Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
Student loans are an issue that is near and dear to my heart. While I myself was fortunate enough to receive an academic scholarship and graduate debt-free, I have seen dozens of friends and family get their lives completely wrecked by the wicked lies and free (for us, not you) money from the academic industrial complex. It is shocking how easy it is to get crushing amounts of student loans in 15 minutes with an internet connection—in fact, I can go out there tonight with literally no credit and put myself $50,000 dollars in debt to the federal government. Tonight! In less than twenty minutes. Can you? (Yes).
Are Millennials fucking dumb for going $100-200k in debt for a social studies degree with a healthy dollop of propaganda? Yes, of course, are you an idiot? They would have been better served by getting a library card and attending community college classes, but their vanity will never allow them to admit this in million years. All the Millennials who got bullshit soft science and libarts degrees think those degrees make them smarter than everyone on this forum. Every dumbass on Twitter and Reddit who does smoothbrain white-collar makework (ineptly) and then goes home and suffocates himself in carbs and streaming video will scream at you if you tell them their college degree was a scam and they have no critical thinking skills, although it's plainly evident from their truncated language abilities and poor attempts at reason. That would require admitting that they had fallen for a scam and that (contrary to received wisdom) they are profoundly dumber than a plumber, locksmith, or electrician who knew better.
You can't cheat an honest man. Con artists know their marks are motivated by selfishness, vanity, and greed—that's how they select their marks. Sure, these idiots were misled, and many of them had families picking up the tab anyway, but they wanted to believe all the bullshit because they've never wanted a life of purpose or self-reliance.
However, the list of bad actors is long, and it's not just boomer parents booming large with all the standard pro-college pablum. There is a propaganda machine beyond imagination propelling teenagers into a lifetime of debt; it's fueled by the academy, by the media, by corporations. "You need this fancy piece of paper if you want to be important and intelligent," says the rat-faced man in the New York Times editorial. "Without a degree, how will I really know you value Black lives?" asks the smug professor over a Zoom call (classes have been virtual for months but tuition prices haven't dropped). "Sorry, you just aren't qualified for this entry level, retard-manageable job," sighs the woman in the HR department. The entire system is in on the scam, and business has never been better. Forget perverse incentivization—the incentivization scheme for student loans is actively, overtly pernicious. In an age where you can find a hobbyist with a YouTube channel explaining any subject you'd ever learn in college, charging students more than an average American home's value for a fancy piece of paper isn't just immoral, isn't just a quaint holdover from a bygone era, but is actively evil.
The answer, as in most things, is skin in the game. So few of these actors have any skin in the game at all; this needs to change, starting with the universities. While there are many possible avenues to attack academia, the most promising to my mind is to make the universities financially responsible for their graduates, a warranty-like system against their graduates walking off the dais and into a lifetime of low-paying barista shitjobs that will never allow them to service their six-figure debt (this happens every single May in America and nobody seems to find it outrageous). I believe there should be a one-year warranty against graduate failure—if the graduate in question is unable to secure a job that pays what the university promised the student at the beginning of their program (this is another huge avenue of duplicity and would need to simultaneously be addressed, like how fast food joints have to tell you just how fat their food is going to make you now), the university becomes liable and must offer to buy the student's credential back for whatever the cost of attendance was plus interest (because fuck academia). The graduate, if they accept, would relinquish their credential (it's not like they learned anything anyway) and get their money back. I imagine that colleges would be far less likely to admit midwit strivers for bullshit propaganda degrees under this system.
As the system works now, there is absolutely zero responsibility on the university to offer a degree that is either cheap or useful for attaining a livelihood. The federal government will pay almost unlimited amounts of money for whatever tripe Professor Softmetal wants to teach, so of course they're going to juice the coffers with millions of teenage dupes and their student loan dollars. Have you been to a campus lately? They're Clown World given form. Monumental gleaming new construction taking up every inch of the quad, amenities beyond a Club Med in Monaco, blue-haired harridans and bugmen everywhere—the staggering amount of federal cash is physically corrupting these institutions. The scam is laid bare for all to see, and yet every fall a new crop of marks lines up to get their grievance studies degree. College is no longer a valuable stepping stone to a better life—in 2020, it's just somewhere you go to party and learn women can have penises too for four years before either Daddy gets you a job, or you end up working a job you could have easily gotten without a worthless degree. The whole thing is rotten; value-free indoctrination that takes you 25 years to pay off. Oh, what a scholastic opportunity!
Force the universities to pay for their wickedness. Make them guarantee their students. Make it illegal to require a college degree for low-skilled jobs. Bar the DOE from lending out vast sums of monopoly money to naiive teenagers, and absolutely gut the private student loan industry (morally on par with payday loan services). 90% of college degrees are worthless anyhow—merely an excuse to be exposed to far left politics daily for four years hundreds of miles away from the positive influence of your friends and family—we'll be doing everyone a favor by destroying this farce.
The modern university and the student loan pimps exhibit bad faith, malfeasance, corruption, and conflicted interest far beyond whatever Fannie Mae, Countrywide, Bear Stearns et al. did in 2008. It's criminal.
Academia delenda est.
Are Millennials fucking dumb for going $100-200k in debt for a social studies degree with a healthy dollop of propaganda? Yes, of course, are you an idiot? They would have been better served by getting a library card and attending community college classes, but their vanity will never allow them to admit this in million years. All the Millennials who got bullshit soft science and libarts degrees think those degrees make them smarter than everyone on this forum. Every dumbass on Twitter and Reddit who does smoothbrain white-collar makework (ineptly) and then goes home and suffocates himself in carbs and streaming video will scream at you if you tell them their college degree was a scam and they have no critical thinking skills, although it's plainly evident from their truncated language abilities and poor attempts at reason. That would require admitting that they had fallen for a scam and that (contrary to received wisdom) they are profoundly dumber than a plumber, locksmith, or electrician who knew better.
You can't cheat an honest man. Con artists know their marks are motivated by selfishness, vanity, and greed—that's how they select their marks. Sure, these idiots were misled, and many of them had families picking up the tab anyway, but they wanted to believe all the bullshit because they've never wanted a life of purpose or self-reliance.
However, the list of bad actors is long, and it's not just boomer parents booming large with all the standard pro-college pablum. There is a propaganda machine beyond imagination propelling teenagers into a lifetime of debt; it's fueled by the academy, by the media, by corporations. "You need this fancy piece of paper if you want to be important and intelligent," says the rat-faced man in the New York Times editorial. "Without a degree, how will I really know you value Black lives?" asks the smug professor over a Zoom call (classes have been virtual for months but tuition prices haven't dropped). "Sorry, you just aren't qualified for this entry level, retard-manageable job," sighs the woman in the HR department. The entire system is in on the scam, and business has never been better. Forget perverse incentivization—the incentivization scheme for student loans is actively, overtly pernicious. In an age where you can find a hobbyist with a YouTube channel explaining any subject you'd ever learn in college, charging students more than an average American home's value for a fancy piece of paper isn't just immoral, isn't just a quaint holdover from a bygone era, but is actively evil.
The answer, as in most things, is skin in the game. So few of these actors have any skin in the game at all; this needs to change, starting with the universities. While there are many possible avenues to attack academia, the most promising to my mind is to make the universities financially responsible for their graduates, a warranty-like system against their graduates walking off the dais and into a lifetime of low-paying barista shitjobs that will never allow them to service their six-figure debt (this happens every single May in America and nobody seems to find it outrageous). I believe there should be a one-year warranty against graduate failure—if the graduate in question is unable to secure a job that pays what the university promised the student at the beginning of their program (this is another huge avenue of duplicity and would need to simultaneously be addressed, like how fast food joints have to tell you just how fat their food is going to make you now), the university becomes liable and must offer to buy the student's credential back for whatever the cost of attendance was plus interest (because fuck academia). The graduate, if they accept, would relinquish their credential (it's not like they learned anything anyway) and get their money back. I imagine that colleges would be far less likely to admit midwit strivers for bullshit propaganda degrees under this system.
As the system works now, there is absolutely zero responsibility on the university to offer a degree that is either cheap or useful for attaining a livelihood. The federal government will pay almost unlimited amounts of money for whatever tripe Professor Softmetal wants to teach, so of course they're going to juice the coffers with millions of teenage dupes and their student loan dollars. Have you been to a campus lately? They're Clown World given form. Monumental gleaming new construction taking up every inch of the quad, amenities beyond a Club Med in Monaco, blue-haired harridans and bugmen everywhere—the staggering amount of federal cash is physically corrupting these institutions. The scam is laid bare for all to see, and yet every fall a new crop of marks lines up to get their grievance studies degree. College is no longer a valuable stepping stone to a better life—in 2020, it's just somewhere you go to party and learn women can have penises too for four years before either Daddy gets you a job, or you end up working a job you could have easily gotten without a worthless degree. The whole thing is rotten; value-free indoctrination that takes you 25 years to pay off. Oh, what a scholastic opportunity!
Force the universities to pay for their wickedness. Make them guarantee their students. Make it illegal to require a college degree for low-skilled jobs. Bar the DOE from lending out vast sums of monopoly money to naiive teenagers, and absolutely gut the private student loan industry (morally on par with payday loan services). 90% of college degrees are worthless anyhow—merely an excuse to be exposed to far left politics daily for four years hundreds of miles away from the positive influence of your friends and family—we'll be doing everyone a favor by destroying this farce.
The modern university and the student loan pimps exhibit bad faith, malfeasance, corruption, and conflicted interest far beyond whatever Fannie Mae, Countrywide, Bear Stearns et al. did in 2008. It's criminal.
Academia delenda est.
