Friday, May 11, 2012

Don’t Go to College: You’ll Just End Up on Food Stamps

This wonderful news came down the wire:

The number of PhD recipients on food stamps and other forms of welfare more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, according to an Urban Institute analysis cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The number of master's degree holders on food stamps and other forms of welfare nearly tripled during that same time period to 293,029, according to the same analysis.

The boost in PhD recipients receiving food stamps is just the latest indication of how Americans are struggling in a down economy. Overall, the number of Americans on food stamps rose 43 percent over the past three years to 46.3 million Americans as of February 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture.

In addition, even graduate degrees that many used to consider a guarantee to a life of wealth and success are going down in value. The sluggish economy has pushed graduates with law degrees to look for jobs outside of the legal profession, according to U.S. News and World Report.

This is why I encourage everyone who is not above the 75 percentile in the nation to not pursue higher education after high school.  A simple test to determine if you are not in that range is to wonder what a percentile is.  If you don’t know what it is, then you shouldn’t be going to college.

What is happening with college degrees of all kinds is exactly what happens when you flood the market with any product.  The supplies are higher than the demand and thus, the value of college degrees is going down in the marketplace.  This is basic economics and if you had bother to read a book about it (I recommend Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics any edition), then you would have realized this simple fact.

The fact of the matter is, most colleges are, to paraphrase Matt Groaning, no better than adult daycare centers for most students.  Everyone who goes to college generally does not do so in order to learn a career skill but to basically have a four year party before they end up working.  Given that most graduates are leaving college with tens of thousands of dollars of Federal Student Loan debt (which cannot be bankrupted), I wonder if the expensive party is worth it?

Now we have a confirmation that it was not worth it for most graduates as many are going on government welfare.  This is how the government operates.  One way or the other you will be on their dole and in their pocket.  I had an uncle who used to be a dairy farmer.  As such, he was subject to the USDA rules and regulations.  Because he was a small businessman as well (as most family farms are), he wanted to produce as much milk as he could.  But the government didn’t like the fact that he was producing more milk (thus driving the price down) than they mandated and so they made him pay more for it.  His family had to go to food stamps for a time as a result.

This is what they do.  They tax you on one end, foster debt on you, and then force you to go to them when you can’t meet the basic needs of your family.  It is all about control and we are seeing this play out in the modern education system, especially with college.  When President Obama pushed for more student loans for more college goers, he did not do this out of a sense of charity but of malice.  He is a Statist through and through and he wanted more people in debt to the government.  And he was all too happy to provide the loans through a private bankster company who enjoys the idea of issuing loans that are not only guaranteed by the State, but the State will also provide enforcement at the point of gun, sometimes literally.

And now more and more college graduates are finding that their degrees are worthless, even the ones that took nearly a decade to “earn.”

The college system is a scam.  If you are not in or above the 75th percentile in the nation when you graduate from high school, then you have no business in college.  If you go to college with your major as Undecided, General Studies, a business major, or a joke major like African studies or women studies, then you have no business being there.   If your IQ is not above average (with average being between 90 and 115), then you have no business being there.

Most people are better off without college.  Even the knowledge I received while pursuing a degree Computer Science has proved to be mostly worthless in the real world.  I was fortunate though in that I was taught programming in C++ while I’ve heard some graduates who learned to program using Fortran, which is language deader than Latin.  Still though, I do not retain much of my studies now from my college days.  I am, however, one of the roughly 20 percent of people who are in a career field that is related to the degree I received.

But if 80% of the people who receive college degrees are not in a career field related to said degree than that means that 80% of the people who go to college wasted their time, money, and squandered their futures to a degree.  I suppose the 75th percentile rule is a little too generous.