Thursday, June 14, 2007

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.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

TAKE THAT LAST PART BACK


TOOL IS REALLY AWESOME WHEN I'M TOTALLY STONED

Anonymous said...

Hey, take THAT back. Tool is friggin sweet sober... ANY band is perceived divine (or at least better) when stoned.
Anyway, I see your point to some extent, but what about the "well rounded individual?" I have an associates from ITT, and I sometimes feel like I'm missing out on important lessons in psych/soc/art, etc... and I also learned a fuckload more IN college than trying to be self-taught. The environment really helped. But yeah, definitely not worth 100K.

Anonymous said...

you can learn those subjects on the internet. you can probably get a friend in college to videotape the classes on his phone hahaha.

Anonymous said...

That was a good read. I though about this and am currently attending a community college to brush up on some skills and possibly learn some new things all at a moderately low cost that will not break my bank. I never really thought about taking up a free internship in my prospective field, but will most definitely look into it. Thank you for helping me figure out a new option.

Anonymous said...

As a middle class american I have three choices:

1.) go into debt so I can go to college to get a degree that will help get me a job that I will need to pay off my debt.

2.) join the army and hopefully survive the war so that the government will pay for my college(or booz and drugs to ease my PTS)so that I can get a job.

3.) live in poverty with a minimum wage job that probably doesn't have health benefits.

Anonymous said...

I mostly agree with what you said. I wish I had the money to go to college, i understand i could take out grants and loans, but deep down i dont feel like it would be worth it. I love that you mention how everyone is going for marketing sociology or psychology carreers, cuz its true. I'd be going for psych if I had the money to waste. I dont feel like i should go to college now because it would be a waste of time/money and eventually end up turning into a place to make friends, waste yet more money and pretend i know what im doing with my life. I think alot of kids straight out of high school dont think about the money because their parents are paying for it, so to them its just "WOOT! I get to be who i want and make new friends and get drunk and laid and go to class and sleep! all without my parents EVER finding out!!"

one of the drawbacks of not going to college is that even if you have hands on experience in a field, because the graduate is also applying theres the risk the graduate would get the possition, even though you would be able to do it better. so it kind of leaves you stuck w/ the chance that youd be jumping from job to job hoping someone over looks the fact you arent college educated but could do the job better.

i guess, to me, college is worth it to those that have an ideal carreer set in mind, and they have the drive to go out there and get it. for the rest of us, id say go to a community college, complete your basics and get a degree in business or osmething...thats gonna be my cop out if i ever decide i want to take the plunge for loans.

Anonymous said...

Good post dude, well said.

Many of my former classmates from HS have since failed out of college and now owe thousands of dollars for NOTHING in return.

I don't understand why someone would get a worthless degree like Philosophy or Pysch... neither of those make money unless you get your Masters or PHd... even THEN you have to go out and get the right job.

I guess I lucked out and have a good head on my shoulders. I found a path I want to take and stuck with it. In one year I'll be a Registered Nurse and with scholarships etc, I will pay off my school in a very short time.

No ball and chain are around my legs!

Anonymous said...

thats the most ironic spam of all time.

Unknown said...

I agree with a lot of what you posted. I really enjoy learning but at college I wasn't learning anything. I felt was being molded into an "employee" someone that can be fired and replaced or layed off before retirement age. Some of my teachers didn't even want to teach. Just for the money. Its sad when I meet people who are stuck in the poverty trap where you need a car for work but you need work to get a car. You need a car in order to get your license. Stresses my family feels are pressed onto me. I cant support my parents and they can't support me. Why do we all have to work between 9-5? Does that cause traffic? To me, money isn't worth the stress. If I fish for my own food its poaching. Or if I sleep in my car or a tent its illegal. Without an address I can't vote. My experience in jail after a police officer hit me (i was arguing with him that insurance is run as a ponzi scheme) was probably the best experience I have had. I finally met REAL people who had similar experiences as me. Man its like family and you have someone to talk to and I learned a lot. They are really smart people in jail some of them are not guilty. What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?? People are held in jail until they pay ransom, otherwise known as bail. Or if you are to poor to pay ransom then they hold you until your court date. If you had a job before you were accused of a crime you dont anymore. Welfare divides families, child support ruins lives. If a spouse wants to live with their child they cannot work or income is taken away. Laws shouldn't be enforced with prejudice. In a democracy if 55% of the people speed on the freeway shouldn't we change the law?

Nate said...

Ha. That was funny and true, man.

Anonymous said...

Why not get a college degree, get a job that you like, even it it doesn't pay great(if you can) and just live a simple life and not pay the loans back? They can't put you in jail. You just won't be able to get more loans. So rent housing, buy old cars with cash (new cars are an awful investment anyway, and if houses were such good investments, wouldn't large companies already own them all?). It's not a rock-star existance, but face it. Your not a rock star. Welcome to the real world. Many many people survive with less all around the world and are perfectly happy. Even if they start to garnish wages, they can only take 15 percent, which is less than you'd be paying anyway.

This is the only way to fight the system. You succeed by being happy. The system tries to make you think that you're happy when you buy crap you don't need. So they prevent you from buying useless crap in an effort to punish you.

Opperate on a new standard. Create your own standard. Not theirs. Celebrate, be happy, make friends, have a drink, find love, live life. Your only "enslaved" if you accept their standard, and in this case you're only enslaving yourself.

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