More from the ponzi world, er, higher education that is

The social sciences eagerly became more and more quantitative, in order to stand up against the folks across the street in the natural sciences.  However, even as the "quants" took over, it became increasingly clear that the "science" in the social sciences does not mean the "science" that the real world understands it to be.  While the world of science is full of the equivalents of 2+2=4, well, we will be lucky to have even a couple of universally applicable scientific stuff to strut across in the social sciences.

The question one might then ask is why such a ponzi scheme continues?  Why do more and more people line up to get their doctorates in the social sciences?

Today's edition of this ponzi-buster comes from Princeton; a graduate student writes about the "quant" focus in political science (yeah, where is the science there, right?) (ht):

Princeton’s Department of Politics is no Lehman Brothers. Alas. The autonomy granted to academia will be ritually abused to protect it from real-world pressure. If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.
This column is hardly the first such criticism. The Perestroika movement within political science in the early 2000s was a reasoned rebellion advocating methodological pluralism. Look where that got us. Meanwhile, those of us who assumed that a political science Ph.D. would help us understand how power works in the real world — the horror, the horror! — must hide behind the few professors who fight the good fight or type feral howls in hope of inciting debate.

An Ivy Leaguer will be guaranteed of employment, which will be to get intelligent undergraduate students excited about political science, who will then go on to do their doctorates only to find out that they will:

choose narrow questions backed by the certainty of clinical data sets — parcels of reality that can be reduced to something to which they can apply their peculiar methods. Even better, why choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in Firestone basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away?

 The system will perpetuate itself!

And this is exactly the process that Ken Robinson described--that right from the first days of school, the system seems to be designed to create professors who will ultimately be good for nothing.  Well, ok, I am taking a lot of liberty with his now famous TED talk :)