Educational Mission That Supports Learning In And Out Of The Classroom: Fill & Download for Free

Given your list of exceptional activities and accomplishments you should certainly be applying to top colleges and universities. You should be proud of what you have done so far in your life. But don’t start packing your bags yet. There are other students with similar accomplishments who don’t get in. And there are some who have not done many of the things you have who do. The typical clichés—it’s a crapshoot or a black box are not accurate. The people who select students do indeed have a detailed plan. They won’t share with the public all the details but it entails shaping a class that meets their intuitional needs. And what this means is that despite all you have done you may not fit into a category that they most value.If you want to help your chances you will need to think about how to make the things you have accomplished come through as passions rather than resume builders. If your service and start up comes across as coming more from the head than the heart then they may not help you that much in the process. You need to both tell and show that you are the kind of person who does not feel that you 'deserve' a spot; instead, you have earned a spot because you understand the school, the mission, and your role in promoting education in and out f the classroom. Make your application personal. Get teachers to say you love learning because you really do. Get your business mentor talk about your start up as a passion not an admission game changer etc. Make you voice humble but confident, make your self full of wonder and gratitude for all you have been given—you are blessed with a great mind and the support to start a business and travel to help people across the world. You have to convince somewhat cynical readers that you have pushed yourself so hard to make something magical happen, not just to you, but to those around you, in and out of class, and that you will do the same in and out of a great university.Best of luck.

For:The arguments for the liberal arts are that they imbue an educated class of citizens with the ability to discern actionable truth from many sources of information, as well as problem solve on the scale capable of leading nations. This is particularly true in the classical form of the liberal arts, where thinking, reasoning, and communication were central.In democratic nations, it is necessary that a large percentage of the population obtain this education, as there are many forces that can pull a democratic nation toward decadence or mob tyranny if the people as a collective cannot discern truth from falsehoods and think in a sober minded way. Simply put, you can’t have democracy without broad and reliable higher education.By this argument, public funding of education, at least in a democratic state, is an investment in the collective future of the nation. Reason would dictate that this is both a sound investment in the prosperity of the nation, as well as assurance that the state will last.Against:The above is theoretical, and hinges on the liberals arts themselves not being corrupted by biases and other destructive influences.If on any level, the liberal arts should be overrun by one predominate view, it would be detrimental to the security of the culture. In a culture that treats the liberal arts as sacred and above question, such corruption become self-perpetuating and tyrannical. At that point, then the institution can no longer achieve its goals and mission of creating a free and educated society capable of liberty. As a fundamental institution, if the liberal arts should become corrupted, then state funding to support the liberal arts only exacerbates the problem, locking in destructive structures to the mission and purpose of the institution.That is exactly what many of us who criticize American higher education believe happened to the academic system. Wide ranging evidence exists that demonstrates that the culture of higher education, particularly that of the liberal arts, is corrupted by one predominating view with regard to most cultural issues today. That is, the culture of progressive liberalism overshadows the academic environment in most of the liberal arts, so much so that it pushes out non-liberal progressives, even political centrists. This includes their theories, their research, and prevents many from reaching the highest levels. These divergent perspectives might be able to add the much needed intellectual diversity such liberal arts theorists value so highly. The self perpetuating self-censorship is exactly the opposite of what the liberal arts needs, and tragically, even the opposite of what the liberal arts explicitly demands of others.Support for that argument can be found here: Is the culture of American higher education biased to the left? What could have caused that, and what are the implications of it?Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, did a study in 2014 measuring back over the last 25 years to measure the dispersion of left leaning professors to those of the right. What he found was staggering. In colleges, liberals have always been more embraced, at least since Abrams began his study. Beginning in the mid 90’s, however, conservatives and especially moderates have been replaced by more extreme liberal biases.Figure 1. Ideological Positions of Faculty in American Colleges and Universities: 1989 – 2014. Data courtesy of the Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, plotted by Sam Abrams.For certain parts of the country, this was far more pronounced. Abrams broke down the disparity geographically and saw that while liberals outnumbered their conservative counterparts throughout the nation in representation in institutions of higher learning, in places like the New England states, the disparity was as high as 28 to 1.…Another study Published in Econ Journal Watch, reviewed over 7,000 where they found that Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 12 to 1. Compare this to a 1968 study that put the Democrat-to-Republican contrast in history departments at 2.7 to 1. Furthermore, it broke it down by department, where economics was the most friendly to conservatives, at a ratio of only 4.5 liberal professors to every conservative. Another study resulted in only 7% to 11% of faculty members in social sciences and humanities are Republicans, according to surveys. At the extreme, the Econ Journal Watch found that History departments, where the leanings of your old High School teachers were long gone, had liberals outnumber conservatives by a 33 1/2-to-1 ratio. It was even shown within these departments that it was easier to find a Marxist than a Republican.So we’ve reached a point where the colleges have become biased beyond reason, to where, years ago, something should have been about it. The process for professor selection, what gets published, and who is nominated to tenure — the next generation of academic leadership, is so utterly lopsided that it makes it impossible for dissenting views to be accurately or honestly presented to the young future leaders of the generation. What’s worse, the ideological dogmatism that has taken over many college campuses now extend further out and affects other degree fields less dependent on liberal arts studies, such as the hard sciences and engineering.So the first argument against public funding is that the higher academic system is already ideologically corrupted and thereby, a detriment to democracy, rather than a boon. Rather than more funding, higher education needs major reforms to combat the bias built into the system over many years.Basically, it is both unreasonable and hateful to expect people whose views and presence is repressed within this education system to pay college professors divorced from the realities of the nation in which they live, to opine about how bigoted and intellectually incompetent they are. Basically, Republicans and conservatives should not be forced to pay to have their children taught their parents are Nazis. This is particularly true when said teachers seem more likely under the current system to have only attained their vaulted position, not because of the product of their scholastic endeavors (because over 80% of Humanities papers are never even cited), but because of the way they vote and promote themselves and their politics in the professor’s lounge. It would be just as true if the roles were reversed, but as the data indicates, that isn’t the case.Next, is that all public funding must be done in such a way that demonstrates good stewardship of the money taken from tax papers is used efficiently, and as an investment in the future of the nation. Tax money taken from citizens should be used in the most efficient way possible to provide for the economic prosperity or security of a people. Or else, money shouldn’t be taken at all, as most people are more capable of solving their own problems than officials thousands of miles away behind government desks.The government should only tax when:it provides goods and services which the people cannot on their own, such as the maintenance of the military, or the building of the interstate system, or response to major national catastrophes.It can reasonably assure a better return on the investment into the people’s ability to prosper than left to purely laissez faire meansIf they can’t demonstrably do one or both of those things, then no new taxes should be created, and where it is shown that old taxes are no longer producing the desired effects, then the taxes need to be removed and the programs shut down or reformed.Taxation, and particularly redistribution taxation should be something done with extreme care. A government which imposes such taxes should be able to argue that you will be better off if your money is taken and given to someone else to do something else, as they will become more valuable to you than even you can provide with that money you would otherwise use for your own benefit. If the government can’t make that claim… then there is nothing else to call that taxation than robbery by a democratic mob.With education, we really have to hold those accepting funds, namely the colleges who ultimately receive the money, if they are fulfilling that mandate by being a better investment into the nation than if hundreds of millions of people were to simply take that money and stick it stocks and bonds.With regard to this, we run into a massive problem in public education.This, I outlined in detail here: Is forgiving student debt a good idea?The problem is that schools have adapted to a particular income model since about the 1990s brought about since the Higher Education Amendments of 1972. That piece of legislature created a needs based grant program that allowed lower income students the advantages of a college education at a state run school. For a time, this was great.A few decades after the program began, however, it became clear that milking the government program was a useful way to grow the wealth of many universities. It was much easier than relying on generous endowments by prosperous graduates. In fact, there was no real incentive any more to build a reputation around being a place that produced high caliber individuals or even one that ensured you would have a job when you got out of college. Instead, the main means of getting students to go to college became creating massive administrations overseeing new recreation programs, student services, and facilities such as the now required lazy river at many college campuses.Things cost money. This money, that has to come from somewhere, and in the cases of many college, is now coming from two places either a) milking the lower income students for federal grant money, or b) taking advantage of easy loans to students to hike up tuition fees. With the second group, this system baits in students with lavish facilities and a wonderful “college experience”, but declining education standards leaving them with a mountain of college debt and no one to turn to.Besides the federal government, i.e. taxpayers.So tax payers paid for the facilities, paid for the tuition, provided the backing for the loans, and now are being called on to pay off those loans, as well. All the while, colleges are getting their massive fees and administration costs — while failing to deliver to the nation a population of educated young people. They no longer either have the ability to discern truth hoods from rhetoric and bias, as that is mostly what they were fed during their formative college years, and many of them don’t even have the ability to pay off their college loans. I mean that while there are many individual young people of this generation who are amazing, college is no longer the source of them being high caliber individuals. They brought with them certain attributes to the classroom and found success in spite of their education.So the second part of the question of funding the liberal arts, or colleges in general, is answering if they are a good investment to the nation. Certainly, the lazy rivers aren’t. But as for the liberal arts, if they cannot willingly overcome their own biases against half the nation’s people, i.e. half of the source of their public income, then they are no longer fulfilling their role of creating powerfully minded, discerning, rational people. Those departments aren’t worth the money they are being given.To correct this, and many other problems, the Liberal Arts need to put into practice more of the liberal arts, reforming where necessary and correcting for previous bias. This would take a great deal of self-reflection on their parts and voluntarily removing the worst of themselves while promoting people they have been chronically indoctrinated to hate. I don’t see that as a possibility, so what is more likely are much harsher measures from the state if there is enough popular support to do so.As for the secondary question of the GI Bill.All current and future veterans should be entitled to the benefits they were promised upon enlistment. The GI Bill, in its various forms, has been a benefit to veterans for generations. But there has been a change, what they were promised has fundamentally changed. Previous generations were promised a quality education where they will take the ethics and values that served them in the military and become leaders of the future in business, government, and their communities. It was saying that the nation agreed that a person was willing to place themselves in danger and face harm for the good of the state and its people, and the state would reward them with education and opportunity in return. However, given the nature of the modern education system, it’s doubtful that either of these realities are as assured for modern vets as they were for those of the past. In that way, while they may be awarded a fine piece of paper four years after they served, veterans of today are not receiving as valuable a compensation for the risk and sacrifices they endured as their fathers and grandfathers.The only way I see to alleviate this is for more colleges to face audits and for those who fail, to no longer allow veterans to receive GI Bill benefits for that school pushing them to those schools where their education will help them to learn how to think, and where it properly thanks them for the service they gave with an advantage in the fight for prosperity after college.Pros again:In rereading my answer, I decided to add a second pro to the list to make a point and provide some needed balance. Not every college’s liberal arts programs are bad. Very prestigious schools still teach at a very high level of academic rigor that creates powerful thinkers and problems solvers in the world today.The problem isn’t that the liberal arts as such are bad. The theory at the beginning of this article is still true. But in America, too many colleges and universities, particularly at the state and local level that supports the greatest number of new graduates, is deeply flawed. This creates many systemic problems, from a chronically un-educated class of people serving an actually educated elite, all while claiming a shared history of the liberal arts, but having very different experiences of what that looks like. In the bigger picture, even the people who receive the best education suffer that their education isn’t what it could be, as even there they are stigmatized with bias. What is tragic, is that they are the first people who should be capable of seeing it.That said, the pro is that there are schools that still teach great lessons in the liberal arts, and are still great at equipping young people with the ability to build and lead the future. It’s just that there are a lot of other liberal arts programs that suck. Those departments at those schools bank on the theoretical definition of why the liberal arts are important in general to justify their own flaw continuation.Liked this? Please consider supporting me through Patreon to help me make more content like this. Relaxed. Researched. Respectful. - War Elephant

Our future plans revolve around our mission.We want to reinvent education and help driven people move the world forward.Here’s what I mean by that:Just like it’s changed nearly everything around us, the internet is fundamentally changing education. And it’s doing it in 3 key ways:Democratizing the spread of knowledge. The world’s information is now available to anyone with a connection to the internet.Breaking down the barriers to quality instruction. It costs less to learn online than it does to learn in a physical classroom. And now you don’t need to be in a specific geographic location to get access to great teachers.Shifting to student-led model. Without the restrictions that typically come with a classroom, students can seek out and get exactly what they need to learn effectively.The online education model is imperfect, but we firmly believe that it is the model of the future. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to make it as perfect as possible. And we want to do it for skills beyond programming.What does perfect look like? To me, there are 5 parts to the equation:1. Immediate support. If you have a ton of people learning on the same platform, and they’re all interested in helping each other out, then it should be possible to get immediate support from anyone at any time. Keeping momentum is critical to learning complex things, so immediate support is essential.2. Peer learning at scale. You can connect with anyone in the world to partner on projects and other cool collaborations.3. 1-on-1 mentorship. When you’re in a classroom, it’s difficult to get individualized attention. The internet makes it possible to learn 1-on-1 from anyone in the world.4. Access to experts. Say you’re learning Ruby on Rails. You should be able to learn from a video lesson contributed by DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails and the most qualified teacher in the world for that particular subject.5. Right content, at right time, in the right medium. Say you’re learning algorithms. You run into a problem and you can’t figure out how to proceed. In this case, 2 things should happen:The education platform you’re learning on should immediately identify why you can’t figure out how to get past the problem. That’s because it’s learned from the millions of students who have experienced this exact same problem previously.The platform should then push you to a combination of text/video lessons and peer/mentor support channels specifically selected to get you through the problem and help you understand it.This model should work just as well for UI design, UX, data science, marketing, product management, and many other modern disciplines as it does for programming.We see Firehose as the education platform for the world we actually live in.And we see it as a place where driven people from all over the world can come to learn the skills they need to go out and do amazing things.That’s what drives us to keep iterating towards getting closer to perfect every single day.As for the second part of the question, yes, you can do both a solo project and participate in the Agile team project. It’s just a lot of work.We find that most students elect to go with Agile team project. This gives you the invaluable experience of working on a team, just like it’s done in the real world. Once you get that experience, you can always work on a personal project afterwards.You can check out our program timeline to get a better sense of everything we cover.