It costs a lot to put your kid through college these days. Of course, you expect to get some value for your money, in the form of an educated young adult who can, you know, think and solve problems. Unfortunately, there is just no guarantee of that, as Rachel Lucas discovered recently:

Lab partner: “Well now we must make the solutions stronger to test higher concentration.”

Me: “We can’t make them stronger, they’re from stock solution.”

LP: “So we just add more!”

Me: “That won’t make the concentration go up.”

LP: “Yes it will, we just add more!”

Me: “THAT WON’T INCREASE THE CONCENTRATION.”

LP: “Yes it will! If you add more to what is here, there will BE MORE.”

Me: “More volume! Not higher concentration!”

He stared at me witheringly and then called over the TA... and asked the TA to explain to me how we needed to add more stock solution to our test tube of stock solution in order to attain a higher concentration.

...By the way? Lab Partner is a senior engineering major. Hope he never designs any bridges in your neighborhood.

It gets worse:

Another time, way back at the beginning of the semester, we had to do a filtration procedure, where you put a filter paper cone in a funnel on a clamp and pour a solution with some solid in it through the apparatus to get all the chunks out, and the filtered liquid would drip into a beaker below.

This was a very slow process because it was a thick solution. It drip-drip-dripped very slowly through the funnel. So guess what my genius lab partner and a few other brain surgeons in the class decided would be a good way to speed it up?

Why, move the funnel apparatus as high up on the clamp stand as possible, as far away from the beaker as possible! Because somehow, in some alternate universe with vastly different laws of physics than we know here on Earth, that would make the solution move through the funnel more quickly.

I am not making this up.

When Lab Partner started doing this, all spastically as is his way, I told him that all he was accomplishing was making the drips splash harder into the beaker and even out of the beaker entirely. Pretty much, he was just making a mess. He was steadfast, and kept telling me to just watch. “It goes faster!”

I asked him if the solution in the funnel knew where the beaker was and he stared at me like I was being obtuse. I asked again, how could the distance between the two possibly have any effect whatsoever on how fast the solution came out of the funnel because after all, it doesn’t know how far it has to fall, and it doesn’t care. He shushed me and told me to watch.

Pressing on, I asked him if there is some sort of magical force field between the funnel and the beaker, and if he was positing that the beaker was sending a message to the liquid in the funnel, hey I’m far away, you better get through that funnel quickly! I wondered out loud if he knew some special law of physics I’d never heard of. He shook his head and kept repeating, “just watch, just watch.”

It was painful. And the thing is, it wasn’t even only him. Several other groups at our counter were doing the same thing. I was struck speechless and had no choice but to stand there and search for an argument in my brain that did not involve calling anyone “retarded.”

It only went on for about a minute because as soon as TA saw what all these Mensa members were doing, with their funnels high in the air, making the drips splash all over the place, he came over to us and asked why, and some of them actually attempted to present their finely-honed Einsteinian theories about how much more quickly the process would go this way. TA and I and the rest of the class that weren’t acting like crackheads all stared blankly at them for a full 10 seconds. One girl across the room loudly said something like, “I hope none of y’all are science majors.”

Sadly, most of them are. One of the guys so convinced about this technique is a biochem major and at least two of the others are chem majors. Or at least they think they are, now. Wait until they get to organic chem. Oy.

These kids have been trained -- by our government schools, no doubt -- to ignore facts, avoid anything resembling thinking, and embrace blind confidence in their own opinions. This is the result. The scariest thing is, these kids are going to get their paper from the university, and then they will be out in the world designing bridges. "Oy," indeed.

Homeschool your kids. Teach them to read, understand, think. Show them how the world works. Make sure they understand the vast chasm between opinion and fact, and that they can distinguish between the two. Otherwise, this could be your kid in a few years.