Another Great Depression

My friend Jaime Long recently tweeted:

 

"Study up kids, you don't want to miss out on one of those jobs where you pretend to work & waste your life in front of a computer all day."

 

I could look it up, or you could, but either way there's not going to be any research presented here, so you'll just have to trust me that I've both heard and read about studies that found that college students barely learn anything in their first two years at university.

 

The results of those studies led to my looking back on my own experiences in those two years of my life, and my results were the same: I did learn a few key things, but nothing that was so massive it could not have been absorbed in the much more illuminating subsequent two years.

 

And by "much more illuminating" I mean the difference between a pitch-black basketball arena and a lit candle on center court.

 

That candlelight cost me and my parents approximately $50,000.

 

There is such a strong emphasis on getting a college education in this country, and I think that is misguided. America needs more people with tangible skills, like the ability to build or farm or somehow Create Value. A college degree does not Value create. Mine was a huge waste of time, actually, where I learned important academic and life lessons, but what made it a waste of time was that it was one or two years' worth of life and academic lessons that were stretched over four or five years, with the huge gaps filled in by a confusing orgy of partying.

 

What were we celebrating?

 

We were filling time in the funnest way available.

 

Can we afford to fill time anymore? Can we afford to continue to squander money and minds on sociology degrees? Isn't every human on earth already a sociologist by virtue of the necessity of paying attention to what people around them are doing? And that's just one of the expensive programs that leads to nothing.

 

I studied journalism at what I was told was one of the better journalism programs in America. When I graduated, I got as far away from journalism as possible.

 

It cost me and my parents $50,000 for me to realize I didn't want to be a journalist—that I'd only signed up for the program because I wanted to learn the disciplines involved: editing, proofreading, interviewing, layout/design, concision writing, etc.

 

I could have learned all those things within two years, even with partying on the weekends, as opposed to Wednesday through Sunday. There is a tremendous bulk built into most schools' requirements, and I have to think it's a money-generating thing for the schools, and again I have to defer to the marketplace: if the price in time and money continues to rise past the point where it makes economic sense for most Americans, then we need to stop feeding the leviathan, because the government is all too happy to have us owe them bigger and bigger debts. Those debts come with interest, and they're trying to make money, too. Plus, it's easier to control our lives, if necessary, that way—by having us indebted to them.

 

If I had a child who only had a marginal interest in going to college, I would encourage him or her to seek any career path in the world—not just the ones for which a college degree is necessary. My friend is a plumber, and he makes a good living in Cleveland, Ohio, in one of the worst places in one of the worst economies in world history. He didn't go to college, but people always need help with their plumbing.

 

That's actual value. That's tangible and useful.

 

We are pointlessly generating debt. Our employers need to start looking past degrees and into what really matters: the functioning of the individual's mind. Having gone to college, I am not impresed by college graduates. It's easier than high school, and seemingly the only graduation requirement is that you don't drink yourself to death.

 

And then at the end you get one of those jobs where you pretend to work and waste your life in front of a computer all day.

 

Another Great Depression, indeed.