House of Eratosthenes

Putting a question mark after that because, like everyone else, I’m in a state of perpetual indecision about it. It’s natural to show some reticence about concluding “education is a fraud, so let’s not be educated.” Concluding that, you would then have to take the next step and tell the generations coming up that they shouldn’t be educated either. That’s all obviously a non-starter.

However, the twenty-nine facts are there (hat tip to The Barrister at Maggie’s Farm).

#1 In 1993, the average student loan debt burden at graduation was $9,320. Today it is $28,720.

#2 In 1989, only 9 percent of all U.S. households were paying off student loan debt. Today, 19 percent of all U.S. households are.

#3 Young households are being hit particularly hard by student loan debt. In America today, 40 percent of all households that are led by someone under the age of 35 are paying off student loan debt. Back in 1989, that figure was below 20 percent.
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#16 One survey found that U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.
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#24 One poll found that 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the “real world” while they were still in school.
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#27 According to the ABA, only 56 percent of all law school graduates in 2012 were able to find a full-time job that requires a law degree.

#28 The median student loan burden for medical school students that graduated in 2012 was $170,000.

Caveats: First and foremost, we have consumer incompetence. If a product is selected and then purchased, and turns out to be a “scam” in its implementation, that doesn’t mean the problems were internal to the product. Spending a quarter of your time sleeping and half your time socializing is not a good way to apply the product. Next, there is nomenclature. An apocryphal quote from Abraham Lincoln asks how many legs a dog has if we call his tail a leg; answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. That’s the trouble with “education” — we call a lot of things that, that aren’t that. Also, we interpret the word in the wrong way, assuming that all activities purporting to be educational, by design are supposed to make it easier or possible for you to get a job you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get. That isn’t necessarily so, and that isn’t even intended to be necessarily so.

Much of the problem, I think, has to do with process and outcome. As is the case with all things, if you want a better outcome, you can hardly do better than beginning the exercise thinking about the outcome. That much seems just self-evident, but a lot of people don’t do that. They go to college as a way of elevating process — they’re there because they’re following through on process. The desirable outcome, they’ve been told, will follow naturally. And there’s your “scam,” I think. They haven’t been told what they needed to hear: “This is YOUR life, planning it is YOUR job.”

Once they’re in, of course, there isn’t much incentive or persuasion for a process-over-outcome type of individual to change his spots. So, they keep following sequences of steps, right up to graduation day…disaster ensues. Well, I’m seeing that looking from the outside in. But sometimes that’s not a bad perspective to have.

We’re being set up for future protests.

It’s natural to show some reticence about concluding “education is a fraud, so let’s not be educated.”

Agreed. This should be amended to “the higher education system is a fraud, so let’s not go to college.” There are plenty of ways to get an education that don’t involve college. Want to master anything other than STEM? Buy a used copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory and watch MSNBC for a few hours straight. Congrats — you’ve just learned the equivalent of a four-year liberal arts degree.

[Speaking as a former liberal arts major, the only reason I didn’t leave college much dumber than I went in is the natural maturation that used to happen between the late teens and the early twenties, back when we were allowed to grow up.]
- Severian | 06/02/2013 @ 09:21
It’s word games once again. Just like “Liberal” is used by communists trying to bring about a totalitarian state, “Education” means the Dewey system for creating tractable factory workers for the coming Socialist Paradise, and it is a fraud. The Dewey system of “Education” is not about learning, but rather, creating Omegas for the leftist “Alphas” to push around. It is vile and corrupt and much be destroyed from top to bottom.
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 06/02/2013 @ 11:05
[…] MODERN COLLIJ EDUCATION– A Giant Scam? … […]
- Steynian 472nd | Free Canuckistan! | 06/07/2013 @ 16:07

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A Giant Scam?Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

A Giant Scam?
Sunday, June 2nd, 2013