College has become meaningless

Another hilarious exposé of our Ponzi scheme society:

College graduates represent the fastest growing demographic of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy over the past five years, according to a new report out Tuesday.

Wait, really? Our high school guidance counselors always told us that a college degree guaranteed financial success down the road.

College Grads Behind Increase in Bankruptcy Filings

If you hang around Libertarians, you’ve probably heard them say that a Federal Reserve Note (a.k.a. a dollar bill) is only worth the paper it’s printed on. What gives the bill it’s value is (1, the theoretical amount of real-world value it represents; and 2), the consensus of the masses that this green slip of processed wood pulp is actually worth something.

A dollar bill used to represent something real. Not only did it represent a real amount of real gold, it also represented a nation that organized, invented, and constructed things of real value. Now the dollar bill is backed up by neither: we got rid of the gold standard, and switched our economy from an agricultural/industrial powerhouse into a “service industry” of paper-pushers and burger flippers.

Big surprise – a college degree works the same way:

Back in 1940, less than 5 percent of Americans 25 and older had bachelor’s degrees. Now, according to data released by the Census Bureau in December, nearly 28 percent do.

Census Data Show Rise in College Degrees

We’ve sextupled the percentage of degree holders – that must mean Americans are six times as smart! But… go back to that opening quote. College graduates are no longer guaranteed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Instead, they end up hundreds of dollars in debt, bankrupt and bitter. What a mystery.

In 1940, a college degree meant something. It meant you were part of a national elite – less than 5% percent of the population, and thus in high demand. This was backed up by a standard, not of gold but of culture: college should be hard enough, and challenging enough, that only extremely dedicated and intelligent people can succeed.

As a corollary, not having a degree was not a shameful thing. Maybe you didn’t have the money or smarts; maybe you did have the brains but figured you could make a better living (and be happier) working in the family business or farm, without wasting four years of your life. Seeing as how pre-1960s USA had one of the highest standards of living in the world, we can only assume they were on to something.

Then came the rise of that modern Unholy Trinity: uninformed mass opinion, amoral capitalism, and government bureaucracy.

The uninformed masses saw the comfortable life-style of college graduates and, not understanding that life-style might be a reflection of ability, came up with the genius idea that their secret was that little piece of paper called a degree! If we had degrees too, they reasoned, we could live just as comfortably as those snooty elitists.

Meanwhile, the least principled colleges realized that if they invented a bunch of meaningless degrees that were attainable to anyone, they could make a killing – and the banks realized that they too could make a killing, through overvalued loans to students with unrealistic expectations. Bringing up the rear was Big Government, who smelled a chance for its specialty: meaningless regulation and bureaucracy. And that is how we got from this:

To this:

The Ponzi scheme worked for a few decades, just like our overvalued currency. But now the slow realization is upon us: without standards, our society has become a meaningless race for things which are turning out to have no real value. Ashes in the wind.

All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
more than one can say…

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.