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Anyone have a link to a good, short article that explains why communism is bad? I’d like to give it to come college students who have spent most of their education being brainwashed by idiot leftists.

Obviously people who have been "brainwashed” cannot be convinced by a short article. FA Hayek wrote his classic refutation of socialism/communism during WWII, and it was a sensation in America (Hayek wrote in Britain) when The Road to Serfdom
(Link to the Readers' Digest Condensed Version in PDF!) was published while Hayek was sailing to America for what had been expected to be a routine author’s tour promoting his book - but which played to overflow audiences everywhere.
Serfdom is filled with topical references to people who were famous at the time but are now little remembered - but you could focus on the chapter entitled (IIRC) “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It treats a fundamental fallacy of Communism - the bland assumption that a dictatorial government will naturally be run by well-meaning people. The Black Book of Communism - Crimes, Terror, Repression is a validation of Hayek’s thesis on this point.
The Wikipedia link above also mentions the similarity of Communism and Naziism; Serfdom hammers the similarities, and discusses the nuances of difference, heavily. Writing before the death camps were public knowledge, Hayek predicted, on the basis of the public knowledge of the Gulag (as Solzenitsen later styled it), that revolting systematic crimes by the Nazis would be come to light.

Of course propaganda is central to communism and other forms of socialism, including our own “democracy” in which shocking portions of the public at large can be systematically diverted from significant facts about the government, and can be convinced of fantastic improbabilities like the idea that Mitt Romney is a criminal. My own theory on the “brainwashed” problem is that our journalism is propagandistic because it can be, no other explanation is necessary. Why wouldn’t it be, if it had opportunity? And my theory on the reason journalism has the opportunity is because journalism is unified. Journalism it is unified because
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Ch 10
And of all people, journalists “meet together,” at least virtually, more than anyone. The Associated Press newswire is nothing but a continuous, 24/7 virtual meeting which determines what is, and what is not, news.
IMHO propaganda always has to begin with sophistry. The term “sophistry” comes from the Greek word “Sophist” denoting a party which claimed superior wisdom. Such a claim leads to very short, very unsatisfying arguments: I am wise, you are not. Therefore I am right, and you are wrong.” Claiming wisdom came into very bad odor on that account. The school which rose up in competition with the Sophists was the Philosophers. Philosophers eschewed a claim of wisdom, but claimed only to love wisdom - thus, to be open to arguments based on facts and logic. AP members claim “objectivity” for all AP members - and IMHO “objectivity,” as they use the term, is merely code for the Sophists’ claim of “wisdom.” Another way of saying that is to assert that it is inherently impossible to know that you are objective, and that anyone who claims actual objectivity - instead of having the humility to limit oneself to claiming to try to be objective - is guilty of arrogance. And a claim of trying to be objective must be backed up by explicit admission of the known reasons why you might not be objective. Sincere admission of the possibility of failure in the quest for objectivity, of course, is logically incompatible with membership in an organization - Associated Press, exhibit A - which you know will claim that you actually are objective.
Why is journalism’s propaganda leftist? My theory is that the internal logic of any institution which does nothing except criticize, condemn, and complain is and can only be socialism. Socialism is simply the theory that the complainers should be in charge. Whereas capitalism takes for granted that people should have authority only to the extent that they get things done of, by, and for the people.
The word “progress” appears once in the Constitution - as a good to be promoted, and in the context of creativity of the people, not politicians. One of the ironies of “progressives” is that they oppose progress. Drill for oil? It is “progressives” who will oppose it, and “conservatives” who will support it. Which only tells you that our political labels are Newspeak. As does the fact that the meaning of the term “liberal” was (according to Safire’s New Political Dictionary) inverted in the 1920s - but only in America. Note that Serfdom was written in Britain, by someone who learned English in America before the 1920s. He uses the term “liberal” heavily in the book, and in its non-inverted sense. It is a confusion factor which he acknowledges with sorrow in a later edition.