[Kaslin]

The rest of the title is: A 19 Year Old's View of Today's "Bumper Bowling Generation"

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

As a society, we accept the collective belief that as long as we put more kids through college, our society will naturally progress. There is the assumption that if students continue to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to pay for an inflated education, they will automatically become more prosperous. Nowadays, higher learning is more about accreditation than education. It's about telling people you have a degree rather than turning knowledge into something palatable.

Preach it brother. This is one of the pillars of our secular American faith, and it needs to be knocked down. Viva education! Down with college!

[Huskrrrr]

As a college instructor I couldn’t agree more! As companies find it harder to compete (especially in California) I see more and more of their former employees in my classroom, looking for that mythical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

[Tupelo]

Today's kids are being seduced into thinking that everyone can be the CEO or a top executive. Reality is, we still need worker bees. We need that machinist who can make and repair things. We need that carpet installer, that bricklayer, that carpenter, that pressman, that assembly line worker, that truck driver. All of which can make in excess of 50K-75K right now and lots more with OT. Instead of millions of mew college graduates driving cabs, we need TRADE SCHOOL graduates, (since apprenticeships seem to have disappeared) working for themselves and their families instead of working to pay back student loans.

[logitech]

I remember bowling parties when I was a kid in the 60’s.

There were no gutter guards.

[FreedomPoster]

Ping.

[Impy]

Mama Boucher says College is the DEVIL!!!!!

[lula]

The problem is there are no consequences, everyone does what they want. When they fail they blame someone else. Look at our leadership power hungry liars, thieves, philanderers, etc...and they all get a pass. It used to be a scandal would yield career ending consequences. Our culture is done...stick a fork in it.

[WesternPacific]

Without giving students the opportunity to fail sets them up to fail or actually guarantees them to fail.

[KantianBurke]

“However, this future college graduate will have an average of $50,000 dollars of student loan debt to pay off. Instead of trying to create a new business, this young man or woman will be worrying about getting a job to pay off their student loans. The weight of these student loans can slowly drag down a young entrepreneur’s vision to create a new business and take new risks in the marketplace.”

WARNING - GOP HACK ALERT! Odd how the schmuck fails to mention that when Dubya and GOP controlled Congress they did squat regarding the affordability of college. Wait, scratch that. They DID do something: they passed a law prohibiting the discharge of student loans. This was a financial payoff for the college loan industry which plenty of us conservatives decried for the very reasons the author lists above. And dum dum’s answer is to skip college? Even money his kids are offered a place at Harvard, they’re damn well going to partake.

[married21]

I am a total liberal arts geek, but I am determined that my kids should have both employable skills and “big picture” knowledge, of the kind that college can offer. Not sure how this will play out, but in the meantime, my highschool student is learning all about shop tools in her robotics club. She comes home with a huge smile on her face, because she has been trained on another piece of equipment, or helped do something real, like building shelves. Something good is going to come from this.

[x]

When I was growing up, it was common for sports teams to award trophies to all the players so no little kid would have his or her feelings hurt at the end of the season. Today, there are school districts which no longer give out "F'" grades, and hundreds of high schools have removed class ranks so that my generation will feel less pressure to succeed. By the time my generation gets out into the "real world," what will happen when our bosses criticize us and rattle the core of our tenuous self-esteems? While my parents and grandparents grew up enduring the Great Depression and two World Wars, will history look back on my peers as the "Bumper Bowling Generation?"

The standard story is that these are boomer and post-boomer parents who give everybody trophies. Doesn't it go back further than that? Didn't a lot of boomer kids get trophies just for playing from teams set up by their greatest generation parents?

[gaijin]

Banks and other biz do due dilligence before extending loans —you can’t get a loan for a stupid pipe-dream.

But SCHOOLS do no such due dilligence —the loans are written without a glance, again and again.

WHY?

Because if a student declares bankruptcy, the debt REMAINS —schools know they can ENSLAVE poor black students studying sociology at Harvard for 6 years.

Why all the cushy treatment for the LIBERAL UNIVERSITY SYSTEM? Aren’t they the ones saying that private biz is just a pack of enslavers taking advantage of young people...? Aren’t THEY the ones saying that the system is rigged...?

Let them live up to their own rhetoric, and let THEM bear a sliver of the debt risk:

Make student debt for Liberal Arts degrees dischargeable via bankruptcy.

The reason for this injustice is because easy credit for dumb young students ensures a steady stream of victims for culture-hating Profs who otherwise have to work in record stores, head shops, or scribbling poetry.

SUBSIDY FOR HYPOCRITICAL, DIRTY LEFTIES.

[jamaksin]

Far to much emphasis on costs ... far easier to capture and cut, cut, cut ...

The game, however, starts with sales, sales, sales ... a point sorely neglected.

You ain't got sales, you got nothing!

[familyop]

Oh, no, we don’t want the dreaded trades-males starting private sector labor unions again. Our government unions are much better and provide licensed, approved persons to administer this economy without manufacturing. Besides, robots have replaced all of the dreaded trades-males and other working class trash. Better than that, we’ve nearly got our enemies to the point of extermination! Mhuahahahahahahahahaha! Isn’t gatekeeping wonderful! We have complete control...complete control! Mhuahahahahahahahaha!

[Piles of irony and sarcasm there while wringing hands in emulation of the highly educated political/regulator class.]

More sincerely, tough, technically inclined young people will own tomorrow. Begin to treat them well, and they’ll treat you well. But they won’t be your slaves. Slavery is anti-conservative in the American sense. Slavery is more suitably accommodated by the kinds of communist/fascist nations that our business, academic and political leaders are in bed with.