This is Not a Blog Post

Obama's latest in a series of panders is to those with worthless college degrees who are up to their ears in student loan debt

My post on the most worthless college degrees sparked some great back and forth on the relative merits and demerits of different degrees. As always, the conversation was lively.

My bottom line is that I don’t care what degree you get so long as you're not reaching into my pocket to pay for it.  Major in dwarf tossing or gerbil ranching for all I care, but do it on your own dime, and don’t take to the streets screaming in outrage when you can't find a job.

I am against the federal government handing out money to college students

All it ends up doing is inflating the cost of higher education many times greater than the overall rate of inflation. If government must hand out money, it should only subsidize that which we need more of and that which will benefit the nation. As it stands, we do not produce enough STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or medical doctors, so if we must hand out money for college, that is where it should go.

Countries that provide free or highly subsidized college are spilling over with pseudo-intellectual mental manipulators and professional troublemakers with advanced degrees.

Indeed, places like Italy and Paraguay enjoy a surfeit of tour guides and bartenders with PhDs who can quote great passages of Foucault and explain how Middle Ages scholasticism smuggled its way through The Renaissance to reemerge as the modern-day republican party shorn of all knowledge and possessing only the narrow-minded hatred of all that is non-white or female.

In those countries, ordinary people pay no attention to such fanciful pedantry, since it sprouts like weeds and serves no practical purpose to a society that cannot afford frivolities.  The incoherent and impenetrable psychobabble of these self-styled thinkers never makes it out of the corner wine shops, shabby union halls and dilapidated communist party storefronts.  It does, however make for lively intellectual conversation among the unemployed.

Extra-Spicy Political Thought

I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. I was in Quito, hanging out with a very leftwing crowd I'd gotten chummy with, great people. I did music sets every weekend at a little artsy combination folk museum, coffee shop, restaurant and bar overlooking the Cumbaya Valley.

I showed up one afternoon after work and it was an anthill of excited activity, with people smoking even more than usual. Rigoberta Menchu was coming! Yes, the discredited lying Nobel Prize winner, and she had at that time already been discredited, but not among the highly educated Latin American left! I wisely shut my mouth and went out drinking with an Army buddy.

Having a degree doesn't make you smart

Government subsidy of non-productive, easy-to-get degrees just produces entitled people who confuse having a degree with being smart. It encourages, resentment, sneering condescension, sloth and social agitation.

Conservative American scientist Razib Khan makes a compelling case for how liberalism has skewed the social sciences, and his anecdotes about the ignorance he encountered among the supposedly well-educated reminded me of a few of my own.

A year of so after the Iran Contra scandal, I thought I'd impress a pretty young Social Sciences major I met at a New Years Eve party by telling her I'd just gotten back from a tour in Central America.  She completely deflated me by responding, "Oh?  Oklahoma?"  That was almost as bad as the Political Science undergrad I engaged in conversation with on an airline flight who said she enjoyed reading Political Science books.  "Locke, Marx perhaps?"  No.  John Grisham.  

This is the equivalent of an Electrical Engineering major telling you he's recreating Frankenstein's science experiments using electricity to revive the dead.  People are entitled to their ignorance, but not on my dime.

So what is the meaning of your life? That should drive your degree choice. I was not smart enough to be a doctor, and I don’t possess the skill and daring of an entrepreneur.  My conscious choice put me on a path to wage slavery, and I will never be a millionaire, but I am happy.

Please see also:  Jack Camwell's blog post response

College: It's Not Just For Smart People!

Philosophy Major

Red diaper rash ranters are marching on Wall Street and squalling for free stuff.  Among their list of demands is "free college education."

Graduates from prestigious universities with advanced degrees in Lesbian Dance and Ethnic Studies are shocked and outraged to find they are unemployable.  And they want you and I to pay off their substantial and ill-considered student loans.

They should be marching on the colleges and universities that screwed them.  They should be occupying the offices of the counselors who steered them away from math and science and instead put them on the path that leads to angry activism, unemployment lines and the crash of unwarranted self-esteem.

Higher education is ripping us off, according to the Mercury News:

Nationally, college is getting less affordable every year... Overall, tuition increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2006, while median family income increased 147 percent and the consumer price index 106 percent, the study found.

When is Congress going to drag college administrators before its pompous committees and demand Big Education stop gouging the consumer?

Finally, here's a link to a hilarious look at the 10 Most Worthless College Degrees.

The article counts them down from 10 to 1. Here are a few excerpts:

9. Philosophy:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers ...

4. English Lit:
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree. ...