Posted on 05/29/2019 11:03:45 PM PDT by Kaslin
I turned a small profit going to college. I went to a low cost school, U of Idaho, and took a useful degree, Civil Engineering. I worked summers as a land surveyor. Joined ROTC to avoid the draft and got a scholarship for three years. Still ended up in SE Asia, but as a USAF Civil Engineering officer, not a grunt.
Sounds like the 1960s.
My uncle keeps telling me about his college/med school experience in the same time frame. He said it was totally free. His peers today are walking out of med school with $200k+ in debt.
The conditions today are so radically different from what they were before credentialism went wild, that there is no comparison.
You got your "free" degree, now you will pay for every generations "free" college after you till you die.
Let’s see....
We structure the society so that there is a constant barrage of lies to kids that college is the ticket to success
We take steps to discourage kids from adolescent entrepreneurial activity by demanding “licensing” and “training” and gov fees for jobs like washing windows, preparing meals, mowing lawns, baby sitting, etc.
We raise the minimum wage and/or constantly deride entry level corporate jobs, sneering at McDonalds “burger flippers” or (ahem) baristas as loser positions, rather than places to learn discipline, work ethic, skills in money management etc.
We give NO, ZIP, ZERO, NADA info on topics like debt, investment, basic business principles, simple math and accounting principles that small business operators use, making the gov indoctrination camps we call “schools” ONLY focus on “getting you ready for college.”
We eliminate all (or most) of the shop, DO/DE (we used to call that for the guys who went to school half days and spent the rest of the day learning auto repair, hvac, electrician skills, plumbing and carpentry skills etc).
We then fill colleges with worthless bureaucrats who teach nothing, but fill their time as administrative wonks running a social indoctrination gulag with wackadoodle ideas on everything from God to econ to environmental lunacy to sexual deviancy.
We throw money at students willy nilly and make it easier to go into ruinous debt than it is to get a fake id to drink at a bar. This money consequently goes back into the university system (wow! weird how that works, huh?) and inflates the prices. It is almost like it is, like, causative or something! No problem, we, the ENTIRE BANKING AND FINANCE SYSTEM, will lend you the money, b/c we know Uncle Sugar will make you pay it back! The dumbasses call it “capitalism” (but it is not) and support this “free market enterprise” because you can sign your name to a piece of paper.
So, see? We set up this entire net that is more effective than stretching a net across a river for spawning salmon at dragging in an entire generation of young, naive, idealistic dupes and enslaving them for life.
It is your fault, though. We bear none of the responsibility. You should have refused to listen to the lies we told you and avoided the honeypots we put in your path. Pay up, punk.
On that note, I have an idea of how to solve this problem.
Require the colleges who foisted these programs on the students to offer, at their own expense, classes to those students teaching employable skills. That's what they were paid for anyway, so they're only being forced to provide training they were paid to provide. Colleges who can't or won't do this must refund the tuition to those who paid it, which would be the tax payers.
The students in turn would have to forfeit their degrees in "Gender Bender Studies". Those who don't are admitting they got something of value, and therefore are not entitled to any additional training.
Everybody wins. The students get employable skills which in this economy would allow them to find work to pay their student debts off. The colleges get off with having to provide the training they were paid to provide. And, the tax payers don't foot the bill.
Disagree.
A con job put up by grifters called the American Education establishment needs to be punished.
These leftists stole from the future to fund their totalitarian views and entrench themselves in the system.
They need to pay. They are ruining the country with their ridiculous social policies and demands.
Endowments need to be taxed, and college and university assets need to be put up for sale. Time to put the Woman’s Studies Center up for sale.
Endowments total in the trillions of dollars and are tax exempt. Every school that has accepted federal loan backing needs to have skin in the game and the large endowments at the elite schools who have led the policies that have damaged the future by essentially enslaving a generation through false advertising and sales (think guidance counselors and recruiters) need to pay and pay dearly.
Selling a lie is morally wrong, and spreading the responsibility to the self satisfied elite leftists is the only way to correct this wrong.
Not through punishing the taxpayers.
You see the bigger game here, that is great.
This is not a zero sum game.
The elite education establishment, and I count just about all four year colleges and universities need to pay for this debacle that they fostered.
If this went on in the areas of finance there would be an investigation and large fines to make things right. The elite schools have the endowments to clear up most of this issue and they need to pay!
By the way, home schooling is THE best training to avoid this monstrous evil we saddle kids with. My daughter learned aggressiveness, hard work (she won a prize for work delivering a local newspaper in liberal Chapel Hill NC), the value of money, how to succeed in a business (she started a “vacation service” business checking mail, phones, feeding pets etc for..... yep, the people on her newspaper route).
I am not saying she did not stray into some idiotic ideas and make stupid (and wicked) decisions. Some of them cost her. However, she got a taste of how the world works and realized that the training she got was true, and what the loons around her were preaching was a lie. Graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with almost no debt, and went straight into sales making over 65 K her first year. Now a nurse.
This is not me,or her mom, either. We were terrible failures in many ways, and I mean MANY! I am saying that the entire system of “education” is calculated to make an entitled, helpless, stupid and foolish victim into a debt and tax slave for life. This is a system that they did not design. Our generation pushed them into it, fed them lies, and then sneers at the mess. Only the parents can teach them to avoid the fools who are ruining the culture.
It won’t end well.
Nonsense, you are suggesting that these former students get slightly better tools to work to pay off debt fostered by elites in a rigged system. The colleges and universities are sitting on property assets and endowments that are in the trillions, Taxing those assets at a significant rate will clear this mess up quickly and stop this ridiculous drama.
I have seen many an angry young adult who are bitter beyond measure. There is no gain by forcing them to be enslaved by a lie by the elites that has been enforced by the government. Remember the government imprisoned these kids by making their loans not dischargeable unless dead. Many parents have also been caught and I know of a number of parents who have sold their houses because of parent loans.
This is in many ways a moral issue, about how predatory elites get their take, and keep their power.
Let us blame the root cause, not “the system.” The colleges have been taken over by Marxists, courtesy of the USSR’s long effort spanning decades. They then take kids who have no life experience and cram their heads full of Marxism. They don’t bother to tell those kids that those (___) studies degrees might be academically easy, but lead to no marketable skills. And the naive kids then get mad at “Wall Street” for their inability to get jobs, instead of the colleges that filled their heads with Marxism.
I would like to see class action suits filed against the colleges and universities for failing to teach basic life skills, starting with the skill of conducting some research before committing to a major to see what the job prospects are for graduates of that field of study.
I did this, and made the decision to major in biochemistry/molecular biology rather than French. I need never be jobless as a result.
I speak to young people whose bitterness is overwhelming.
Leftist elites have set the pathway to send these kids into Socialism and Communism in a major way. Parents too.
If we do not right this wrong by punishing the education establishment there will be an upheaval in this country that will end democracy and private property.
Tax the endowments and assets.
Jubilation all around?
Not from those whose assets, as the other side of someone’s debt, were wiped-out.
No, the elite and other school endowments.
I agree.
Incidentally, when Congress wrote laws that companies had to put aside money to pay their pension obligations those laws applied to Congress and government as well. Like virtually every company, the government was paying for pensions out of current revenues rather than putting aside money. Government realized it couldn’t raise taxes enough to put aside the huge amount such generous retirements required so they decided they would fund it through student debt. They outlawed other institutions giving out loans to students because they couldn’t take the competition as government rates had to be high. They also had to make it illegal for bankruptcy judges to discharge the debt. This is because bankruptcy judges always retired student debt first as a degree in Gender Studies has zero income potential and everybody knows that. Including the school that sold the students on their rosy future as Gender Councilors.
This is why no politician can do away with student debt, because they would immediately have to figure out a way to fund the bloated pensions of millions of retired and soon to retire government workers. All those present and former government workers vote too.
My parents sent me to school, and I worked as well.
Of course it took longer, but I graduated without debt.
Who says it has to be done in 4 years? What’s wrong with working to attend school?
There’s another root cause and that is runaway financialization backed by government. This racket of extorting a home’s worth of value from every student didn’t exist 30 years ago.
There is GOING TO BE a debt reset. We simply do not have an option about that. “We” cannot pay the debt that “we” (ahem) have piled up. We is in quotes b/c it actually has been piled up by a rapacious and evil central banking system for the sole purpose of transferring wealth and power to the top from the little people. They have destroyed actually everything this country was founded on, individual and states rights, freedom, refusal to engage in imperialistic foreign wars, and sound money. All these have actually grown out of, or been supercharged, by the money destroying federal reserve. We have come to the end of the tether, and the ONLY thing that can happen is the repudiation of this debt.
The only question is whether we will 1) see all assets destroyed by violent revolution or international war, and realize we just can’t pay it and not try 2) ruin the currency by inflation or hyperinflation, and thus collapse the government, to be replaced with .... who knows what or 3) We can repudiate the debt and live within our means, the same way someone bankruptcies and can’t get credit.
The third way is preferred, but is also the most difficult, calling for character and discipline. Therefore, it is my prediction that we will go for 2) and then maybe 1).
I see almost no hope for “the republic” though I am actually optimistic about the people who make up the backbone of what is left of the country. Our values work, and theirs don’t. Nowhere does this come our clearer than in the midst of societal collapse. It is scary, though.
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