A few generations ago, 5% of the graduating high school seniors went to college. The, graduating seniors were taught far better than those today. High school graduates knew more and had higher skills in math, reading, history, and geography than recent generations of college graduates.
One college graduate out of every twenty Americans provided the necessary knowledge/leadership.
After WWI, things changed. When that war ended, farming was in the midst of mechanization. Livery stables, horse farms, blacksmiths, harness makers, and all those involved in animal powered activities were being replaced by mechanics.
Just as trains replaced canals, and canals had replaced wagons, internal combustion engines allowed fewer people to move things and people more cheaply than ever. So, colleges started expanding.
An increasing number of colleges began absorbing ever-larger numbers of students. The smarter students went into engineering and technical studies. But, what of the students not intelligent enough for that?
Rather than take their rightful place at the lower income rungs, those who wanted to be more than they were developed all manner of make-work. Society could afford it. Endless, and useless, studies like psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the other pseudo-intellectual pursuits of the time came into being, providing pretensions to more pretentious people than ever.
These largely useless disciplines were soon supplanted by even more useless organized concatenations of the sheerest drivel. Every aggrieved group soon had the word “Studies” attached to it. Colleges became “universities” to absorb the swelling numbers of new, pseudo-intellectual activities.
Government funding was made available, not because a single one of the “Studies” was useful, but because they each kept lots of losers off the street. Employment numbers looked good because the students were not included among “the unemployed”. The downside?
After they graduated, students discovered there were no jobs in any of the “Studies”, except for the few who had political connections. Bamboozled children had spent five or six years getting useless degrees that guaranteed unemployment. They are staggering under crippling burdens of debt. Half of them are unemployed. One in twenty has a job in their field. Most are working at Starbucks, driving cabs, or waiting tables. Levels of frustration have grown. Pretensions have been painfully punctured.
Still, the huge Higher Education Machine mangles students’ lives while crippling the economy with even more debt. Those who don’t understand that higher education is neither applaud the building of buildings, hiring hordes of administrators, and just plain wasting money in every possible way.
Most college graduates have been made to feel they are “too good” for the level of work for which they have the talent. Amazingly, some people still think college is worthwhile. The less able and pretentious, do not realize that higher education is neither.
But, a growing number of more intelligent students grasp that higher education and its proponents are among their most destructive enemies.
