The Real Problem with Universities
Originally posted to Thinkspot on August 25th, 2022.
Here in the United States, every week is a fresh battle. Last week saw sides drawn over the FBI raiding the home of a former US President in an act that makes Watergate look like the “cofefe” dust up by comparison. This week’s 3 alarm fire came yesterday, when the Biden administration announced that he would be canceling ten thousand dollars worth of student loans and an additional twenty thousand dollars in pell grants for those who make less than 125,000 dollars a year.
The Left is shouting that they should spend more and cancel all student debt. The Right is shouting that the whole thing is insane and you should be held responsible for the loans you took out instead of passing the debt onto people who made better choices than you.
I was listening to the Timcast IRL show with host Tim Pool as they broke down the whole situation. Pool’s take is that both sides are wrong, but something should be done about student loans. The loans are a problem because in his view student loans are predatory.
And here is where I disagree, wholeheartedly.
Student loans aren’t predatory. Universities are.
The problem isn’t taking out a loan for college. The problem is the entire structure of higher education and the culture in and around it.
Once upon a time, the American people were sold a lie. “If your children go to a good college, they’ll be wealthy and taken care of. If they don’t, they’ll be worthless.”
This lie is so pervasive that corporations began replacing men and women who had worked their way to the top with college graduates with no experience and a fancy piece of paper.
A hierarchy was created in American culture that has continued on through decades and generations. At the top were people who went to schools like Harvard and Yale. In the middle were people who went to State Schools, unless it was NYU or UCLA which were still considered upper echelon for some reason.
At the bottom of the totem pole was everyone else, whether you went to community college, trade schools, got a job or started your own business. We were told that all of those people were stupid and worthless. It was everywhere. Sitcoms in the 70s, 80s and 90s are drowning in jokes about this. “Well, Bob, my daughter is going to Notre Dame. The boy is going to State.” Cue laugh track. And again, because there is a pecking order… “Yeah, my eldest is going to college. And uhh… the youngest is going to a good trade school.” HILARIOUS.
This was pumped into our parents brains. My mother has spent 30 years managing businesses that deal in tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions every year. And yet she has spent that entire time convinced that she couldn’t do anything else with her life because she didn’t go to college. Ironically, while my Mom isn’t rich by any standard, she worked hard and provided a good life for herself. She proved the paradigm wrong, despite the fact that she can’t recognize it.
It wasn’t until roughly my generation that we realized that going to college wasn’t a golden ticket. By the 1980’s, universities had become a meat grinder, turning out students holding fancy degrees with absolutely little preparation for the world and sometimes no ability to get a job that would pay back the loans they took out to get them.
That’s when the elites expanded the lie. Now you not only had to get a Bachelor’s degree, you needed to get your Master’s or a Doctorate to get that life you were promised.
Ironically, in a just system, you would have skipped regular college and gone straight to Graduate School wherein you can actually get the education you were paying for in the first place.
That is part of the predatory nature of the college system. You’re sucked in. You take out loans you can’t pay back and in the end, you don’t have any usable job skills. In fact, many people leave college dumber than they went in after being brain-washed by ideologically-driven professors who can’t be fired.
How did this happen? Well Universities and elites sold us a second major lie. The myth of a “well-rounded education”. When you go to college, you declare a major in which you plan to get your degree. When I went to college, I planned to go to Law School, so my major was Political Science. (Side note: you can get a degree in balloon animals and still get into Law School if your grades are high and you score well on the LSAT. Political Science is worthless.)
But when I went to the college counselors– who were useless, by the way– they handed me a syllabus full of requirements that had nothing to do with my degree. Why did I need to take two years of chemistry or geology to go to Law School? I wasn’t planning on being an Environmental Lawyer. Why did I need to take multiple semesters of French or Spanish? Is it good to speak a foreign language? Of course, but it has nothing to do with my education.
And that is the key.
It doesn’t have anything to do with education students. “Well-rounded educations” are there to bolster college departments that would be floundering due to a lack of interest.
And look, I get it. We need geologists. We need Americans who can speak Japanese. But we don’t need a system that forces students to pay tens of thousands of dollars in ever-increasing student debt for classes that they won’t remember taking in a year and offer no usable job skills.
Most college students don’t need chemistry. They need basic IT skills. Almost none of us need advanced algebra. We need education in basic economics.
Twenty years ago I took out something like fifteen thousand dollars in student loans that I just paid off last year. I never graduated. I never got any usable job skills. And you don’t get points for going to college. It only counts if you have the piece of paper. Meanwhile some supposedly dumb guy who went to a trade school and became an A/C Repairman probably paid his house off by the time he was 35. So who is the idiot?
I have a friend who paid tens of thousands of dollars for a higher end state school to get a degree in graphic design. Now you can learn everything she learned for free on YouTube. But even before YouTube, jobs like hers should have been learned through apprenticeships. Of course that’s something the elites got rid of decades ago so that they could create legal unpaid labor through internships. Unpaid internships that are exclusively offered to college students.
It’s ludicrous.
College isn’t completely useless, just mostly. If your child is going to college, they should have a clear idea of what they want to do. Ideally they should be going for a STEM degree. They should avoid nonsense classes like acting or balloon animals 101. Take only classes that will give them skills to survive.
Also, make sure that college is right for your child. It isn’t right for everyone. In fact, it can be a detriment to many. You don’t have to have a degree from a University. You don’t have to feed the elitist machine. If you work hard, you can be successful.
Your kids don’t know any of this. Tell them. Don’t let them fall into the trap.
Every problem in this country boils down to a broken education system that keeps people in debt and ignorant. If you want to fix the country, first we have to take back the education of our people.
#college #university #timpool #timcastIRL #joebiden
