The amount of literature foisted upon unsuspecting parents, scaring the crap out of them in regards to how little their child will earn if they don’t get a secondary degree should be proof enough that it is a scam. It’s like a time share in Baja, or a whole life insurance policy: the harder the sell, the more expensive the mistake. And an expensive mistake can college be.
Pay no attention to the six and seven figure earning college presidents and faculty, who cry each year for tuitions and tax payer funding to be increased alongside their pay increases, in the shadow of enormous corporate sized endowments. And never mind that parents and students must then take on insurmountable piles of debt to finance that “education,” just sign up and go to school, or you will be left out of society’s warm hug.
How about the fact that most entrepreneurs I know make more than, or definitely as much as their ‘educated’ peers. Or that a very small percentage of people I know are doing a job they ‘studied’ for in university.
For many people, college is little more than the most expensive, most drawn out, most date rape enabling, most being arrested for assault or petty drug charges encouraging, keg party of their lives. For many others, those of a more straight edge mentality, it is little more than an extended afternoon in the library with interesting councilors and cohorts, that only later does one realize they would have encountered anyway had they gone into the business or field of their choice to start with, and foregone the mountain of debt they now have to service with a job that likely has nothing to do with their degree. Often, after one graduates and works for a couple years they realize how much further ahead they could have been had they simply forgone the expensive diploma, and got to work.
Medical doctors, atomic engineers, those whose professions are of a certain ilk, are to me possible exceptions, although I would guess that a lot of the lower level stuff could just as easily be learned with a thorough mentor, a rigorous study habit of readily available literature, and an extended period of apprenticeship. But my main point being, unless you are going to be splitting rib cages or splitting atoms, you likely would be better off simply getting to work.
There are countless professions that require various levels of certification, by whom else but the government.
This accomplishes a couple things.First, it allows the government to control labor flows, holding millions of prospective workers back for a minimum of 4 years, and likely another 4, to earn whatever brand of accreditation has been deemed necessary to perform said task. During this time, each individual is accruing massive debts that will then require the individual to be a good boy or girl for the rest of their lives and pay the vig on the loan as they toil in a falsely created realm of inflation and interest. Which brings us to the second major necessity government has for a growing university population.
This Ponzi scheme is in particular interest to those individuals who staff the halls and offices of government buildings nationwide. Three words: Government employee pensions. Is it really that unthinkable as the reason your high-school corrals students towards a university? Often with a full time financial aid office, helping each student get the loans they need to attend the college of their choice? Did you know that student loan debt is the only debt not dischargeable in a bankruptcy? Do you know what state employee pension funds invest in? Do you recognize it is the same government that makes those laws as well as sets the interest rates on the loans?
The greatest gift this system gives to government is of course the extended years of ‘education’ that the government now gets to indoctrinate the populace with their pro-government ideals. To gain evidence of this, one must only study the curriculums of public universities and find that far too often, Economics, is not a required course, but an elective.
Economics, the only concrete universal reality we all share, is not required to be learned to earn a degree, in fact, it is quite heavily admonished by those in the liberal arts wing of the establishment, whose classes are not only required, but are part and parcel of the brainwashing design of the university system itself.
Economics is likely the only worthy thing an average person should study. It is the one thing they deal with every day of their lives, without exception, and it is not required to graduate. The arts and sciences are awesome, but one doesn’t need a degree in literature to write a book, one does not need a degree in acting to perform, one definitely doesn’t need three quarters of biology to sit in a cubicle, nor does the director of human resources need a semester of physics.
Filling the bloated halls of state schools everywhere are piles and piles of professors who know everything there is to know about their subject, and yet could find no gainful employment with that knowledge other than to teach it to someone else. Very little taught in a liberal arts program could not be learned with a similar amount of time spent walking galleries, sitting in libraries, or debating with friends in a coffee shop. For one to really get along in this world, no matter what their profession, they need to be skilled at Economics. It touches everything you do.
Scarcity, supply/demand, opportunity cost, these things aren’t just figments of Wall Street's imagination, they exist in colonies of field mice, and for damn sure they exist in a complex society such as ours. How can we be surprised that people vote, live, and act the way they do when the most important subject they could have ever learned was only an elective. People argue that the university provides critical thinking skills, that the courses they mandate allow an individual to learn problem solving skills, and therefore, whether or not they actually use the specific information they majored in, it benefits them none-the-less.
That sentiment completely ignores the concept that a properly functioning elementary and high school system should have well accomplished the goal of critical thinking and problem solving years before a student took on the debt required for “higher” education. But that wouldn’t leave much of a pension fund, would it?
