Yesterday, it was announced that there was more college debt (833 billion dollars of it) than the total that Americans owed on all their credit cards. Making it worse, some of that credit card debt is owed by college students and parents to pay for college expenses. Counting that, total college debt may have reached a trillion dollars! That kind of debt load, spread out among largely un- and under- employed young people is so onerous as to be unbearable. Lives are destroyed so thoroughly it is as if they have been devoured by debt, eaten alive by academic cannibals.
We should contemplate a key question: “Why do so many snake oil salespeople in society encourage impressionable young people to get college educations in fields where there are no jobs?”
First, colleges need people to attend colleges. That’s how college and university presidents get million dollar salaries, legions of lesser administrators get slightly less, and hordes of political favorites obtain tenured positions with huge pensions and 5 hour work weeks.
Governments,too, like for young people to go to colleges and universities. They have a deep appreciation for “higher” education because it keep young people off the street. Unlike the armed services, peace corps, and jail, students actually pay the government, or government-like institutions, to keep themselves off the street for several years at no cost to the government!
It’s no wonder there’s a near unanimous opinion among Public Officials in favor of “higher” education. Governments get an added, and often overlooked, benefit from it: enrolled students do not count as being unemployed. That makes whatever political power that’s in office look like they’ve solving the unemployment problem, guaranteeing ongoing, bi-partisan support for even more students to be led into financial self-destruction.
These special interests have put our nation in a situation where students, like lambs to the slaughter, are led to mortgage their futures to pay back debt they can’t legally get rid of by bankruptcy. Worse, the meaning of their lives has been stripped away. To the joy of The Culture of Death, tens of millions are led to believe they can’t afford families and children while they spend the entirety of what could have been child-bearing years paying off their accursed student loans.
It’s bad enough that poor, bamboozled students have paid so much for so little knowledge. It gets worse. Many of these deluded children were convinced to take years of courses in subjects that are worse than useless. Millions of them graduate, broke, with degrees that actually turn employers off. “What, another Anthropology major? Don’t they know that we in the Human Resource Departments, who do the actually hiring, aren’t allowed to hire applicants who fall into the “Poor, Deluded Fools Category.” say countless HR administrators each they add another resume to the daily pile in the circular file.
The problem is fixable. Things can be made right. The best solution: pay off a big part of that debt by confiscating every dollar in every college and university endowment fund, and in every other account they have. The colleges and universities, themselves, should make the students whole because it was their administrators who encouraged their recruiting departments to fill even the most useless classrooms to pay the salaries of even the most useless frauds in academia. Confiscating all such funds would pay off about half of America’s school loans, a small payback for having had one’s life devoured by vicious time & life cannibals.
The rest of the debt should be transferred in a pro-rata form to those same colleges and universities. Professorial and administrative salaries and pensions should be surcharged, apportioned by the uselessness of the subjects they taught. The above-mentioned Anthropology professors would lose half of their incomes. Administrators would lose two-thirds, until all student debts were discharged.
Engineering-type professors, whose students learned real things and found good employment, wouldn’t lose a penny in this process. Many of them might actually be found to be deserving of salary increases for having tolerated the mindless, passionate outpourings of so many pseudo-intellectuals for so long.
It is not fair that so many students should have their lives destroyed by educational con-artists. It is fair that those who willfully destroyed so many lives be made to make restitution.
