Timothy Birdnow

Higher education is a peculiar institution. It is perhaps the only industry other than journalism that openly repudiates the values and desires of the customers, for instance. And higher education makes people pay money - lots of money - for the privilege of a piece of paper that says you might, maybe, be a good employee to a company in the future. There is no guarantee of employment, no real prospect of it even if you take the wrong major.

And they grade you, and by grading you determine your future to no small degree. If you refuse to parrot back the values and beliefs of your professor you may well wind up with poor grades and prospective future employers might well decide you aren't a team player...

That is what you are buying with your money.

It is a voluntary form of socialism in many ways. And unless you go to a technical college you very often don't learn anything of practical value. A liberal arts degree is worthless in anything other than academia.

That is why the university system has become increasingly crazy, increasingly Marxist, and at the same time an "education" is increasingly expensive while teaching less and less. It now mostly takes sane, sensible kids and turns them into radicals. Colleges are now little more than Marxism Mills.

Which is why so many young people are going to technical schools. These schools are still about imparting knowledge and thus getting tuition money, not about simply padding their student body list for government grants and fattening the administration.

And that is why, paradoxically, the more government money that pours into these schools the poorer the education. The schools aren't about teaching anymore so much as about inculcating the values of those who sign their paychecks, and those values are decidedly neo-Marxist.

Recently a trend in "higher education" is to not even give out grades for first year students under the guise of mental health. Mental health does not fall under the purview of higher education.

Which is what these technical schools avoid; treating their students like wayward children. They don't coddle them. Granted, most of these schools are not live-in facilities. But still.

At any rate there has been a problem with "grade inflation" for decades as colleges sought to promote those who did not do so well. This comes from a desire to see minorities do better; many minorities get poor grades because they attended poor high schools. And it also comes because many of these students who attended poor high schools are struggling with basics they should have learned in secondary education.

Be that as it may the point I am making is that universities are structured to give out grades - it's what you are paying them to do. Their jobs is to prove you have mastered course material sufficiently for employment in the workforce. There is little value to a college degree beyond that as things are currently structured.

But they don't want to do their jobs, mostly because they don't want to be shown up as frauds. They say they will EDUCATE kids but in the end they spend most of their time propagandizing them. Then when the kids don't learn anything they give them bogus grades or none at all. Clever, but why are the parents paying for something they aren't getting. If, say, an instant oil change place was found to be putting in just a little oil into your car and the rest water they would be sued into non-existence. If you ordered a ribeye steak at a restaurant and they served you rabbit they would soon be out of business. Heck; I used to go to bars when I was a young man and I tested the value of my liquor by buying a shot of 151 rum. If it lit on fire I knew the place was legit. If it wouldn't I knew I was in a clip joint. The clip joints are almost all gone now; gee - I wonder why?

Colleges are all clip joints these days.

Everyone remembers Eisenhower's Farewell Address and his warning about the "military industrial complex" but he also warned about academia and the rising technocracy and warned they would go the way they have gone - get very fat off taxpayer funding and stop educating kids.

Sadly they still have the prestige and making contacts is the big draw for places like Harvard, where the kids are dumb but they make the contacts to succeed. It's a good-old-boy network with them and if you have a Harvard degree you can be the stupidest guy at the very top of anything.

But that is for the lucy few who get in because they have the cash or the right parents or the best sob story. The rest of the academic kiddom gets a titanic debt from which they will never be free and a mediocre job, probably well below what they expected, and are horribly dissatisfied. How long will academia continue on life support like it is now?

We're already seeing a major move into the trades and technical schools. My friends all went to technical schools and I went to college. Guess who did the poorest? I made just a fraction of what my blue-collar friends made over the years, and it cost me a lot more. No where near as much as college costs now, but enough.

And then there is the prospect of being overqualified, as was I for many jobs. I couldn't get any sort of job in the trades and I couldn't get a professional job because who needs an expert in Russian history and translating scientific documents? (It sounded like a good idea at the time; we were in the throes of the Cold War when I started college. Who would believe the Soviet Union would collapse shortly after I got out - after seventy years!)

By the time national security started hiring again I had been out of school for years and it was easier to get new people. And there STILL wasn't a lot of use for a guy who majored in Russian history; we needed guys who studied Islam and the Middle East. I should have majored in Medieval history and Arabic instead.

Oh well, water under the bridge.

The point is that we need to find new ways to educate kids and circumvent the traditional college. The trade schools do that,but only for the trades, plus they often lack the social life that is so appealing to young people. That should not be underemphasized; kids want to have fun and prepare for a better future. But if you want to be a white collar guy you are not likely to have a lot of luck with a trade school. Yes, some teach you to code, but that is a dying skill in itself, and it's only got a limited shelf-life.

We need college without the colleges. More thought needs to be given to that.

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