College is the new indentured servitude.

College is the new indentured servitude. The jealous angry hearts of the intellectual elite finally have it! Everyone can go to college! There's a billion colleges, a billion financial institutions willing to lock you up in a 100 grand worth of loans to go have a second round of high school, with lots of redudant courses, bong hits, life courses on visiting the public health department for std tests, and a lot of red eyed losers telling you over and over again why 'widespread panic' or 'dave matthews' is a genius while asking your major 20 or 30 times.(to which you answer undecided, psychology, sociology, marketing depending on how good of a pot hookup you have).

In the end you leave undergrad school with no real skills and the companies know it. A 'music business' or 'marketing' degree gets you a glorified data entry position(technically in the field, much in the same way that working at a Borders call center makes you an author) paying 20k-30k a year if your really lucky, and someone who dropped out of high school and interned or knew someone is your supervisor. All this in exchange for what can be as much as 100k in loans for even bullshit schools with no real reputation or entry requirements.

Even better! You can take most of it online! The college knows online courses don't require you learn anything or do any real work, they don't care. Its universally accepted adult daycare now and graduate school is the real college.

All this for what can be a hundred grand! The amount of money that an average college grad on the books gets more than a hs grad is like 10k or so, so after 10 years you break even!

And that's considering the 'not graduated college' stat doesn't include only career minded people, it includes statistical outliers that fuck up the value of the stat such as meth addicts, career criminals and waiters and bartenders who don't report the 30k they probably make a year accurately to duck out of taxes.

If you take that into consideration, there's no real evidence that a career-minded person benefits financially from attending college! offering free labor as an intern right out of high school, if you're committed to it, will often offer you free tuition, or free education hands-on in the field you want, which also counts as experience, and gets you ACTUAL contacts in the field. 4 years later you are working for a higher salary than the inexperienced college grad in the mail-room, who nowadays may just get frustrated in 6 months, feeling like college was supposed to be his/her "due's paying" time, and that this hopeless situation is unresolvable, driving him/her to a job waiting tables or selling cars.

all this for 100 grand!

there are always of course college graduates who buckle down and make the experience worth while, but the watering down of the university system, its desire to appeal to a broad universal base, has made its average value meaningless in the job market, and at a balooning cost that isn't self-sustainable.

so for those of you in college cruising by right now, drop out and beg for an internship in the field, or put your money where your mouth is and tour with Widespread Panic. (if its such a fuckin religious experience)

special note: if purportedly psychadelic music requires psychotropic drugs to cause introspective analysis or psychadelic feeling, its not really psychadelic. in short, if you need to smoke a blunt and eat shrooms to enjoy a band, it sucks ass.