College

Bill Clinton says HERE that "higher education institutions are pricing themselves into America’s decline," which ThinkProgress sums up with:

We currently have a higher education system that is delivering less and less, but costing more and more.

Which you might remember from my nation-saving post HERE:

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?

I wondered if everybody NOT going to college and picking up diluted, meaningless degrees was necessarily a bad thing?

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.

And, as usual, I have the solution:

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.

I'm flattered Bill Clinton has been reading Xmastime, but if he and ThinkProgress are serious about using me to save this country, they're gonna hafta pick up a phone. And Bubba taking me to Flashdancers would not be a waste of time.