College Fruition

I wrote HERE a few months back:

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?

Looks like college costs are really going off the rails; there's an article HERE wherein the question of higher education being priced out of the hands of the non-extremely wealthy:

The public has become all too aware of the term "bubble" to describe an asset that is irrationally and artificially overvalued and cannot be sustained...Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst? Some early warnings suggest that it could be.
Consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college. There is a growing sense among the public that higher education might be overpriced and under-delivering.
According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, over the past 25 years, average college tuition and fees have risen by 440 percent — more than four times the rate of inflation and almost twice the rate of medical care.

But as much as the costs, the key word from the above is "under-delivering" - with rare exception, the proliferation of meaningless college degrees has meant that the job market is flooded by under-achieving graduates from under-delivering colleges, with results as I mentioned:

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?

So if ONLY the super-rich get to go to college, is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe by eliminating many of the "baby-sitting" colleges that are worthless, thousands more kids will be forced to either do actual work, or truly be entreprenuers themselves:

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.

Of course, that would still mean that the richest of the rich would still rule the "meritocracy" of higher education. How do we save the middle class AND make a college degree worth something again? As usual, Xmastime has the genius fucking answer:

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.

Will that ever happen? Of course not; we are a nation constantly looking to price ourselves out of whatever we can. But it will be interesting to see how far colleges can push the envelope re: price before they go too far. I for one am not interested in mortgaging my house so my kid can go to Dickfuck U. cause he screwed around in high school like his old man. Or cause he's blind, crippled and crazy like his inevitable mother.

Of course, the odds of any of these people, or "my house" ever existing are slim, so. Cough.