Inside Mammary-land

If there is a bigger scam than so-called higher education or one supported by such a collection of self-interested grifters who nevertheless bask in public adulation I have yet to hear about it.  Only the CHIP program, an offshoot of Medicaid designed to funnel Other People’s Money into lucrative Pediatric Emergency Departments and Childen’s Hospitals purpose-built to loot this rich bonanza, and Supplemental Security Income Disability even come close in terms of shadiness.  Just like most of the money spent on the goat-rodeo of American  Medicine is absolutely wasted, most of the money spent on higher education is also mostly just thrown away producing little benefit to society except the employment of fearsome armies of educational bureaucrats who would otherwise be fit for nothing but agricultural labor.

Universities are mostly now nothing but diploma mills and federal student aid farms where anybody who qualifies for student loans will be fed into the pipeline to emerge at the other end with as much money squeezed out of them as possible. If you think it is otherwise you are sadly deluded. The price keeps going up, outpacing inflation, not because the quality of the educational product has improved but because there is so much federal loan money available to pay for it that suckers keep lining up to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars and  waste four or five years of their lives for easy, meaningless degrees that give them something to put on their resume when they apply for a job at Starbucks.  There used to be educational standards but now, for the most part, there is a university for everyone and a Mickey Mouse degree to be had at any level of educational ability and for any level of scholarly ambition, be

for The other thing you folks have to realize is that there is a tremendous amount of “Degree Inflation” out there. Any idiot can get a Masters nowadays and doctorates are not that hard to come by. The fact that anybody has a “Masters” in anything does not impress me in the slightest. Universities are mostly now nothing but diploma mills and federal student aid farms where anybody who qualifies for student loans will be fed into the pipeline to emerge at the other end with as much money squeezed out of them as possible. If you think it is otherwise you are sadly deluded.

Higher education as it is structured in the United States is one of the biggest scams in history.

Unfortunately, the true purpose of higher education today, for most people, is to keep them clear of the job market for as long as possible. Where else are we going to park the majority of 18-to-24-year-olds unless it is in the equivalent of federally subsidized day care?

I assure you that college education in any field of study used to be highly valued and highly respected, that is, until education standards started to tumble. Today, there is residual respect for higher education but this is mostly inertia and why, as it takes nothing to get one, a bachelor’s degree is so devalued.

My illiterate 11th grade nephew gets “Straight As” at school according to my proud sister-in-law…but, I say again, he’s illiterate and can’t string a couple of words together or do long division. He’s college-bound of course and will probably spend his first year taking remedial courses.