“They can no longer smugly claim that just having a degree is a fast track to high-paying jobs.”
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Except for certain degrees that are in demand many college degrees are a fast track to the kind of job that used to be done by someone with an eighth grade education because in many cases a “college education” represents no more of a real education than an eighth grader was expected to have fifty or sixty years ago. Rush Limbaugh calls them “instant unemployment degrees”. What we need more than cheap college degrees is a real K-12 education system at least equal to what we had back in the fifties. A young person with a REAL high school education as opposed to simply having a high school diploma might have a future even now.
- The Wizard reminds the "brainy" Scarecrow about the universality of brains and then presents him with a rolled up parchment/diploma:
"Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have! But they have one thing you haven't got - a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th. D...that's Doctor of Thinkology.
A diploma can tell the world you have a brain. Right! Ha!