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• Tuesday, February 21, 2006 10:23 PM

  "College" is a scam

  When are we going to wise up and realize that the entire higher education system of the country is a scam? That it charges an egregious price to young people for knowledge that rational and lean institutions could impart at a fraction of the price and time?

  Here is a telling example: I graduated in 3 years because I had 1 year of Advanced Placement credit. That 1 extra year just magically disappeared, yet my degree is just as good as anyone else's! I saved an immense amount of time and money just by passing a handful of tests for which I really didn't have to study all that much. And, if anything, the market rewarded me for not having that 4th year, as I was "smart" enough to graduate in 3.

  There are some programs that are just as they should be, or close (perhaps medical school, perhaps legal programs, etc.), and it is true that there are many wonderful experiences to be had on campus. But society now requires people to get a degree simply because it's a degree, while not being satisfied with the knowledge sans degree.

  The reasons for this include but are not limited to the following:

  1. "College" is an industry with its own interests to protect. There are many, many people living lives of comfort based on the system without adding proportionate value to the economy.

  2. "Colllege" takes a vast number of young people out of the workforce and therefore decreases competition for jobs therein. The social function of dampening labor supply should be obvious. In short, there are not enough jobs to go around, hence the increasing number of hoops required by society for the most minimal of "white collar" jobs.

  3. "College" allows the ruling castes to preserve their prerogative by allowing their progeny to attend the "good" (i.e., costly) schools and forcing others to attend the "bad" (i.e., less expensive) schools. As another poster pointed out, it's forced branding of the entire populace. How interesting it would be if young people simply got out of high school and poured into the workforce without all the school stars on their bellies. Horrors, we might start to have more merit-based competition.

  The pertinence of the above to the topic of the article should be fairly clear. Young people are forced to go to "college" for 4-6 years, at which time they are making little or no money. When they graduate, job prospects are still poor, and they don't have any savings but rather are burdened by "student loans."

  It's a rotten, rotten system that subtracts hundreds of billions of labor value from the national economy.

  What we should be doing is teaching k-12 in a very lean and mean fashion that gives kids good reading, writing, mathematical, and financial skills so that an 18-year-old graduate is ready for a basic white-collar job. Then those kids can decide whether additional education--real education--is needed to learn a trade or profession.

  As for universities, they would still have a limited role in teaching those students who really wanted to pursue higher learning in the arts and sciences. And those degree programs should be focused on genuine achievement in those areas, not just supplying a plethora of mandatory "majors" from which students reluctantly pick.

  No discussion of Generation Debt is complete without a thorough questioning of our malignant system of higher education.

  —MLR Read MLR's other letters
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