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.

What’s Phase Two?

Well it’s that time of year again.  The flowers are blowing, in spite of global cooling global warming climate change, the birds are laying eggs like crazy, and another batch of college students are being pumped out of the education system like a Jackavosaurus in labor.

I’ll bet many of you feel proud to have gotten an expensive piece of paper.  Especially if your major is in Communications, Political Science, Philosophy, or Education.  I’m sure I could list other utter worthless degrees, but I’ve got more important things to tell you: you are moving back into your parents’ house with about 22,000 in debt.

There’s no shame in moving in with your parents really.  I mean, the cost of living in most metropolitan areas has skyrocketed, largely because of rent control laws, subsidized rent for government workers, and because those are the only areas where your worthless skills can be of any use.  You think a farmer cares about the ramblings of Niche or the differences in the political systems of France and the United Kingdom?

But let me tell you a monumental secret that your guidance councilor didn’t bother to mention: your student loan will be with you for the rest of your working career not matter what you do.  Unless, of course, you pay it of early, but you’re too busy hitting the night life after finishing up your shift at that burger joint to notice.

Let me explain: you cannot declare bankruptcy on your government loan that you got for your education.  Any bankruptcy lawyer worth his fee (which is odd that he is able to feed his family considering his clientele are deadbeats) will tell you that you’re stuck with it like that Herpes you got from odd looking dwarf that one spring break night when you were high on whipped cream fumes.

What’s that now?  You say you just make your payments if you aren’t able to?

Don’t make me write laughter on this page.  Once you stop paying your government student loans, the government will garnish your wages without a court order, unlike pretty much every other debt you stop paying on.  You see, the government doesn’t care if you can barely make ends meet.  I know, they said they cared about the poor and the downtrodden, but for one thing, you’re not a minority, and for another, you’re working and making money, which makes you rich.  Only poor people are on welfare, anyone making money is rich, after all.

So now you regret that <insert worthless degree title here> four-year-degree you spent five years to get?  Well, didn’t they teach about cost analysis in High School before you went to College?

Oh yeah, they don’t teach you basic personal finances or basic economic lessons in government schools because they don’t want you be smart.  Knowledge is power and when individuals have knowledge, the government has less power.  You see, the State wants slaves, err I mean good citizens, not individuals.  How do you think they keep their power going?  Through sheer force or by the mandated force of gullible sheeple?

Yeah, I know that you didn’t learn any of this in college either.  Colleges, you see, are merely a business since it isn’t mandatory.  They probably have the greatest scam of all going for them in that they have convinced a large number of idiots that a college degree is necessary for a nice salary.  In any case, even if you took an economics course or two, you were probably never told to apply those principles to the value of your college education.  The wouldn’t want you to drop out and find real work, now would they?

I’m sorry to be a downer here at your graduation party.  I know was I hired to toast you, but my conscious wouldn’t be clean then.  Your best hope is to go work at a retail store of some kind and become manager.  You’ll blend into the crowd of the rest of us and will be unable to do anything about it because of the enormous debt burden you were tricked into accepting for a worthless degree.

But still, congratulations on getting through phase one.  I’m not sure what phase two will be for you, but phase three is that you die.  NOW GO FORTH AND DIE!!!!

OK, I’m Aware Now

Because my family is interested in football, I found myself watching it this past Sunday.  I’m not particularly interested in the sport over all, but I’ll watch it on occasion.  This Sunday, I saw a lot of players wearing pink in some form or another and when I asked about it, I was told it was for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

My first thought was that it was stupid for football players to participate in this campaign.  A more manly cancer should’ve been picked, like prostate or testicular cancer.  These bright pink pieces of clothing looked really fruity.  Then again, I’ve never considered many football players to be real men, especially the current ones.

Why on Earth do we have all these awareness campaigns in the first place.  Most of these diseases or genetic defects that are part of this are stuff we all know about.  When I was in the fifth grade, my class was forced to watch a video on AIDS where it was stated explicitly that you could only get AIDS from sexual contact or blood transfusions from an infected person.  They had a neat cartoon dog, similar to McGruff the Crime Dog, telling us about it.  When I was in Health class in High School, I was taught how to check for testicular cancer and, if needed, breast cancer.

It got worse in college.  At Virginia Tech, every week was one long awareness campaign about something or another.  They always seemed to be related to some Left-Wing Progressive type of cause.  Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks had a whole week to tell us all about themselves.  There was an AIDS week, although I don’t think anyone on campus had AIDS, but it was a very large campus.  Heck, the bulk of my freshman orientation was nothing but a really unfunny version of that film PCU, except nobody just accepted each other for who they are in the end.

The college life is all about dividing people up into groups and conquering each one.  Only Christians, especially white Christians though I spent much of my college years with Asian Christians, are singled out as inherently evil.

Oh, and don’t get me started about the feminists marching past my window at 11:00 PM at night shouting, “Yes means yes and no means no.”  OK, I won’t touch in any way sexually you ugly hags.  Let me sleep, I’ve got to go to class tomorrow morning.

Now that I’m out of college, I still see various campaigns, mostly in the form of magnetic ribbons on cars.  But now I see a bunch of big, beefy professional athletes wearing pink.  I think some feminist group was snickering while watching this at the grand joke they’ve played on the NFL.

Look, I have no real problem with fighting diseases or promoting openness for various behaviors that weren’t considered acceptable a few decades before.  It’s the constant bombardment of these campaigns that irritates the heck out of me.  To top that off, these campaigns have become nothing more than a weird form of victim worship where the victim of cancer is elevated to god-like status.  It’s a shameful display of ego.

I’m probably just coming off as a giant dick here, but I am just sick and tired of these awareness campaigns.  I’m aware now, OK?  You mission is accomplished and I think you can go back to actually solving the problem rather than whining about it.

College: A giant scam by Molotov Mitchell

Video Link

If 80% of the people who graduate from college aren't using their degrees in their career (I'm in the other 20% myself right now), then why do we continue to ruin our children by insisting that they attend college?

Most "children" would benefit more from entering the workforce immediately following high school. Leave college education to those who truly have exceptional abilities. If your kid isn't in the top 25 percent of his or her class, then he or she is probably wasting their time and your money (and their future income) going to college.

The Illusions of College

Like just about everyone else in America, I went to college.  I graduated in four years with a degree in Computer Science (No, I will not fix your computer) and ended up working as a computer programmer.  I love what I do.  It allows me to solve complex problems using inanimate objects and helps me to organize a virtual world into some kind of working order.
But while I attended college, I consider much of my time spent there to be time wasted.  Not that I did not learn a lot and come out of there with new perspectives on things, but the culture of a college campus seemed to be heavily grounded in the illusion of what the real world was not.
It is really hard to explain, but looking back on college, I feel as though the entire college atmosphere was not trying to mimic the real world, but the world the administrators sought to create through us.
Think about all the stereotypes about college these days.  Colleges have become the symbol of the 24-hour party, the place where you go as a reward for enduring our government skools.  Usually, this is at the expense of our parents or on loans that are differed until after we leave college.  So why not have fun and enjoy your time there?
I remember hearing pathetic college girls bragging to their friends about how drunk they were going to get on Friday night.  If I were a person lacking in moral character, I might have followed that girl to the party and taken advantage of the situation.  I wonder if such girls were not taken advantage of countless times and they didn’t even know.  It’s sad if you really think about it.
But the 24-hour party mentality is just the tip of the iceberg.  Even though most college campuses tend to not condone heavy drinking, frequent sex and drug use, and other such reckless behavior, I think they purposely do nothing about it on campus.  I believe that this fits in with their indoctrination agenda of the students they are trying to mold and shape.
The idea of the modern college campus is not to give you the technical skills you need to survive in the real, but to demonstrate what the real world could be like if you accept their ideas.  It would be filled with nothing but constant parties, discussions of ideas, endless nights of online gaming, free sex without consequence, and whatever your heart’s desire entails.
That was the atmosphere that I felt was created on campus.  Or maybe it just happened that way through the lackluster policies of the administrators.  Either way, they do nothing to reverse the dangerous trend.
College should not be about having fun as the top priority.  Really, nothing should be that way.  In this case, it causes people to place unreasonable expectations on college and as such, administrators adjust their policies rather than enforce the ones that were tried and true.
Higher learning is about honing your strengths into marketable skills or discovering how you can use your strengths to make you money in the real world.  That is not to say that you can’t have fun in the process and that partying with your friends is not out of the question.  But when the emphasis in higher learning is more about having fun than it is about actual learning, there is something very wrong over all.
Some of my perspective, though, probably comes from my own experiences in which I probably could have applied myself more.  But I didn’t and I don’t really regret that entirely.  Most of what I learned in college was not really all the relevant toward my career field, it merely gave me a base to work from.  What I learned in the corporate was far more useful to me than what I learned in college.
So maybe this viewpoint is skewed because of my own personal growth experiences.  One thing is for certain, and that is that I know most people don’t have to go to college in order to succeed in their own personal strengths.
But don’t tell that to high school students.  We all want them to be duped into going into thousands of dollars of debt by the time they graduate or drop out.

College: Chicken or the Egg?

A recent Forbes article reports on the problems with student loans and the actual value of college education. It reports on how massive student loan debt is an incredible burden to college dropouts and even college graduates.

I found the article interesting because I am experiencing the same kind of thing with the young people around me as well. I only had a very small student loan when I graduated from college. I was fortunate enough to have parents who funded my college education and received a degree that gave me a marketable skill. I've since paid off that loan.

My wife, on the other hand, would fall into the category of the people who that article talks about. She went to college and came out with about 33K in debt. We are still working to pay it off and it has been a source of shame for her. I have to continually remind her that I married her for her and that if the debt truly bothered me, I would have walked out instead of proposing. So it is now our debt and I very much intend to pay it off as soon as I can (which could be at most three years from now if she and I buckle down and do what is necessary).

But I can't help but wonder what are the socio-economic impacts that such debts will be making on our nation as a whole. We have a large percentage of the college-age adults coming into the real world with thousands of dollars in debt that they cannot hope to pay off by the time the reach 30 (and in some cases, 40). Since federally insured student loans are not bankruptible and no court order is needed for wage garnishments, you will pay them.

I would hope that the Federal government would scale back the number and amount of student loans that young adults can qualify for. Maybe just make it equal for all students, regardless of the college they attend or the major they are seeking. The impact of this is that there will be less college students, but I don't see that as a bad thing. In fact, we may see more college students actually working for their tuition rather than goofing off while going into debt.

I am not holding my breath though, especially with the official position of Obama being to restore our nations' credit lines. But it might be something worth bringing up with your representative in Congress.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be college grads

I graduated with a bachelor's in Computer Science on May 2004. I also got two minors, one in Mathematics and one in English Literature. But besides the degree, there isn't much I can say about college education that made it worthwhile. Sure the degree gave me an opening into the career I am in now, but that is about it. My next job will have been gained because of the experience I've obtained here at my current job (which is substantial).

I've been reading up on recent reports about how most college students take longer than four years to get a degree. Most of the time, on average, students who are in the bottom 40% of high school and get into college take about 8.5 years to graduate with a 4 year degree. Talk about stupid. But I guess that's what happens when your IQ is lower than 110.

I can say from personal experience that many of the classes I had to take to get a college degree were not needed. I took a lot of mathematics courses. Calculus, combinatorics, and discrete mathematics took up much of my coursework. And yet, I haven't used much of any of the knowledge gained in my current job. Likewise, a lot of the basic courses in computer science were probably better spent just reading up on and taking the more advanced courses.

As for the other courses I took that were required for me to graduate but had nothing to do with my major, most of them were not challenging at all. My English course was tough, thanks to Professor Donald Hall, who was probably one of the most dedicated professors I've met. At times I wondered if I was taking a psychology course instead of an English literature course with him. But it was a great course and I still have many of the essays I wrote along with his comments. Let me tell you, I really learned how to truly analyze fiction under his tutelage. His coursework also helped me to hone in my writing skills. I took other English courses to fill in my minor, which I decided to take during my Junior year since it looked like I wasn't going to need much to fulfill my major's requirements. I took a course on Greek mythology, English renaissance, and creative writing. By far, I feel like my time wasn't wasted there, even though my ultimate objective wasn't being met.

To be honest, though, I think I could have taken half the courses and still achieved the same with less time. I would still have a decent job, but more money as I would have had two more years to build up equity and probably two more years worth of knowledge in my vocation. I didn't make any friends there who I've kept, as friends tend to come and go anyway, so it would have not been a huge loss on my social life either. I've never been a party-goer anyway, seeing as how I'm naturally introverted and won't trust you all that much until I know you well enough.

In any case, I've always believed that a huge chunk of the students who were attending college probably shouldn't have bothered. They were just not intelligent enough to need to be there. You need to go to college when you have a clear career goal in mind in a field of interest. Not only that, but the field of interest won't let you get a job without the degree. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs you can get where you don't need higher education or a two year degree.

A lot of people believe that you must go to college to be successful in life. I highly doubt that entirely. Although I've gone to college and gotten a degree that was useful in finding a job that I love doing, I'm probably a small percentage in the college graduate arena. And besides, how are we defining success in this case. If you want to define success as financial success, then I can tell you that this is a stupid notion. Sure, college graduates who use their degrees in their career fields make more money, but income does not equate to wealth. I know that right now there are men who make no more than 40K a year and have only a home mortgage in debt and enough savings to take care of any income shortfalls. They are also saving up for retirement as well as their own child's potential college education. And then there are men who make six figures and are being hounded by collections agencies over bad debt.

The truth is, it's about how you live, not how much you make. If you make 40K a year for your entire life from age 25 to 65, you will have made 1.6 million gross pay. If you've been saving that money and spending wisely, you'll be all set by the time you retire as your nest egg only needs to be 500K. And, when you make compound interest work for you, this is not a hard feat to manage.

If you define success as any other way, then I doubt that you are looking at a college degree for that. Having one hardly means that you'll be a corporate CEO someday or own and operate your own small business. In fact, you can start your own small business without a college degree.

So while I am not against kids going to college, I am against dumb kids going to college thinking they can do any better than their peers who were in the top of the class, while they were not. Our intelligence is limited. You cannot assume that your IQ will increase if you go to college. Your IQ is a constant that you will carry until your death.

If you have interests in economics, politics, art, or any other subject that won't get you a job, then don't bother going to college and majoring it that subject. You can easily go to a public library and check out books of interest in these particular subjects. In fact, if I ran a university, I would keep the majors limited to those which the job market demands and offer the other stuff as optional courses of interest.

My brother is currently interested in becoming an auto mechanic. And really, he doesn't need to go to college for that and I'm sure he'll learn his trade well and have a very good and steady flow of income as a result. I wouldn't encourage him to go to college because there would be nothing there for him. He wouldn't miss much either.

The American Dream is achieved by people of all forms of intelligence and college is never a factor in this case. But the American Dream can be put on hold for a long time if you go into debt while trying to earn a degree you're not intelligent enough to get. So please, if you know what you want to do, figure out how to go about accomplishing it. You'd be surprise how much time it really takes to learn a trade and get a job. In some cases, you may be able to start working right out of high school and do a good job on your own terms.