Why a College Degree is Worthless

This one is a little more "rant" oriented and contains traces of auto-biographical information.

I'm pleased to see that this topic gets more and more coverage all the time. I find myself in a similar place as JS Kim, an investment firm manager who "attributes zero of his success as an entrepreneur to the formalized education process, his four years of education at an Ivy League institution or the attainment of a double masters in business administration in public policy."

I made the same mistake as him and achieved the pointless, end-of-your-name alphabet soup, only I didn't do a double masters. Mine was only in public policy and not from an Ivy League school, but rather a crummy public school (ECU). I've learned economics and business, like Kim, completely on my own, no thanks to the seven years of higher education or the K-12 indoctrination. If I'm as smart as him, maybe I'll be successful as an entrepreneur someday. Unfortunately, all of my degrees are statist, they pigeon-hole me, are a source of great shame, and I had a particularly surreal time going from a political science PhD program to an emergency backup plan: master of "public" administration.

The fact that American education is not only worthless but counter-productive, cruel, humiliating, entropic, and mind controlling should be abundantly obvious to everyone nowadays. Nonetheless, there are still those fools who seek to re-affirm the grandeur of achieving a college degree. Let me provide just a couple quick reasons to avoid "schooling" past 12th grade in America.

~College Degree Holders Are Largely Unskilled Workers~

Unless you've learned something closed to a trade, your college experience has probably left you unskilled aside from the ability to write a little better than average (this is a stretch at many colleges though). Engineers, accountants, doctors, chemists, and the sort can consider themselves skilled. Liberal arts majors cannot.

The only skills that college professors are willing to teach are statistics and a rundown version of their research methods. Contrary to what the professors tell you, companies are not banging the door down looking for graduates who know how to use SPSS and SAS. The ultra-quantitative way of thinking may have had a lot to do with the downfall of the financial institutions, and little has changed (due to the moral hazards of the bailouts), but that doesn't mean the average college graduate from big-state-U is going to find themselves that kind of opportunity. It's always been a very exclusive club.

It also doesn't matter how many internships one does. Even that very rarely leads to substantive skills. The current business plan of American higher education is to produce young workers who are good at glorified paper-pushing activities. Since the economy is shedding these jobs (and for good reason), anyone who has been educated under this decadent status-quo is in a world of trouble. Tomorrow's jobs, believe it or not, will require a great deal of skill. That's what happens when there is a market correction: unproductive labor becomes obsolete.

~Student Loan Bubble~

You can't give good treatment to this topic without mentioning the debt burden of today's college graduates (and dropouts). Last time I checked, the average debt load upon graduation is somewhere around $20,000 to $30,000. As Peter Schiff has pointed out on numerous occasions, this all has to do with the easy-lending policies of the federal government. Just like with the real estate bubble, the government has turned the higher education system into a monster by allowing people to borrow at teaser rates, with very little requirements, and no down payment.

I've mentioned in previous posts that colleges have little incentive to keep the costs low. They fully realize that, due to societal pressure, most young people will pay whatever it takes to get a college degree. This is where you hear bizarre stories about folks going six figures into debt in order to pay for an art degree. The money issue, like in every other situation, is going to be the Waterloo for higher education. The colleges that cannot change with the times, cannot even get their staffs to quit taking 2-hour lunches, and do not provide meaningful training are going to see their revenues dwindle and be forced to shut down operations. With the way things are now, university administrations have no ability (or backbone) to tell the spoiled-rotten professors they have to take a pay cut. The economics and politics of the situation will leave universities with no choice but to disband.

Good News: there is light at the end of the tunnel. I DO have a job, which has nothing to do with my educational attainment and I have the opportunity to start from the bottom and prove myself as a productive individual. You can do this as well. You CAN recover from the stigma of a college education. Let your individuality, talent, and critical-thinking abilities propel you into a better career. Oh, and for God's sake, move to a non-communist country. It's good for career development.