Posted on 09/17/2025 5:58:20 AM PDT by karpov
Choosing a college major is a life-altering decision, made millions of times a year by 18-year-olds with little exposure to higher education or labor markets. Colleges frame programs in terms of possibilities, not probabilities. They pitch degrees like products, emphasizing prestige and potential while downplaying the risks of dropping out or ending up underemployed. These institutions influence such decisions millions of times a year, but students make them only once. And while schools hold internal data on outcomes and labor markets, they rarely share what matters most.
To the institution, the student is a sales prospect, not a learner they’re accountable for educating.
Anyone choosing a major should know his odds of finishing. He should be able to trace a degree to the jobs it qualifies him for—and to see what those jobs actually pay. Students deserve to know how often graduates land relevant roles, how much they earn over time, and whether they’ll be actively recruited or stuck searching job boards with little traction.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics catalogs nearly every job in the U.S. economy using the Standard Occupational Classification system (SOC), tracking data on wages, job growth, and employment across nearly 900 distinct occupations. The Department of Education classifies more than 2,800 academic programs using the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) system.
A federal “crosswalk” links CIP codes to SOC codes, mapping degrees to potential careers. But that mapping shows intent, not results. Misalignment between curricula and job requirements, weak labor demand, or industry norms can make the crosswalk meaningless.
Take ballet. A degree in ballet—yes, the codes are that granular—maps directly to the occupation “Dancer.” But most professional dancers didn’t earn a college degree. They trained in studios or conservatories. The link exists on paper but rarely in practice.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
college scams
They also need to weed out useless degrees.
Colleges are money making schemes in cooperation with Govt.
Amazing how these “liberal” institutions can with a clear and loving heart keep charging more and more for degrees that are worthless.
They sell a bill of goods, when the goods are rotten, they just smile sitting on their bags of cash.
I am sure the 100k you spent for the ancient Egyptian lesbian art studies degree will make you loads of cash….
Of course just like housing mortgage “crisis” the buyer is just a guilty as the lender….
Colleges themselves should be the only way to finance an education (other than cash from your pocket).
The college loans you money and waits for you to pay back the $100,000 loan from your big income working in the field of Lesbian Dance Theory.
Or the college loans you money and gets paid back from your Engineering degree.
And if money at the college gets tight, they stop building the campus like a classy resort for rich kids and instead they just make a utilitarian school campus where people learn a profession.
I agree big time.
There are a lot of YT videos about “art school is a scam.”
Most are made by art school grads.
Maybe that concept will expand.
In fact, most of the time college IS a scam.
The most under-utilized training institution is the US military. One of my high school friends went into the Air Force when I went to college. He wanted to be a pilot, but vision limitations changed that. He became a flight mechanic. I went on to get a Ph.D. while he stayed in the Air Force for 20 years, retired at 38, and worked for a major airline until he was 60. He out-earned me his entire life. After he retired, his income was over double mine. (I was a university professor.) For many high school students, it’s an option worth considering.
Many degrees are such that employees could claim a fake degree and their employer could never tell by their performance on the job.
Obama's so-called Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 is "paying forward. Over-inflated tuition became debt, and then public debt when debtors default. The scam of most college tuition and overpaid faculties and bureaucrats is a Democrat-run con.
Coming to its end.
And paying for your own brainwashing on a 30 year student loan......
You can get a degree in ballet??
Isn’t that all marketing, in general?
If our universities and colleges were like trade colleges who turned out graduates with no actual marketable skills they would be sued into bankruptcy. Actually they are just like trade schools/colleges that got sued into bankruptcy.
Agreed. And the best way is to change the headline about college marketing to "Everyone Should Ignore College Marketing" while also getting government money out of colleges.
You can determine the value of a college degree (or trade school) by picking the career before going to school. Ask people already in that career what kind of training is valuable to both do the work well and also make you marketable enough for people to hire you in that field. Those people know which colleges/trade schools/majors have real value because those are the ones who ultimately will make the decision of whether or not to hire you.
If all of the consumers (students and their parents) did that, the useless degrees would disappear and the free market will keep the degrees of real value.
College, if done right, is a conduit to network with people in your desired industry. If you go to college for four years, without trying to network, it’s a waste.
Mixed feelings on this. Humans need to dream. But tempering that dream is most important.
Some years ago I heard an interview with a young woman who was studied theater but also mechanical engineering. She consults on stage and prop design and construction - the really difficult stuff like chandeliers falling from the ceiling.
A woman who just began working the desk at my gym is doubling in music and public policy/administration (something like that),
The job of the college is to impart genuine, testable knowledge of the subjects that are taught. They have no business predicting or selling the results of that knowledge— that’s up to the student.
Like many other institutions and corporations, universities do not exist anymore to provide a product that people want and will be beneficial to them. They exist mainly to create DEBT to keep the FED ecosystem churning. New debt must always be created or the system collapses.
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