Why Should Anyone Go to College?

Why go to college? This answer will be unpopular, but if college is coming for you or your children, try to get some perspective before you take that step. First, think about your timing. This is 2024. Colleges and universities are not what they were a generation ago. The content is different. The experience is different. The outcome is different. The value is dramatically different. Then, think about your finances.

Children traditionally went to college when a family’s social position demanded it. College happened if the family had the means. People might get a legacy or a scholarship to go to an institution, but they rarely borrowed money to pay for the education. A Boomer Brain Fog obscures this today. This boomer fog rises from the Baby Boom Generation that lived deep in some weird egalitarian hallucination that reversed the logic of college education. Boomers came to believe that social access was gained through college. John Adams knew that social standing led to college. The Boomers believed college led to social standing. Psychedelic.

John Adams went to college to finish his fluency in Classical Greek and Latin, perhaps to study the law, but mostly because it was expected of someone from his class and with his family status. Society was hierarchical with authority at the top. John Adam’s family had substance. The Adams had always been important in the community. John was expected to continue in that tradition. Even today you should absolutely go the college if you feel a social responsibility to become a leader in society and you have the money. John Adams did. Hillary did.  That is the reality of higher education in our society.

The idea of going into debt for something as intangible as a college degree would have been ridiculed by almost everyone not too long ago. Somehow the logic behind getting a university education was flipped.

Before 1965 most people went to college for the same reasons that people enter student government in high school. Nobody went to college to learn to read Cicero in Latin and Plato in Greek, but they went because social expectations required men of a certain standing to attend college. The student government in 1965 was a shadow play. Student government taught boys and girls how to work the levers of politics. The class president had no real authority. He would know more about government in the end and that was enough. In 1965 people went to college for the same reasons. They went for social connections and for some insight into how the system worked. They went if they could afford to, or they went where they could afford. The professions required a degree and so did the better jobs. College had a pragmatic value for the middle and upper classes. To be clear, doctors and lawyers were middle class. Realtors and businessmen also qualified. College, like skiing and taking a year in Europe after high school, made sense for some families. The rest went to work.

8 May 1969, A Shau Valley, South Vietnam 101 Airborne
Vietnam War 1969 –

The war in Vietnam changed everything about college. College enrollment for boys suddenly meant not being conscripted to fight in Indochina.  Standards for college graduation were reduced to accommodate the new students, many of whom did not have the required languages in their high schools to enter college in earlier years. The lower standards for entry harmonized with the lower standards for keeping young men enrolled. Professors desired to not fail young men. Failing them got them drafted, effectively a death sentence in the rice fields and jungles of Vietnam. The reason for going to college changed immediately and dramatically for the Baby Boomers. The standards for young men were transferred to young women. Everyone benefited from the new lax standards.  Students moved from simple enrollment standards, to simple classes, to graduation on skids that were greased by softball programs. Some went on to graduate programs that were sandboxes of social issues with even less academic rigor. Still others took on professorships of the unqualified, for the unqualified and by the unqualified. The new brand of lukewarm instruction was then offered all through the 1970s to ever less prepared students even after The Draft ended.

Then there was the money. The new education became funded with loaned money, like the National Defense Student Loans, to make the financial obligation possible for poor and working class students. What began as an anti-war mechanism to keep young men out of the rice fields, ended with a homogeneous mass curriculum that few people in 1909 would consider education. As long as a student did not rock the boat, he or she could go through the BA or BS, get an advanced degree, go on to get a doctorate and teach with a chance for tenure, without once having to distinguish themselves. By 2000 the faculties of every institution were populated by professors whose original qualification was Draft Deference. Not a bright light shone in the box. Today these are the senior educators you will meet in 2024 as you arrive at any university. They never had standards or learned discrimination, so the junior educators working for them spring from a second generation of ignorance.  Vietnam invented Affirmative Action for white men. Those standards of education became institutionalized.

 College became an industrial process that continued long after the war stopped in 1976. More people graduated than the number of “college” jobs. Employers responded by replacing high school requirements with college requirements. Gradually, every clerical and managerial job also required a college degree, not just doctors, lawyers, and scientists. A college degree became the new high school diploma and the college graduation requirements declined appropriately.

Not much changed in the elite institutions. Those whose social position demanded college still went to college. They just went to better and more expensive schools, as they always had done. All continued as before, but now the middle and lower classes who once only needed free high school to get most jobs now needed to pay to get secondary education at college. Two generations went deeply into debt to fund the new college requirement to get entry level jobs.

An unprecedented stream of money flowed into the public universities and smaller colleges. This income from student loans and government largesse encouraged the schools to tell each new batch of students the lie about upward mobility. The new HR requirements for job applications gave the academics some basis of fact. The clerical job at IBM that once just required high school graduation, now required a BA. Human Resources Professional was one of the newly minted and phony pseudo disciplines aimed at the least qualified bureaucratic clerical drudges, so they naturally became the gatekeepers in various industries. HR made a college requirement a qualified yes. You needed a degree to get a job, even if that degree was in Design History or Gender Studies and the job was sales clerk.

It was a scam that nobody would admit then or will admit publicly even in 2024. The Baby Boom Generation believed the lie that came from the education monopoly itself. It is a lie that a college degree will lead to a better job. The business community was populated by the people who themselves had been scammed. Confirmation bias drove them to repeat it, to try to make it true.

Factory Education

Like any industrial process, a structural hierarchy emerged in higher education after 1980:

    1. Attendance at one of a handful of elite schools would give access to the ruling class in some capacity. The Harvard Business School MBA Program Class of 2023 enrollment is 1,013 souls. Previous graduates like Henry Paulson, George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney were not elevated to power by college. They went to the right colleges from influential families on their way to power.
    2. Attendance at top-tier universities just below the elite schools are more accessible and graduates from these schools populate corporate America from middle management and upwards, they rise in academia, and they populate the middle “Boss Class” like Purdue University’s Samuel R. Allen, the chairman and chief executive officer of John Deere. If they begin in an executive position, they serve directly under the executive class. If they begin in an operational position, they will rarely rise above that station.
    3. State colleges provide retail with management, real estate with agents, businesses with clerks. They are strictly Operational management with far fewer executives. School principles and the vast majority of politicians and government administrators go to these programs.
    4. Community college programs certify everything from policemen to teachers. State universities and colleges who have teacher training are really in this tier. These graduates remain in operations and rarely make it to management. Teachers have principles. They rarely become principals.

Only the first group assume the roles of actual leaders. The CEOs and executives in the second group work for them in some capacity. The leaders did not require college to become leaders and some never go to college. Bunker Hunt said, “I tried college. My father was a self-made businessman without much education, and he wanted better for his kids. I looked around and saw that everybody at college was training to work for someone else. Even lawyers work for firms and doctors for hospitals. I didn’t want to work for someone else, so I left college.” Bill Gates and Larry Ellison fall into this group of leaders who did OK without a degree. One should note that all three, Hunt, Gates, and Ellison came originally from elite families. Family still is the primary qualifier to get into elite positions in society, just as John Adams, so also Elon Musk. College does not put them there. Before the hypnotized Boomers, everyone knew this was true.

college
“College Of Health & Human Sciences, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC – ” by w_lemay is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Boomers are mostly leaving the scene now, but their legacy lives on. The new dynamic education system was entrenched by the 1990s. People went to college up through the Millennium to get a job, almost any job because jobs had moved into the corporate office space and away from the blue collar job site. Parents used this same bias to push their children into college, sometimes even at the cost of imposing a strangling debt on themselves and the children. While the logic remained true for the professions, technical engineering, and finance, it did not apply ubiquitously, so the degree in Art History from Purdue got the graduate a job at Starbucks just as a degree in business from Indiana State University got the graduate a job managing that Starbucks.

Maybe it can be blamed on demographics. The demographic bulge of the Boomers passed through society like a pig through a python. They destroyed the hospitals at birth through sheer numbers of babies. The elementary schools, high schools, insurance, job market, stock market, retirement homes and now funeral homes all had the Boom and then the Bust. Maybe the colleges were predestined to fail because society was not prepared for that number of entitled individuals pounding on the doors. Maybe Vietnam was just coincidence. The dream of social standing from attending college is past. The Boomers are no more. College went on the shelf along with the vacant elementary schools and the Dot Com Boom. Even the  most gullible person can now see that a position at the top of society would never be the result of a degree from Arizona State. This will not stop the banks and the educators from trying to sell college to the population, but the energy is out of the illusion. The trick is visible. The rabbit is just wire and felt.

Why Should Anyone Go to College?

The lower classes never needed college. The indigent poor would have no use for a degree while they live in a cloud of denial and addiction on the streets of Phoenix. The small businessmen and skilled craftsmen have no need for college. The Side-Gig workers need social media, but not the degree from the University of Colorado.

George Washington only spoke English.
“United States Deputy Secretary of State, Antony Blinken in Abuja, Nigeria”

Where would John Adams go to college if he were alive today? He would still qualify as a member of the landed aristocracy, so he would probably still go to Harvard. Could he still become President of the United States? That worked for George W. Bush, so probably. What about salary men at corporations? They still need to convince HR to give an interview. Anyone who wants to be indentured, to sell their time to a company, probably needs a degree. For free women and men, not so much.

Should You Go to College?

If you are reading this, the answer is no. George W. Bush never questioned his position. Blinken doesn’t question his. You should find a way to learn what is needed to live your best life without going into debt. Buy the education you can afford, or get it for free on the Internet. Free sites like https://archive.org and https://gutenburg.com have everything previous generations learned. Be inspired by Larry Ellison and learn how to become a billionaire. Ignore the people trying to sell you loans for college. The better life and higher income that schools promise you is exactly like that Nigerian Prince who needs you to send him your bank information so he can send you a million dollars. Find another way.