SergeantBrother
Notorious Member
Recently there has been some public debate over forgiveness of college loans. I am of two minds on this topic, because on one hand these college loans are, without a doubt, predatory. Young barely adults are told that higher education is the end all and be all of success and then pushed into signing away their future, going tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, to spend 4 years (often more) of the most precious years of their lives to very often receive an education that is close to being worthless. These young adults were lied to and tricked into getting, or trying to get because about half of people who attend college drop out, these worthless degrees for a job market that doesn't demand them. On the other hand, should the people who didn't have a chance to go to college at all be forced to pay these ridiculously high debts, which have increased in expense at ten times the rate of inflation over the half century, for people often richer than them? Also, considering the vast expense and questionable utility of college, forgiving student debt is just going to eventually push up tuition fees even higher and encourage even more young adults to go into massive debt to get increasingly useless degrees.
The answer to me is obvious regardless of whether or not we forgive student debt. The higher education bubble needs to burst, these colleges and universities need to be taken down several notches and be removed from the high position they have in society. Far too many people go to college now, people who should be learning trades or other useful job skills, things which they may well have to do anyway after the spend outrageous sums of money and prime years of life getting a piece of paper.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that very few job skills are taught in college and increasingly few careers require such an education as a part of the job, there is a genuine pressure for people to get degrees because when people apply for many jobs, they will be competing with people who have four year degrees. Such a great amount of importance is wrongly placed on these degrees and with the power within the job market still largely in the hands of the employers, someone without a degree will have difficulty getting hired even if the college graduates have no appreciable advantage in job skills. There is some slight useful basis in this bias, because a college degree does serve as an IQ test of sorts, and a test of character too, because someone with a degree has at least the intelligence and/or work ethic to complete that degree. It's a very expensive test though, which becomes increasingly less useful as the pressure for more degrees and more students and more money pushes down academic standards and causes an explosion in useless majors. These sorts of tests would be even more useless if there were better ways for people to gain or prove their abilities - job training, work experience, apprenticeships, even old fashioned IQ tests.
Do some people need to go to college to get the job they want? Yes - doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. They are the exceptions and even those fields could do with some major streamlining with regard to education.
I would contend that the "underwater basket weaving" degrees are even than even useless. They in fact have a very negative effect upon society and students. One thing is that as more money flows into higher education to give young people useless degrees, the more power higher education will have over society and the more ostracized people will be for not buying into this terrible system. This creates an economic death spiral as more people get useless degrees, which become increasingly useless but also increasingly desired as more people get them, and a larger and larger part of our economy and fraction of our lives is dedicated to this parasitic system.
Another even more insidious effect is the propaganda that is ubiquitous with higher education across the nation, and likely the entire western world. Here leftist professors, often literal communist, sometimes apologists for mass murder, are paid to indoctrinate young adults at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives. Universities are festering nests for some of the world's most vile ideologies to grow and spread - social justice, feminism, intersectionality, Marxism, post modernism, and general hatred for the west, whites, men, Christianity, freedom, and logic. Universities are increasingly dogmatic echo chambers as well, where dissenting opinion is harshly punished and the students are eitehr punished for their beliefs or taught to be closed minded to opposing views. Young adults are at the stage where they yearn to become full adults, where they want to prove their intelligence and wisdom, then they are placed into an environment where all of their peers and authority figures push an increasingly radical and extreme agenda. These vile ideologies likely couldn't survive in a free market, but they are supported both by the government and by misguided students (or their parents) who pay into the system in the hopes of gaining useful skills.
To make the situation worse, overt leftism isn't the only sort of hidden lesson the students are receiving. Universities are very often dens of iniquity where degeneracies of all kind are encouraged. I'm sure the thing that is jumping to many people's minds are alcoholism and promiscuity. Once again, teenagers who have just left their parents home and are full of hormones and unused to this kind of freedom are easily influenced by the university subculture.
What is my solution? Well, as individuals we need to stop going to college. The educational industrial complex needs to be broken, and with it the chains that it uses to bind us and make us its slaves. This is going to involve some hardship, because these are vast and powerful institutions and they aren't going to go down without a fight. Young people who wisely decide not to go to a university are going to suffer certain disadvantages. Then again, being $100K in debt for a history degree has some disadvantages too. Those of you who know me know that I have children and I will be discouraging them from seeking higher education unless there are some exceptional circumstances that motivate them to do so. Hopefully more people can make this same decision and the power that higher education has over our society can be diminished before it destroys us.
The answer to me is obvious regardless of whether or not we forgive student debt. The higher education bubble needs to burst, these colleges and universities need to be taken down several notches and be removed from the high position they have in society. Far too many people go to college now, people who should be learning trades or other useful job skills, things which they may well have to do anyway after the spend outrageous sums of money and prime years of life getting a piece of paper.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that very few job skills are taught in college and increasingly few careers require such an education as a part of the job, there is a genuine pressure for people to get degrees because when people apply for many jobs, they will be competing with people who have four year degrees. Such a great amount of importance is wrongly placed on these degrees and with the power within the job market still largely in the hands of the employers, someone without a degree will have difficulty getting hired even if the college graduates have no appreciable advantage in job skills. There is some slight useful basis in this bias, because a college degree does serve as an IQ test of sorts, and a test of character too, because someone with a degree has at least the intelligence and/or work ethic to complete that degree. It's a very expensive test though, which becomes increasingly less useful as the pressure for more degrees and more students and more money pushes down academic standards and causes an explosion in useless majors. These sorts of tests would be even more useless if there were better ways for people to gain or prove their abilities - job training, work experience, apprenticeships, even old fashioned IQ tests.
Do some people need to go to college to get the job they want? Yes - doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. They are the exceptions and even those fields could do with some major streamlining with regard to education.
I would contend that the "underwater basket weaving" degrees are even than even useless. They in fact have a very negative effect upon society and students. One thing is that as more money flows into higher education to give young people useless degrees, the more power higher education will have over society and the more ostracized people will be for not buying into this terrible system. This creates an economic death spiral as more people get useless degrees, which become increasingly useless but also increasingly desired as more people get them, and a larger and larger part of our economy and fraction of our lives is dedicated to this parasitic system.
Another even more insidious effect is the propaganda that is ubiquitous with higher education across the nation, and likely the entire western world. Here leftist professors, often literal communist, sometimes apologists for mass murder, are paid to indoctrinate young adults at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives. Universities are festering nests for some of the world's most vile ideologies to grow and spread - social justice, feminism, intersectionality, Marxism, post modernism, and general hatred for the west, whites, men, Christianity, freedom, and logic. Universities are increasingly dogmatic echo chambers as well, where dissenting opinion is harshly punished and the students are eitehr punished for their beliefs or taught to be closed minded to opposing views. Young adults are at the stage where they yearn to become full adults, where they want to prove their intelligence and wisdom, then they are placed into an environment where all of their peers and authority figures push an increasingly radical and extreme agenda. These vile ideologies likely couldn't survive in a free market, but they are supported both by the government and by misguided students (or their parents) who pay into the system in the hopes of gaining useful skills.
To make the situation worse, overt leftism isn't the only sort of hidden lesson the students are receiving. Universities are very often dens of iniquity where degeneracies of all kind are encouraged. I'm sure the thing that is jumping to many people's minds are alcoholism and promiscuity. Once again, teenagers who have just left their parents home and are full of hormones and unused to this kind of freedom are easily influenced by the university subculture.
What is my solution? Well, as individuals we need to stop going to college. The educational industrial complex needs to be broken, and with it the chains that it uses to bind us and make us its slaves. This is going to involve some hardship, because these are vast and powerful institutions and they aren't going to go down without a fight. Young people who wisely decide not to go to a university are going to suffer certain disadvantages. Then again, being $100K in debt for a history degree has some disadvantages too. Those of you who know me know that I have children and I will be discouraging them from seeking higher education unless there are some exceptional circumstances that motivate them to do so. Hopefully more people can make this same decision and the power that higher education has over our society can be diminished before it destroys us.
