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First, I didn't realize you were the author; I thought you just posted it. Kudos for writing it.

I came it this from a style perspective. I thought you were setting up the reader metaphorically by first telling the story of the buggy whip, where the point was that it was a high-quality buggy whip manufacturer that made a product nobody wanted. The natural transfer of concept to college would have been that universities are also putting out a product that there is no demand for (which I believe is true, but not like the total market collapse of outdated technologies).

To your point that "a career that will not make a return on the investment made," I believe it's a three-fold issue.

The job market isn't paying the salaries.
The students aren't pursuing the marketable degrees.
The universities are cranking out graduates without regard to whether the job market is there for the graduates. In other words, they are graduating buggy whips.

The causes for #1 are also two-fold:

The jobs are being off-shored to lower-cost geographies.
The cheaper workers are being imported via H-1B visas and are displacing our graduates.

The causes for #2 are two-fold:

The students are choosing social-justice degrees with no anchoring in reality.
The K-12 schools are socially promoting students who either aren't ready for college or are better suited to trade studies.

The cause for #3 is two-fold:

The students have been socially indoctrinated to believe the only way to succeed is with a college degree, so everyone must now go to college.
The change to government-sponsored student loans has made it easy for universities to pad their enrollments in order to get the funding to sustain their tenures and research programs.

I understand your point that Ted and Alice (and Bob and Carol) made a series of bad decisions, and the students are also making a series of bad decisions, but I believe that leaving the analysis there is over-simplifying (you said I was over-thinking). In decision analysis, there is the concept of "good decision, bad outcome," and "bad decision, good outcome."

In the case of getting into the buggy whip business, I think we'd all agree that it was a case of bad decisions with bad outcomes. I don't think the college degree analogy is necessarily the same.

As I pointed out in my first post, if there is a market balance between supply and demand then the price paid will equal the cost plus profit. If the universities were balancing the supply of graduates with the demand for graduates, this would mean that the graduates were being paid a salary that allowed them to pay off their loans plus their living expenses.

The fact is that the university degree market is completely unbalanced and out of whack. Young students may be making good decisions to pursue a degree, but many are too uninformed at that age to understand that the universities are glutting the market right now. Just like with Ted and Alice, the universities have built up a capital investment in professors and manufactured an inventory of graduates that can't be sold.

The university result will eventually be the same: their inventory of unsold graduates will lose their value (in terms of alumni donations, university brand reputation, etc.), and the university might eventually go out of business if they can't get new student enrollments because the word is out that their graduates are unemployable.

Is all of this the fault of the student loan scam? Is it the result of students making bad career decisions? Is it the fault of businesses that are looking for cheaper workers or exporting jobs? Is it the fault of universities hungry for students flush with loan cash that they keep taking them in regardless of the ability of the job market to absorb the graduates?

But in any case, this is what I took away from the metaphorical parallel that you set up in your rant.

-PJ