.
But, they do conveniently tick the box of requiring a degree and do weed out anyone too who might question system too much or show too much empathy.
As someone who lives in a big city full of cops and who has to live next to a few people in law enforcement, it doesn’t seem as though my city college or even my state university system degree programs keep ugly, nasty people from going into law enforcement. Family friend graduated with a law degree from Harvard and became a DA down in Austin, TX. It wasn’t Harvard that cheese-grated away her soul. I’ll spot you that plenty of local schools can be corrupted by the financial advantage of funneling people through a Cop School curriculum. But the thing that really seems to turn people into assholes and monsters is the job of being a cop.
Not disagreeing with you there. I have a myriad of reasons why I am no longer in that field, and that period of my life was a huge contributor in radicalizing me to the left, by US standards. You see and do a lot of fucked up shit and work with a lot of people who should be getting serious psychological treatment rather than carrying a gun and a badge, controlling a court room, determining who qualifies for social aid, or how someone in a cell should be rehabilitated. You get put in situations where you have to decide between doing right and putting a massive target on your back from the system.
That all being the case, there are still a lot of ignorant or just straight up shitty people who get reinforced by these programs to continue the cycle.
We just call them Police Academies.
There’s definitely an attitude that the small town and community colleges are just diploma mills for local schmucks. And that degree inflation has made them a kind of young person tax on the way to earning a decent salary.
But I do recoil a bit at the notion smaller schools and “hand-holding” curriculum somehow don’t produce more educated people than the post-high school educational sucking sound of service sector/blue collar employment. That you need to be in a weed out course in order to prove you retained information. Or that TAs aren’t there to hand-hold students who are stuggling in a subject and only exist to fuck you over arbitrarily.
The idea that education needs to be painful or stressful in order to be useful produces a lot of schools with obscene drop out rates and - let’s be frank - suicides to get you to a place that a slower pace, more generous grading curves, and smaller class sizes with more attentive teachers could easily avoid.
That’s not to defend cops, of course. But it seems absurd to suggest the product of a more casual and cheerful time in college is hordes of glass-chewing thumb-headed fascist psychopaths.
I think you’re misunderstanding the point I was making. I’m not advocating the gatekeeping of higher education, I believe that the taxes I pay should enable anyone to go to college or a vocational program if they choose.
My point is that these colleges that cater specifically to law enforcement programs aren’t even remotely equivalent when compared to normal community colleges, let alone a university. They do the bare minimum to meet the legal requirements, teach the bare minimum required by the state law enforcement licensing board and instead substitute rhetoric and pseudoscience that reinforces mindsets in graduates that the streets are a warzone, minorities are cartel members, and that authority is more important than empathy.
Functionally, many of these specific programs don’t give any real education or experience above a GED where it matters, yet they parade that they do. They often call them “Law Enforcement” degrees, not criminal justice degrees, as they are not equivalent and can’t legally call them the same thing. But, they do conveniently tick the box of requiring a degree and do weed out anyone too who might question system too much or show too much empathy.
As someone who lives in a big city full of cops and who has to live next to a few people in law enforcement, it doesn’t seem as though my city college or even my state university system degree programs keep ugly, nasty people from going into law enforcement. Family friend graduated with a law degree from Harvard and became a DA down in Austin, TX. It wasn’t Harvard that cheese-grated away her soul. I’ll spot you that plenty of local schools can be corrupted by the financial advantage of funneling people through a Cop School curriculum. But the thing that really seems to turn people into assholes and monsters is the job of being a cop.
Not disagreeing with you there. I have a myriad of reasons why I am no longer in that field, and that period of my life was a huge contributor in radicalizing me to the left, by US standards. You see and do a lot of fucked up shit and work with a lot of people who should be getting serious psychological treatment rather than carrying a gun and a badge, controlling a court room, determining who qualifies for social aid, or how someone in a cell should be rehabilitated. You get put in situations where you have to decide between doing right and putting a massive target on your back from the system.
That all being the case, there are still a lot of ignorant or just straight up shitty people who get reinforced by these programs to continue the cycle.