Posted on 05/27/2011 4:41:45 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We can’t deny it anymore: college is a scam and a bubble (see the reasons why below). But I’m the first to admit it’s going to take years for that bubble to burst. And while college tuitions are still skyrocketing and student-loan debt is creating a generation of indentured servants, we might as well benefit from it
Many stocks will continue to go up from the multi-decade college bubble, even as it eventually bursts: The Washington Post Co. , which owns Stanley Kaplan, gets all of its earnings from the education side of its business. Blackboard , which is the firepower underneath online course management. Google , which has all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips and also is trying to get into the online course management game. Apple , because the increase in MacBook Air sales is due to more colleges buying them for their labs, and probably a basket of the cheaper online education schools like APOL , etc.
Student loan debt is now greater than credit card debt for the first time ever. After the huge debt crisis we experienced in 2008 and the financial bust in housing that ruined so many lives you would think we would be having more of a national discussion on this but we just aren’t.
¦ As a result, for the first time ever we are graduating a generation of indentured servants rather than the entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, and inventors that America is known for. I have no self-interest in this (I’m obvious not shorting colleges. That’s impossible). I just hate seeing American go down the drain.
¦ 44% of graduates in 2009 are either unemployed or hold jobs that don’t require degrees. So in other words, these millions of young people are five years behind their peers
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
My son just graduated college.
His mom and I did Floridas prepaid college program.
Soooo instead of starting his adult working life with a huge bill to pay off,
He starts out free and clear and Not some indentured servant
You seem to be living in and romanticizing a long gone past. Certainly if you are going to be a doctor or an engineer you need a higher education. But as a whole, higher education has developed in to a scam with many tentacles, each with millions of parasites living on them.
As the article mentioned, there are phony diploma mills like Kaplan University. This "University" is nothing more than a scheme to use gullible young people to rip off the tax payer, and would never exist if not for federally backed student loans. That's where all the money comes from.
Then there are apparently respectable institutions all over the country, including the Ivy League and other apparently respectable places. But if you take a close look, you see that these fine places are packed to the gills collectively with hundreds of thousands of parasitic, know-nothing, do-nothing professors and administrators; especially in victim studies and other worthless disciplines that offer students nothing useful for making a living or being learned in general.
To top it off, they corrupt young minds with nonsense that actually holds them back in life and damages a free society. Even hard science students are forced to indulge some of this nonsense, and certainly subsidize it. Countless very foolish, and sometimes downright stupid, people are paid very well to do nothing of value, while tax payers and parents are being stolen from. The collective scheme makes Madoff look like a kid stealing gum from the corner store.
Whether you want to admit, the entire system is now more corrupt than not. The sooner it crashes and burns, the better; hopefully before my kids finish high school.
I have always said I learned more from wrestling than I ever learned in a classroom. Thats where I learned if I wanted something all I had to do was never, ever give up.
Does it work? I failed out of 2 consecutive semesters, faked cancer to get back in (Im going to hell for that) and failed again. 20 years after graduating high school I make more than most PhDs employed in their field.
Someone mentioned about on-line schools. That might be the option that will be for those that can’t afford, can’t handle academics, or parents who don’t think it is worth having a college degree because of liberal teachings. I guess that might be an option.
Your witless remark is not born from anything other than ignorance, FRiend. I have done exceptionally well for myself in the IT industry netting several industry certifications and corporate accolades for excellence.
English is not underwater basket weaving. Educated skill with the written word is on the wane due to the recent obsession with digital media. As a result, the ability to form a coherent sentence, let alone an entire document, is increasingly difficult to find.
Do not be so quick to cast the Arts into the pool of worthless degrees. There is far more utility to a degree in English than something like Art History, and I have a good salary to prove it.
You just watch....if Obama is running behind in the polls next September they are going to float some massive student loan “forgiveness” plan. This is a made-to-order vote buying scam which touches nearly everyone.
With Obama as president, we will probably need to learn Arabic.
I have people working for me who pay a full mortgage payment's worth of college loans a month.
My degrees like yours are also door openers. They are not from “premier” institutions. I had the advantage of VA benefits and supplemented that with personal funds. No student loan debt.
On a Side note - one of my friends in high school was devastated when his SATs came in as 900s (that was the days of two tests). Ernie had ambitions of medical school. Last time I talked to him 40 years ago he was in junior college getting A grades in calculus, physics, chemistry, etc. I can’t really know but I am convinced that Ernie went to medical school.
I never understood the private or Ivy league college idea. I went to a public State university, put in my 4 years, graduated with honors, and came home to trudge through the morass of contract work and menial jobs until I got my break. Kids these days expect to come out of college and just sit down in their new cubicle with benefits and six-figure salaries, and it is just not like that.
I started making $15/hr. with no benes and had to work my way up to where I’m at. If kids start out of high school with that mentality, it’ll take them a while longer, but they can make it there eventually. College just accelerates that, but anymore it seems to me that undergraduate degrees confer nothing more than having spent four years drinking and learning how to think PC. I had hard skills to back up my degree. I did not lean on my degree to get work, it was just a very nice accent.
Student loan debt is obviously becoming a problem, but I think the mentality with college needs to shift from “I have to go, so I’ll take out loans,” to “Let me get a job and see if I can afford it going forward.”
“College is entirely too expensive,because they have filled themselves with useless course’s, and Professors who couldn’t do a real job if they had one. Those who can —do, Those who can’t -—teach. That’s a little extreme , but it isn’t dead wrong either.”
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Well said Venturer. And dead on.
China will see to it that we have as many college educated debt prisoners as we can handle.
Now everybody go down to your favorite big box retailer for some more China made sh!t.
And don’t forget to stop at the bank to wire your kid some money for that kegger this weekend.
We have a good friend, in his mid forties, who is planning to go back to school. He has an associates degree in his field, which was considered acceptable for over 20 years. In addition, he has he has two decades of impressive experience. In recent years, however, he has been told repeatedly that he is not “qualified” in his field despite his vast experience because he does not have a minimum of Bachelor’s degree. He is not alone in his plight. So, while the author of the article does make some valid points, the practical reality is that a college education, though expensive and in many instances little more than politically correct indoctrination, is still a necessity in many career fields.
I have 150 college credits and in all aspects of my current career, I am self-taught.
College gave me the line on my resume that helped me get my first job. After that, it was all on me.
And that’s because HR departments are staffed with (drum roll please) liberal arts graduates.
In Silly Valley, the first step of a company into becoming staffed with idiots was the rise of the HR department. Every startup starts by recruiting people who can DO the work, have passion for the work and know their stuff.
Then the company grows to a point where management decides “Oh, hey, we need an HR department.”
Then the idiocy starts. I remember getting into an argument with one particular HR drone (a witch who seemed to be missing only her broomstick) that it wasn’t possible to ask for “three to five years’ experience programming Java...” because Java hadn’t been out that long. MAYBE you could find someone with two years’ experience in programming Java - if you could recruit someone out of Sun Micro.
Didn’t matter. Three to five was what they wanted.
Then there was the epic day when HR decided they were going to “address” the complaints of engineering that they had been sending us morons to interview. You people who haven’t worked in high tech have to understand that startup tech companies are looking for not only a definite set of skills, but a certain kind of person. One of the things we would be looking for was someone who was honest and smart, not just smart. No one can know everything, and we’d push candidates for answered until we got either one of two responses:
1. (Acceptable and desired): “Hmmm. I don’t know. But here’s how I’d try to find out....”
2. (Unacceptable) “insert complete BS here.”
Anyway, on the EPIC HR RECRUITING DAY, they pulled in eight candidates with “high” qualifications, as seen by HR. Every person coming in had a MSEE or MSCS from a “name” school (eg, Stanford). Every one of them was a 4.0 GPA student. Every one of them looked and sounded oh-so-terribly impressive.... to a liberal arts graduate. I might add, however, that liberal arts graduates are horrible judges of what an actual technology is.... which is why we see so many politicians championing “alternative energy” schemes that are scams. And for any who protest that liberal arts candidates “can too!” do technology, I need mention only one name: Carly Fiorina.
To interview these people, management pulls no fewer than 12 engineers off our projects that day to round-robin interview them.
Some of the people in this group of 12 engineers don’t have any completed degree. Some have part of a degree, and then 20 years of experience. Some are grizzled old timers going back to the days when computers had tubes and there was no CS degree. Some are physics jocks. Some are (like me) EE’s. One was a MechE. All of us are hard-chargers, people who don’t wait for paperwork to get something done.
Net:net result? Not one of these eight candidates were hired. Not only were they nowhere as “good” as their paper credentials indicated, in some cases we wondered if they actually did their own work in school at all. I interviewed one gal who was supposedly a math contest champion, had high honors in math, etc. Asked her what arcsin(-2) was. She said “that’s impossible.” Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
She said she had designed a PDP-8 on AMD 2901’s. When asked, she didn’t know how many bits were in the PDP-8 word. Bzzzt. (the other engineer in the room with me looked at me and I looked at him... we were astonished that anyone who claimed to implement ANY instruction set with bit-slice processors would not remember how large the word was... and in any event, if you know something about the 2901, all you need to do is count them up and reckon there’s four bits per 2901 and there ya go. 3 2901’s, 12 bits wide. She had all the project drawings right there with her.... with three big boxes labeled “2901”.... WTF?!)
Another candidate chose to get into an argument on the design and implementation of BGP with one of the three guys who was leading the BGP effort at the IETF. That was entertaining. I thought there was going to be a fistfight.
When we were all done with this disaster of a day (it took an entire day to round-robin all these people), we showed the candidates the door. Then we took HR into a meeting room... and proceeded to verbally flay them alive. One engineer shredded the candidates’ resume’s into confetti about 0.25” square and showered the HR people with it before storming out of the room. The most mild-mannered engineer there was rather scornful in his critique of HR’s “screening” process.
That was the day I started my jihad against liberal arts majors, and shortly thereafter, I decided that the obsession with degrees and credentials we have here in the US was mental masturbation on the part of American industry.
I’m talking about one person, not “anyone with a CS degree” and yes he definitely has issues beyond his degree. He does have a BS from a local university that is supposed to be well rated. As far as the other courses he had to take he still could not pass the finals from the public high schools of South Carolina from fifty years ago. I have spoken with recent graduates of the same university who MAJORED in history but don’t know the history I had to learn in GRADE school. No, I am not exaggerating, not at all. When a history major cannot name the one president of the CSA, cannot come within ten years of the start of the American civil war, has no idea about anything to do with the American revolution, does not recognize terms such as The Battle of Hastings or The Magna Charta, in fact knows almost nothing about the revolutionary hero after whom his university is named, something is wrong. Degrees are being awarded to people who don’t really have what used to be a high school education, some don’t even have what used to be an eighth grade education.
Its a sad commentary that university history students know so little. Something tells me they could tell you the exact date of the Stonewall [Homosexual] rights in NY or who Harvey Milk is.
My husband tried the no college way. It was 30 years ago, and he knew all about computers. The only job he could get was a crappy job at AT&T. He worked for a year and then decided to go to college. Since he had to pay for it himself, he went to community college first and then transferred to Cal-poly. It took a long time to get his degree because he was working the whole time, but it was worth it.
He’s now director of software for a major company in the silicon valley, and he has taken very good care of us.
He says that college didn’t teach him too much, but it opened lots of doors that were impossible without the degree.
That's your fault, not the college's.
WOW
You really know how to hurt a guy! ! ! ! !
Currently, in this area, an enterprising, hard working youngster can knock down upwards of $20/hour with overtime by going to work in the oilfields. College is a tough sell for those who haven't a chosen career in mind.
Of course, they can double that with a degree in engineering or geology, but after a few years of roughnecking, they can afford to go to school and pay cash if they are careful with their money.
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