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.

ECU Raises Tuition; No Recession for Professors

A lot of people have been completely insulated from the recession and have enjoyed "business as usual" with but a few distractions or pitfalls. Bankers, for example, have had it better than ever financially. What about college professors?

At eastern North Carolina's largest school, East Carolina University, tuition is going up and no cuts are to be made to academics. Check out the Chancellor's take on the budget and tuition increases. This is going on everywhere in the country and is not limited to public universities (although, those may be the first to fail if this situation continues). At ECU, the raising of tuition is nothing new. It happens every year as a result of unlimited student lending (see the parallels to the housing bubble) and the fact that the state legislature gets pressured more and more to reduce funding. The university knows it can get away with raising tuition as long as people can take out more loans with impunity and without risk. What's new? Now, you will see even deeper cuts to administrative staff (meaning longer lines and lower service), but NOT any reductions to pay and benefits of professors.

I no longer have access to ECU's faculty salary information (you have to have a school user name), but unless things have changed, the average faculty member makes well north of $50,000 per year and much higher in certain departments. What happened to Americans having to cut back and take lighter paychecks? This has not been the case at ECU or hardly any other universities. The burden is always absorbed by the customers. God forbid ANY university abolish the tenure system and kick some of the six-figured, leftist blow-hards out and balance the university's budget.

In effect, the tenure system is a form of unionization that allows senior members to hold the rest of the world hostage. As long as there's a mis-informed demand for college and an academic cartel allowing the tenure system, this problem will not go away and costs will sore even worse than health care prices. The other irony of all of this is that there is an enormous market of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there who would gladly take a job at a university for less than the cost it takes to pay tenured-for-life losers who cannot even be troubled to publish in the irrelevant journals their younger peers do. It's time to ditch the dead weight.

Peter Schiff was right once again. Education has been something I've followed closely for years now and I knew there was a bubble for some time. I was happy to see that Schiff joined in the criticism of the student-loan induced bubble. The costs of education are spiraling because of these awful no-risk loans that were designed to make things more affordable for the poor. ECU has made it clear that academics is the LAST area that will be touched by any kind of financial hardship. They would like you to believe this is because of a commitment to excellence. Unfortunately, it has more to do with a commitment to the very powerful, shadowy union of the professors, who will never take a pay cut even as their universities desperately need to streamline.

Why Do Leftist College Students Hate Families So Much?

It's completely irrational if you follow things to their logical (or at least, likely) conclusion. Left-wing college kids, if they have any identity at all, are usually known for one thing: deviance for the sake of deviance. It's not necessary the good kind of rebelliousness associated with the Ron Paul movement and anti-statism. No, it usually involves hatred of most time-honored customs. One can debate the merits of social conservatism all day, but it's clear that many college-aged folks hate every last bit of it. They're taught that way.

One of those traditions is of course the family structure. This is a social institution that's been around since time immemorial and it has not lasted that long by accident. However, leftist students (and even some libertarians who choose to emphasize leftist social ethics) are very anti-family. They're taught that it reeks of bourgeois lifestyle, coincides the "evil" patriarchal system, and gets in the way of individual expression. The fact that lefties usually hate individualism leaves more than just a grain of irony in this situation, but, at any rate, Marxist intellectuals are willing to push some "rugged individualism" if it means disruption of the existing social order. Suffices to say, families are a bigger threat to statist hegemony than individuals. This is why you'll hear many a women's studies professor preach the indomitable nature of the individual woman. For them, it serves an end (individuals eventually melted into a collectivist utopia).

On a practical level, however, leftist students ought to re-think their aversion to American family structures. Why is that? Because in today's sterling economy, they'll be back in their parents house immediately following graduation, barring some employment miracle. Insofar as the most left-liberal, anti-family students tend to choose the most useless college majors, odds are they'll need to move back in with those dreaded bourgeois parents who never understood them and their mindless rebellion against "capitalism," "the rat race," and mainstream culture. You don't know what you have until you lose it and need it again. That is precisely the painful lesson these folks would endure if their generous guardians did not re-admit them back into the home despite their bratty ways.

The anti-everything, pseudo-Renaissance artist is not likely to make it very successfully in today's economy, not without completely re-tooling his/her profile. In the mean time, it's time to ditch the attitude and black clothing and accept the fact that you need your family a lot more than you think. This goes for middle-aged and elderly folks who fall on hard times as well. You never out-grow the family. Thankfully, the good news is that these folks do not make up every student in academia. It is a positive sign to see people re-learn the values of family and sticking together when things get tough.

As long as Marxist professors try their hardest to proselytize impressionable undergraduates, the ugly kind of anti-social individuals will exist. Then again, I guess these kids are good candidates to just continue their education into master's and PhD programs. I would like to feel sorry for their bank accounts when they take out so many loans to go to school forever. I do not though.

Teachers as Prison Guards

I think someday when I have children and they reach school age I will try something interesting, if not a bit surreal. On the first day of kindergarten, rather then pretend it to be some sort of journey that the child will be embarking on, I will give the child the full, honest truth from the get go.

I will walk the child up to the teacher and explain things this way: "See this person, junior, this is your prison guard, you are not to use the bathroom without her permission. You shall regain your auto-urination "privileges" once your sentence is complete in about 12 years, until then, the guard controls your bowel movements. You will speak only when spoken to, eat when told to eat, and you will not to leave the premises without permission along with an escort. Good luck, junior."

How do you think the teacher would react? Could she protest? Was anything I would have said not grounded in truth?