You’ve already heard about the Freshman 15, when no amount of college dorm sex burns enough calories gained from 4-7 days of binge drinking per week.  So let’s move on to how college makes people stupid.  Question:

Why do people want so badly a college degree?

a) They want to be smarter
b) They’re scared of not appearing at least middle-class
c) They want lots of sex and booze and drugs

There’s some truth to all of the above options but when you dig deep into people’s choices about anything, it’s nearly always fear, fear and fear that drives people’s actions.  The correct answer is B.  I’ll prove it.

College is an Insane Car Dealership

Your kid wants a car so it’ll be easier for him to get a job.  Makes sense.  You’re nice and stupid so you give him 250k and tell him to pick a dealer and buy one. Any dealer, any car.   So he goes to the dealer with the hottest receptionists and all you can drink soda and all the cars in the lot cost 250k.  All sorts of cars: a new Ferrari; 2014 Toyota truck with 30k on it; 1986 Yugo; dead 1970 Vanagon with a homeless person living in it.  Insane, right?  Well that’s what’s happening when someone sends their kid to college, except the Toyota truck is an Electrical Engineering degree while the Yugo is a Fine Arts degree and the broken down Vanagon is a Social Justice degree (that’s a real major at some schools!). And the only way to explain this insanity is that people will accept insanity when they’re scared to death.

“But college graduates earn more than those without college degrees.”  

They would’ve earned even more if they hadn’t graduated from college.  Right, Bill Gates?  Yeah, Steve Jobs?  And that’s why Peter Thiel is paying $100000 to the best students to *drop-out* of schools like MIT.  College doesn’t make anyone smarter and more employable. Only you can make yourself smarter and more employable.  Khan Academy is on Youtube if you need a free tutor.

Value of College Education.

Question: What should Jamie major in if she wants to be a journalist?
a) Physics
b) Communications
c) Journalism

Answer is “A” because there’s high demand for journalists who can write about science.  If you got this question wrong then you’re not ready for college.  You’re going to pick the Yugo simply because it’s an automatic and you can’t drive stick (math), so no Toyota truck (most sensible option) or Ferrari for you.

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College is a social and intellectual filtering system, and an ineffective one at that.  Most degrees from most schools can’t even ensure that its recipient can do basic arithmetic and isn’t a psychopath.  A college degree is as good a filter as Catholic schools are at ensuring your daughter remains a virgin till married and son doesn’t become a cocksucker.  But employers don’t give a shit that colleges suck at what they do because they’re not the ones paying for an overpriced filtering system. It’s the batshit crazy and the government who pay for things that don’t work.

And the best companies  — from Microsoft to Amazon to Google to Apple — know college is a broken filtering system so they’re beginning to avoid using it to select applicants.

Another question:

What did famed journalist Peter Jennings major in college?
a) Journalism
b) Communications
c) He dropped out before deciding on a major because he thought that college is stupid.

Correct answer is C.

When Robert Maynard Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago, he said this about education:

“The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens…and promote the intellectual development of the people.”

College isn’t supposed to make you employable.  It’s supposed to be more of a monastic experience, a “life of the mind” that the University of Chicago is (or cynically, was once) known for and few, very few 18 year olds are ready for.  From Wiki, on Hutchins’s observations on higher education:

Hutchins also explores some of the improper directions educational institutions have taken in the United States. He argues that education is becoming nothing more than a trade school, and a poor trade school at that. As an example, Hutchins discusses the relationship between a foundry and the local college in a particular town in California. This college offers courses on doing foundry work, which instruct students to become workers at the foundry. In this way, the college is satisfying the need of the community for foundry workers rather than the intellectual needs of the individual. Further, Hutchins asserts that the foundry students actually receive poor training since educators do not have the practical experience of working in the foundry. Hutchins believes the students would receive a much more efficient and thorough education on working in a foundry by actually working in that foundry.

It’s the occupation’s responsibility, not the school’s, to train employees because schools suck at training workers. Yet we have politicians who want to help businesses by offering free tuition to all students (so they can take classes that’ll make them dumber and unemployable).  This isn’t a new development, Hutchins was writing in the early 1950s, and colleges were already fucking students up in their own fucked up way.

Hutchins also warns that education has shifted its focus from being educational to custodial. He charges that many schools have become no more than baby-sitting services for adolescents, protecting them from the tumultuous world of youth.

Like today’s “safe spaces.” Again, he’s writing in the early 1950s so stop saying the whining started with Millennials.  Millennials didn’t learn their habits from technology, they learned it from their parents, who learned from their parents, and so forth.  Most colleges are just reinforcing what students learn from their parents.

Even an undergrad degree from Harvard doesn’t make one employable at a socially acceptable job. Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello graduated from Harvard with a BA in Social Studies, also known as Left-Wing Studies.  Since few wanted to hire someone with his mindset and attitude, he made a living with his giant penis.

“When I graduated from Harvard and moved to Hollywood, I was unemployable. I was literally starving, so I had to work menial labor and, at one point, I even worked as an exotic dancer. ‘Brick House’ (by The Commodores) was my jam! I did bachelorette parties and I’d go down to my boxer shorts. Would I go further? All I can say is thank God it was in the time before YouTube! You could make decent money doing that job – people do what they have to do.”^[9]

Stripping is a great job actually, just not one expects from a Harvard grad.  So he became an alternative rock star, one of the few jobs (such as academia) for leftist Harvard grads.

Not saying there’s no value to attending Harvard and if a kid from working class Mountlake Terrace gets in, I’ll tell her to go, that it’ll be worth the debt, even if she picks the wrong major and ends up unemployable. This is her chance to experience one of the most competitive environments in the world, and that’s priceless.  This may be her only chance to be socialized into the sort of leader Harvard wants their students to become, to act as Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard drop-out) does in this scene:

Just don’t expect Harvard to socialize every student into a Mark Zuckerberg. A lot of students choose the wrong major and turn into narcissistic victims, like the Yale undergrads from scene below:

Even Yale, which requires its undergrads to live on campus till graduation so they can be socialized into well educated Yale graduates, has trouble socializing some of its students to stop acting like self-absorbed children.  (Well educated people aren’t easily offended).  Imagine what it’s like at a less competitive school, what are students there turning out to be?  Are they trained to be offended by everything?  Point is, the value of an elite school is in the experience, not in the results.  And there are many comparable experiences that don’t cost anywhere near 250k and don’t have anything to do with college, if you’re willing to let them have it.

Free College Movement
Yet some politicians support free college education — even at the community college level — in an effort to help businesses and the poor.  This is another misguided effort. It won’t help businesses, it’ll burden them with taxes for education that produce fuck ups they’ll have to retrain.  It won’t help the poor, it’ll humiliate them and teach them that they alone are not capable of becoming well educated and well employed.  It won’t help anyone except for the envious and those who channel their contempt for those less fortunate as feudal benevolence.  The Last Psychiatrist, commenting on this madness:

All the system had to do, starting around 1965, is not incentivize this madness.  If there were not guaranteed student loans, up to any amount, available equally across majors and across colleges, independent of skills or promise or societal need, none of this would have happened.  Easy money got us into this mess, and easy money will keep us sailing until we go right off the edge of the map.

And into the abyss, where we’ll be serving Big Mac and fries to a new Master.