Some rare good news is emerging on the educational front. Apparently, America has started to "fall out of love" with college degrees.
When I first saw the headline – "How America Started to Fall Out of Love With College Degrees" – in the venerable liberal rag Time magazine, no less – I confess I burst out laughing even before reading it. "It's because those degrees are overpriced and useless," I told my computer.
"Back around 2010, soon after the financial crash tanked the economy, Americans' unflagging faith in higher education started to falter," begins the article. "By 2011, more than half of college graduates were unemployed or underemployed. If a bachelor's degree was a golden ticket for some, for many others it wasn't much."
Having been brainwashed into believing a college degree was essential for everyone – regardless of the market needs for the subject matter being studied – colleges raked in untold billions in student loans and provided worthless pieces of paper to their students. To say many of these students regretted their lifetime enslavement to debt is to barely hit at the level of financial devastation that resulted. Student loan debt is one of the most soul-crushing and cruel obligations imaginable.
And Time is surprised that America is falling "out of love" with college degrees?
"Campaigns extolling higher education as a way to work 'smart' rather than working 'hard,' with images of a dirty plumber next to a shiny college graduate did not factor in the price of tuition and the time and skills needed to complete a college degree," intones Time.
What Time doesn't address is whether the expensive shiny degrees have any merit in the job market. Is a degree in wokeness worth the $150,000 you paid for it?
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The article does admit America has a "newfound hunger for skills" that don't require college degrees: "Too many Americans cannot afford the time it takes to get a degree, or the astronomical price tag of it. Affordability and employment are the top priorities for Americans when it comes to higher education."
In other words, a generation of young people are wising up and seeing the devastation the college-industrial complex has wrought on their older peers, and avoiding the same trap. Good news indeed!
"The U.S.'s mistake was not in lionizing higher education, which is a noble pursuit, but in stigmatizing the alternatives [of vocational training]," observes Time. What Time doesn't admit is that the quality of college degrees has been on the decline for decades.
"Never in the history of Western civilization has a thing become more exponentially expensive faster than the cost of a four-year degree," notes Mike Rowe. "We've told an entire generation that the best path for most people is the most expensive path. And we've also promoted college not on its merits, but at the expense of every other kind of degree or any kind of certification training."
The disenchantment with diplomas is widely noted. "A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll reveals that a majority of Americans believe a college degree isn't worth the cost and time," writes ZeroHedge. "Sliding confidence in the higher education system indicates that the American Dream can be achieved without a college degree. This is an ominous sign for liberal professors teaching meaningless programs, particularly in the humanities."
In fact, the near-universal emphasis on woke indoctrination by liberal professors in lieu of practical training is making many college-age people leery of plunking down the big bucks. "The problem with most formal education is the people teaching you, i.e. professors, are usually career educators and have no clue what the real world is like," noted one disgusted commenter. "They live in their bubble of a fantasy world and push those fantasies on their students who end up getting brainwashed mostly with liberal/progressive ideas (i.e., capitalism is evil and socialism / communism is great) which always fail."
The disgusting thing about this whole higher-education juggernaut is the fact we need higher education in our society, notably in STEM subjects. Yet the progressive slant is ruining everything, including STEM. Math and science are "racist," and soon my doctor may be asking about the state of my prostate or my husband about the condition of his cervix. It's this stunning blindness toward real-world value that frustrates so many people about college.
"Universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable," notes columnist Victor Davis Hanson. "Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal. Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public – and often enraged alumni."
Some colleges are taking note of the changing attitude. A few are closing down their humanities departments (due to lack of demand) and focusing on more "in-demand careers," which is an encouraging development. Regarding an English degree, for example, "Students … find that their study of literature inevitably turns into either an exploration of the arcane theoretical interests of the professor or the high school teacher, or more commonly now, an indulgence in a kind of ideological or politicized study of grievance." How will this translate into earning potential for graduates? Answer: It won't.
Right now we're watching banks collapse and unemployment skyrocket. At the same time we're seeing an enormous demand for skilled labor and a rapidly changing economy. Those who are not burdened by student-loan debt and have the mental flexibility (as opposed to "woke" indoctrination) to adapt to changing circumstances are those most likely to successfully pivot and adapt to whatever the future may hold.
As for the future of universities – well, they too will have to pivot and adapt. After a painful readjustment (and possibly a purging of the liberal nonsense), perhaps they will emerge to provide a valuable service to society by providing well-educated young people who can make a positive difference in the world, rather than churning out graduates with the astounding ability to single-handedly crash mega corporations by applying woke marketing principles to a blue-collar consumer base.
So, if Americans are indeed falling "out of love" with college degrees, I consider that win. Let's hope our nation's institutes of higher education learn something from the trend.
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