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Young Americans: Leave Those Creepy College Covid Camps And Start Your Careers Now. The ‘everyone should go to college’ mantra is brittle, false, failing, and harmful.
The Federalist ^ | 02/02/2022 | Joy Pullmann

Posted on 02/02/2022 9:14:03 AM PST by SeekAndFind

Despair is in the air. Three-quarters of Americans believe their own country is in decline.

Trafalgar Group, December 2021

It’s hard to dispute that when you see things like junkies destroying U.S. infrastructure while governors who liberally micromanage law-abiding people throw up their hands.

h/t Aaron Renn

I do think there are major problems in our country that are not likely to get seriously addressed in the near future. I do think they matter, and that because of rampant terrible American leadership (and acquiescence to such leadership by the people), millions will continue to suffer.

Yet I also think there are lots of amazing opportunities happening right now that people need to awake to and seize. To seize these opportunities, Americans must break out of societal conventions, ways of thinking, and life scripts that clearly don’t work any more but feel comfortable and without viable alternatives. The people who are willing to take such risks to make fresh choices that fit our new reality will overall be handsomely rewarded.

That brings us to college. The “everyone should go to college” mantra is brittle, false, failing, and harmful. Deep down, we all know it, and we’ve known it for a long time. Those promised returns to income from starting life in deep debt are simply not materializing like they used to. That Boomer windfall is long gone, if it ever existed in the first place.

But lots of young people and their parents don’t know their other options, or they know about them but are scared of the social pressure to live by failed narratives. Other great options are in fact plentiful, and partly because of our societal decline. Pertinent to the college discussion is the desperation of employers to find talent and their motivation to train that talent. It has never been higher in my lifetime (I’m “in the middle of our life’s journey” as an older millennial) and in the lifetimes of most working-age people today.

If you haven’t heard, employers are starved for employees thanks to stupid lockdowns and stupid attempts at medical coercion. A friend in the trades recently told me he knows hiring managers in construction who are combing active build sites to try to find people to hire and train for skilled labor jobs that are lifelong career opportunities.

He sent a recruiting flyer boasting jobs in plumbing, welding, HVAC, and the like starting at $30,000 plus benefits worth some $20,000 more per year, and by the fifth year of employment — or when a comparable peer would be finishing college — a salary of $60,000 plus benefits. That’s making more than the U.S. median household income in five years of work, with no college debt or timewasting. It’s well above the typical white-collar job trajectory, and can lead to salaries of six figures annually after a decade or so, as well as the possibility of starting one’s own business.

Not to mention, the work has excellent prospects. Plumbing and welding can’t be outsourced to China or India, and the average age of trades workers is well above the U.S. median. This is just one illustration of what’s happening in hundreds of thousands of companies and industries, and it’s an amazing shift in the job market.

When I was looking for my first job during the Great Recession, employers generally didn’t want to train people. They wanted people to walk onto the job ready to go. They would train, but not extensively. Employers wanted employees to ideally spend years of free labor and training in college and unpaid internships just to get an entry-level professional job. Employers wanted other people to pay the price of training potential hires.

But now, many employers will take almost any warm body that moves. They will train it, dress it, pay it, and smooch it good morning every day if it just shows up to work. This is an amazing opportunity for everyone who needs a better or more substantive job, or whose school or employer is abusing him with political ideology and none-of-their-business surveys about what injections he’s recently put into his body and what’s up at the tippy top of his nasal cavity.

This is also an opportunity to rip apart the damaging “go to college, everyone” paradigm. A college education can be useful for some people, but let’s be real: Most colleges do not provide an education, they just provide a very expensive and largely socially wasteful sorting function for big corporate. This is very well established with good data, and has been true for decades.

On the flip side of the “go to college, get set in your career for life” false claim are the real costs that the college-for-all mentality imposes on young people right as they are the most vulnerable and inexperienced in their adult lives. Most notably is the debt college puts young people in, which damages their lifetime happiness by retarding and even completely aborting their family formation.

There are also other less-remarked and just as significant costs to pushing young people into not just four-year but also now graduate degrees. One is soaking up young people’s wonderful energy into make-work for four, five, six, seven, eight of the most energetic and potentially productive years of their lives.

College-for-all converts young people from potentially creative producers, doers, and entrepreneurs into passive consumers, not just while they are stashed in dorm rooms but also for the decade or more after college it takes to pay the debt they accumulated for a degree that will not put millions of young people ahead in their lives or careers.

This is a massive waste of time and talent. Significant research has shown that the majority of young people exit college having learned nothing or actually losing intellectual ground.

Instead of treading water intellectually, professionally, and personally until their mid-30s, young people can instead use these amazing first two decades of their adulthood to develop real skills, professional relationships, and authority. They just have to get a job and use it to learn skills instead of wasting their lives in college. Or they could lean into a skill or useful hobby and see if they can develop it as a side hustle and ultimately their own business.

Today there is even more weight to this situation because, amid the Covid panic, colleges have turned into internment camps. Truly, some college Covid policies are or have been on par with the literal Covid internment camps in Australia and China. Some send security to grab young adults and lock them away alone for two weeks based on being a “close contact” who in almost all cases will never develop Covid during this insanely abusive and utterly unprecedented “quarantine” of the healthy.

College-age Americans are at a near-zero risk of disastrous outcomes from a bout with Covid. According to world-famous epidemiologists, it would have been far better if the young, healthy, and low-risk had been set free to create natural societal immunity to protect the vulnerable sick and elderly instead of restricted with lockdowns. So not only have the colleges treating them this way put the young people in their care at risk from the ill effects of quarantining the healthy, they have increased the Covid risks to the vulnerable.

As with K-12 school shutdowns, quarantines, and masking, the mass higher education abuse of young adults negates whatever intellectual and moral credibility they had left after decades of defrauding students of a genuine education while charging their futures for this injustice. It’s high time for young people and their families to stop allowing this disgustingly corrupt credentialing industry to hold their entire life cycle hostage to lies.

The corruption is real, but so is the opportunity to make something good of your life. You don’t need these disgusting educrats to certify your worth. In fact, you are better off having nothing to do with them.



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Education; Society
KEYWORDS: careers; college; education
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1 posted on 02/02/2022 9:14:03 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Probably 70% of current college students should not be going. No real value add.


2 posted on 02/02/2022 9:16:38 AM PST by BiglyCommentary
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To: SeekAndFind

You mean that degree in afrocentric gender diversity isn’t really gonna make any money? :-{


3 posted on 02/02/2022 9:17:54 AM PST by rktman (Destroy America from within? Check! WTH? Enlisted USN 1967 to end up with this? 😕)
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To: SeekAndFind

My son is in one of those creepy covid college camps—a freshman at Cal State pursuing a BS in Computer Science. He loves to program, and already knows how and in fact worked 2 coding jobs last year, and he doesn’t NEED that degree per se, but many companies still won’t hire programmers without it. He likes his Computer Science classes a lot, and tunes out of the indoctrination GEs.

I’m thankful that his Cal State campus was one of only SIX that reopened in person this semester. Just six of 23 campuses. He does terrible with “remote learning.”


4 posted on 02/02/2022 9:19:33 AM PST by olivia3boys
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To: SeekAndFind

Navy schools, best education in the world. And 4 years in the military will inoculate you against most of the absurdity if you still want to go to college after that.

That’s what I think, anyway. I wasn’t in the navy, but I worked with a lot of guys who were.


5 posted on 02/02/2022 9:21:37 AM PST by marron
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To: olivia3boys

but many companies still won’t hire programmers without it.
***HR is where all those humanities majors ended up. HR is the problem.


6 posted on 02/02/2022 9:23:41 AM PST by Kevmo (I’m immune from Covid since I don’t watch TV.🤗)
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To: SeekAndFind

The problem is there are no easy and obvious options - the education-industrial complex has so propagandized everyone, from government to schools to teachers to parents and students - and such huge protected interests have grown up around the education-industrial complex - that is still seems like the only obvious choice to most people.

Smart kids and parents look at other options - but those parents and kids are a definite minority.


7 posted on 02/02/2022 9:23:48 AM PST by PGR88
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To: SeekAndFind

We need to completely restructure the education system. It’s madness to allow a young naïve student to take on $100k in debt for a worthless degree. The universities just take the money, they don’t care and have no skin in the game. Maybe the cost of the tuition should be proportional to the market value of the degree(?)...plus the amount that can be taken as a loan might be proportional to a degrees value. The value a degree in the workforce should be made blindingly obvious. Maybe these institutions should be required to publish/email reports per semester about degrees and market value.

Maybe they should be the source of the loans...get the government out! What we have is a source of funding (government) of loans at higher interest rates than other private loan providers to entities that prey on those that believe any degree is valuable and keep raising prices so long as governments keep handing out the loans.

It all makes no sense whatsoever - it ends up funding “hate studies” types of degrees and the indoctrination of young minds toward garbage.


8 posted on 02/02/2022 9:25:24 AM PST by fuzzylogic (welfare state = sharing of poor moral choices among everybody)
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To: SeekAndFind

To push my thought a little further, when I meet a kid with a degree that doesn’t translate into a job, like Geography or something, I usually tell them to go see the navy recruiter; he’ll know what to do with you.

They never listen, but that’s what I tell them.


9 posted on 02/02/2022 9:25:43 AM PST by marron
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To: BiglyCommentary

We will not be able to compete in the future if most of our smart people refuse to be educated.

We need good STEM people. We do not need a single new diversity studies major.

And for training, that died and is dead.

Take a young person. Train them up with a skill. Give them a hands on education. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of man hours into them. Then watch them walk out the door for a $0.50 hr raise. Because you are training your competition.

That was the speech given to me by a senior manager once. He was requiring a degree for lab techs, and I was telling him if they can follow a cookie recipe I can teach them the test. He said “Red, if you train our competition I will fire you!”


10 posted on 02/02/2022 9:25:50 AM PST by redgolum (If this is civilization, I will be the barbarian. )
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To: marron

How long ago?

Most recent vets I worked with are more woke than recent college grads. You have to be to survive.


11 posted on 02/02/2022 9:26:57 AM PST by redgolum (If this is civilization, I will be the barbarian. )
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To: redgolum

“most of our smart people refuse to be educated.”

The problem is the the dumb ones blowing a 120k on futile attempts to be educated.


12 posted on 02/02/2022 9:30:47 AM PST by BiglyCommentary
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To: SeekAndFind

To no ones surprise, liberals have ruined education. They have made it pretty much free to everyone with grants and loans coupled with a vast supply of worthless degrees. With the stream of cash from taxpayers, the schools have expanded and hired liberal scum to “teach.” No job after these idiots who borrowed $100K for a degree in basket weaving get out. What I have to pay that back??? No worries, vote for the democrats and they will forgive the loans. wallah, the ponzi scheme is complete.

Yet again democrats have hooked people on the candy from the fed gov.


13 posted on 02/02/2022 9:33:24 AM PST by Jonny7797
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To: SeekAndFind

As long as colleges keep adding fluff meaningless “degrees”, yes, on the whole college degrees are worthless.

Why “history” or “English” even have to be broken into super specialties is absurd. Those are the most useless degrees outside arts.


14 posted on 02/02/2022 9:33:27 AM PST by the OlLine Rebel (Common sense is an uncommon virtue./Federal-run medical care is as good as state-run DMV)
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To: SeekAndFind

I work part-time for AutoZone. I am a hub driver and I have met and interacted with employees at 16 stores. There are some really good young people out there and I am happy to see them jumping into something practical and learning an important and necessary business and good customer service skills.

There really is a refreshing change taking place in how young people are looking to get started in their early working lives.

I graduated from a university years ago but I don’t see today’s colleges being the right practical choice for many young people.

I am the ancient one but I see promising young people heading down the right track.


15 posted on 02/02/2022 9:39:36 AM PST by Gnome1949
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To: BiglyCommentary
At least 70%, but probably higher than that shouldn't go to college. College is a colossal waste of time and money, unless you are doing something in a STEM major. IMO, college is a complete scam.

My theory is that college enrollment exploded in the mid to late 1980s after movies such as Porkies and Animal House came out. After that a whole lot of people sought college for that type of experience. Coupled with “free” government Pell grants and other subsidies, college enrollment exploded into the current massive leftwing bureaucratic monolith it is today.

16 posted on 02/02/2022 9:40:34 AM PST by Obadiah (Fauci is the golden calf of science.)
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To: SeekAndFind

If you want to hire a plumber, electrician or HVAC tech, you will have to do more than putting up a flyer offering $30k a year.


17 posted on 02/02/2022 9:43:27 AM PST by Round Earther
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Even STEM is wrecked. Young engineers these days have no common sense and could not math their way out of a paper bag. By far the worst programmers on the planet have computer degrees, and dont get me started on plc programmers with degrees in automation who can’t program, do math, and are completely clueless about mechanical systems or thermodynamics or anything else remotely sciency.


18 posted on 02/02/2022 9:44:58 AM PST by dsrtsage ( Complexity is just simple lacking imagination)
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To: Obadiah

Yeah, they send you off to college, try to gain a little knowledge,
But all you want to do is learn how to score

-Jimmy Buffett (Pencil-Thin Moustache)


19 posted on 02/02/2022 9:47:45 AM PST by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: BiglyCommentary

My oldest son went one semester and hated it. He became a police officer and loves it. My daughter took to college like a duck to water and will graduate in the spring as a nurse. My youngest son went one year and decided I’m wasting money because I don’t know what I want to do and dropped out. I said that’s fine but you go to work and he took a full time job as a butcher in a local meat department.

I think the trades are the way to go for many who don’t want the typical college track. One to two years and you get your certification a in HVAC, plumbing, welding etc... The old guard college instructors snort in derision at such things but they are stuck in 1990.


20 posted on 02/02/2022 9:51:40 AM PST by sarge83
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