Posted on 05/27/2015 4:47:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No.
College has become a scam.
Some students benefit: those with full scholarships and/or rich parents so they don't go deep into debt, those who love learning for its own sake and land jobs in academia and those who get jobs that require a college credential.
But that's not most students.
Half today's recent grads work in jobs that don't require degrees. Eighty thousand of America's bartenders have bachelor's degrees.
Politicians such as Hillary Clinton promote college by claiming that over a lifetime, college graduates "earn $1 million more." That statistic is true but utterly misleading. People who go to college are different. They're more likely to have been raised by two parents. They did better in high school. They'd make more money even if they never went go to college.
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that there isn't much evidence that college grads are paid more because they learned anything at college that is valuable to their jobs.
Getting into elite universities and graduating from them is mostly a "signaling" device, he says. It tells employers you're a smart person, so employers can begin teaching you things you really need to know. Employers, not the colleges, turn out to be the ones making students valuable contributors.
This suggests college is more like a hurdle than an investment. It would be better if companies found cheaper ways to screen for talent than four years of college.
Most of America's prestigious universities started out as training centers for the priesthood and ways of confirming your status as part of the upper crust. In many cases, that's still true today. Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize that. But we are.
Now President Obama proposes spending more of your money on "free community college." Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders goes further, proposing "free tuition" at four-year public colleges.
Of course, "free" just means taxpayers are forced to pay.
This is nuts. When government subsidizes services, people supplying those services get wasteful. Colleges now spend millions on manicured lawns and fancy gyms.
A University of Missouri admissions officer bragged to my TV show crew about the university's "day spa" and said when it comes to recruiting students, "more important than reading, writing and arithmetic" is giving "our Tigers spring break every time they step into the student recreation complex."
I'm happy that Missouri's students like their luxurious gym, but I don't want to help pay for it. If the school thinks its "day spa" is crucial for recruiting, let them sucker their own alumni into making voluntary contributions for it. Leave taxpayers alone.
Government subsidies encourage students who don't belong in college to go anyway. Many don't graduate, feel bad about themselves and end up deep in debt. The subsidies also invite schools to increase the cost of tuition.
Democrats complained we need Obamacare because health care costs "were skyrocketing." But while the cost of health care rose 296 percent over the past 30 years, college tuition rose 553 percent. College is now a grotesque spending bubble, funded by government, that's about to burst.
Law professor Glenn Reynolds, author of "The Education Apocalypse," writes, "The rapid increase in college tuition began just about exactly the time the federal government started helping to subsidize college ... (Y)ou don't want to engage in subsidies that make universities more bloated and more inefficient."
But that's what Obama and Sanders propose to do.
A more compassionate move would be to warn people that college is not as valuable as colleges advertise themselves to be.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel encourages students to escape the college trap by paying them $100,000 not to go to college and instead to found their own capitalist ventures.
If we really want to build a better future and not just keep going through the same old motions, experiments like that are a much smarter idea than throwing more money at the college bubble.
Did you write that essay? If so, its outstanding. In any case its one of very, very few posts that I’ll hang onto.
Sounds exactly like what I did. After the first couple of semesters of failing grades, I still insisted to my father that "I didn't want to waste four years of my life in the military."
After the third semester and a half, I drove myself to the Navy recruiter's office. I enlisted for six years, got some great schooling, advanced to E-6, but then eventually got out.
After the military experience, I was completely motivated. I promptly enrolled back at a decent state school, finished with honors, a technical BS degree, and have been more than gainfully employed for over 20 years. It's a lot easier to get through college when you're motivated and paying your own way. [Because I didn't know I would ever go back to school, I didn't use the GI Bill.]
I heard a man at my church say that his parents had a drug problem when he was growing up, that every Sunday morning they "drug" him to church.
And many of the rest that say they require degrees don't.
With the exception of a few in the medical, science and engineering field most jobs don't need degrees.
I drugged my kids and brain washed them too !
Thank you for posting this!
I pretty much majored in beer and girls, so it seemed like a natural vocation.
My Air Conditioner took a dive the first day I turned it on this year. I live in Georgia, I would have given the HVAC guy my check entire check book to get that joker back up and running.
University exist to make people talk like Krushchev.
Yes..... I wrote it in response to the many threads such as this one
Although I believe it is not really possible to evaluate a college education in $$ terms, some don’t have that view.
“Economist Bryan Caplan argues that there isn’t much evidence that college grads are paid more because they learned anything at college that is valuable to their jobs.”
I bet the kids at Cal Tech and MIT would argue that point.
I am one of those parents who is helping to defray my son’s college costs. He received a 50% scholarship and once complete, providing he decides on getting his masters will cost 100k. The reason I am assuming the loan which he will pay a good percentage of, is he knew what he wanted to do since he was 13, and moved towards that goal.
He got into a school which features an advanced business program which will allow him to get his Masters after 4 years instead of 6. He has selected the right job at the school to help him in his career. His outside activities reflect his career decision.
To me it is a good gamble. My daughter on the other hand is in community college. We pay as we go so she has no college debt. If she shows an inclination to a major which will enable her to earn a good salary, we will go the loan route. If she wants to take liberal arts, she is on her own.
Degrees like Womyn’s and Black Studies is destroying America. The only reason they exist is to give liberals who have no marketable skills the ticket to entry level jobs that require degrees.
I had an associate that had two kids that went to college for two years or so and then dropped out. He would complain endlessly about money down the drain.
Then, he became interested in the Civil War.
His daughter knowing he was pretty much un educated bought him a multi volume series of the history, an expensive and thorough set of books. . She began to use her college learned skills to keep him occupied with materials.
The son gravitated into the studies and became and still is a Confederate reinactor. He is a rebel field surgeon. His endeavor became quite focused on the doctors role in the rebel Camp.
It is impossible to know what a little bit of formal education can do or how it will benefit.
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