1) to really assert yourself academically in an extraordinary university, eg create a career of academe through Harvard (direct subset: a clearly-defined professional degree route, like teaching/artchitect/lawyer etc)
2) to use the time to network with like-minded people towards a goal, eg the Napster/MySpace/whatever guys
3) to do all the right things and immediately upon graduation land a job that while neither stimulating nor even important is safe, secure and leads to a very fine quality of life, eg C-student business degree, landing a job at Capital One or some such.
Reading about Cornell's crocodile tears yesterday, I've noticed that college has become one of those rare things that the more useless and market-flooded it is, the more expensive it is. What the hell does being a college graduate even mean anymore?
Not having perfect vision is a way the Air Force thins out the herd of prospective pilots. And yet once you finish flight school, what's the first thing they do? Give you glasses. It's the same thing with college - it takes about 30 seconds into your first job interview to realize nobody gives a shit where you went or how you did, as long as you graduated. Except for the real elite top layer of colleges, graduating college has become what graduating high school was a generation ago. There are so many colleges out there that, if you have enough money, you'll go somewhere. And so we've become a country filled with baby-sitting colleges that immediately flood the job market with so many people that having gone to college is simply a checkoff point, like perfect vision (though a less than perfect analogy, as perfect vision is more discriminatory) for the Air Force. Hell, if I have 40 friends, about 20 went to schools I've never heard of, and another 10 went to huge schools that just seem to be herding cattle.
And yet, as I've said, the less the quality of a college degree matters the more expensive it is. My almost matters is a joke of a university, but at least it only cost me $900 my first semester. This fall? $7,900. Has the worth of graduating from there gone up....whatever the fuck percent it's gone up price-wise? Hell no - the academic status is still in somewhat the same line with the others schools it had been, but the costs have been allowed to go up absurdly.
So either we hafta completely surrender to the dilution of the college degree and admit that most students are there because their parents are rich enough to stash them away somewhere and 95% of them don't fucking matter, or we have to reverse the course and make a college degree mean something. My solution is that college should be completely free, but almost impossible to get and stay in. Yes, if you have a 4.0 in high school you may go to college. Get your first B, and you're out. Tough shit.
But Xmastime, you say like the late great Craig "Iron-Head" Heyward in those soap commercials, what about the other 90% of high school students? Well, put 'em to fucking work. Either they come up with something for themselves like an invention, or a restaurant, or they join a trade or company that actually does something. This country was built on the masses building and working on shit that actually mattered. Surely there's a connection between the fact that our complete infrastructure is in dire need of repair after all these decades, we don't manufacture things anymore, we're running out of money, and yet at the same time we have millions and millions of cubicles in offices filled with people in nebulous jobs who had enough money to go to college, graduated, and then got into the "Gentleman's Club" of office jobs that nobody really knows what it is they do. Like the middle class itself, the "middle class" of the work force seems to be disappearing - either you're working at McDonald's, or you have a corner office at Capital One in which you instant message your friends all day while making $120/year. Whereas decades ago the C- student would be working at a factory building parts to reinforce bridges, today's C- student is your financial adviser. Is this the right direction to be going?
THESIS: The dilution of the college degree has led to the vanishing of the middle class workforce, which is why we're in the position we are now.
1 comment:
I'm going to have to classify you as an anti-oligarchist aristocrat.
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