College: who needs it? As I pointed out in this recent column, the idea that possession of a college degree will ensure that you get a good job "is the global-warming version of self-refuting assertions. Provably false by the shortest possible historical glance, it is nevertheless a lie that has been told for at least half a century, retailed in large part by the professoriate and administrators at universities all over the land, many called into being or fulfillment by the sudden arrival of the Baby Boomers who hit the beaches in kindergarten, practically invented high schools, and then stormed the citadels of higher education and overwhelmed grad schools starting in the 1960s."
In that column, I noted that the sudden enormous expansion of higher education also coincided with the Vietnam War and, more important, with Selective Service, i.e. the military draft. In the 1960s, going to college was one surefire way to avoid getting drafted, and staying in college pursuing advanced degrees was a way to stay out of the Army for a long as possible, hopefully until the war ended and a boy's chances of killed for no apparent reason were thus greatly diminished. Amazingly, college enrollment soared.
But colleges couldn't sell themselves primarily as draft-dodging machines. There were always medical deferments (readily available from sympathetic anti-war doctors) and simple finagling, such as that indulged in by Bill Clinton, who deftly triangulated the situation and welshed on a promise to join the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the University of Arkansas law school. In fact, every president since Clinton has managed to avoid the draft, including George W. Bush (various student deferments and time served as w weekend warrior in the Texas National Guard, which was never going to be called into active duty), Barack Obama (the draft had been abolished by the time he would have been eligible), Donald Trump (student and medical), and Joe Biden (student "star athlete" with a recovered memory of teenage asthma). There had to be something more alluring.
The answer was money. Employing one logical conclusion of the Gell-Mann Effect ("wet streets cause rain"), they sold the nation on more education by asserting that the reason college graduates made more money than those with merely a high school education was the degree itself, not the intellect, ambition, or aptitude of the individual. So college not only saved you from getting shot in Vietnam, it also set you on a path to riches.
Applications soared; so did tuition, ancillary costs, and the ranks of administrators. Lending institutions sniffed the air and were quick to rush in with "student loans," later to be supplanted by Obama, who expropriated the student-loan racket as part of "Obamacare." The government itself was now in the act, preaching the gospel of irrational enthusiasm; extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds ensued in due course. Heavy debt and impoverishment past the point of bankruptcy followed, to the point at which the Rutabaga President, Joe Biden, even granted "loan forgiveness" to his subjects, thus putting the American taxpayer on the hook for the follies of a relative few, partially defying a Supreme Court decision because he felt like it.
In its their wake came the advent of worthless degrees in faddish social enthusiasms, useless "scholarship" that made the hitherto baseline gut courses of basket-weaving and journalism look like rocket science. This was only to be expected, since the universities had been home to the Eternal Grad Student since the early '70s, "anti-war" leftists who openly despised America, praised Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, and transitioned seamlessly from student to administrator without ever once having had to experience real life or real jobs. With women showing little to no interest in the hard sciences, a thousand courses on the intersectional chanted poetry of 14th-century Peru blossomed. In short order, men became a minority on campuses, where they were often openly treated as rapists-in-waiting.
And now here we are. Who'd have thought Britain's thoroughly rancid Henry VIII might have been on to something with his abolition of the monasteries? As the blogger "John Carter" -- obviously an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan -- writes on his blog, Postcards from Barsoom:
The English Dissolution of the Monasteries is particularly dramatic due to its scale, speed, and the systematic fashion in which it was carried out, but monastic closures were not confined to Britain. During the same period monasteries were being closed across Protestant Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, with kings, princes, and town councils confiscating their holdings in order to put them towards better secular use. While monasteries escaped closure in Catholic countries, they nevertheless steadily declined in influence over the centuries following the printing press. Once absolutely central to Europe’s cultural life, today only a relative handful of monasteries remain, as quaint spiritual retreats and tourist attractions.
Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.
The rot in academia is already proverbial. Scholarly careerism, declining curricular standards, the replication crisis, a demented ideological monoculture, administrative bloat ... a steady accumulation of chronic cultural entropy has built up inside the organizational tissue of the academy, rendering universities less effective, less trustworthy, less affordable, and less useful than ever before in history. We see a parallel here with the moral laxity of 16th century monastic life, where religious vows were more theoretical than daily realities for many monks. Does anyone truly think that Harvard professors take Veritas at all seriously?
At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.
In short, colleges and universities are demographically and economically doomed, and everybody knows it. There's nothing but upside in the purging of the professoriate, the reduction and defeminization of most state colleges and universities (that declining birth rate is not going to fix itself with women spending some of their prime childbearing years studying feminist theory), the abolition of community colleges (which are really just glorified high schools), the end of credentialism, and the demotion of the Ivy League schools from incubators of future Supreme Court justices to something approaching their original functions, e.g. training Protestant pastors (Harvard) and educating American Indians (Dartmouth).
As Carter writes: "Professors will find themselves unemployed and, with very few exceptions outside of STEM, unemployable. There is no organic market demand for ‘researchers’ specializing in queering the depictions of gendered masculinities in third century Roman lyric poetry."
In the meantime, young men who -- correctly -- see little to no use for what currently passes as a "college education" should take Mike Rowe's advice.
"Learn a skill that's in demand." In other words, get a real job, you lazy bum. Who knew the answer was so simple, besides literally every single generation of men born before 1970? Meanwhile, as Rowe notes, "AI's coming for the coders." Good luck, laptop class. Enjoy the breadlines.
Article tags: college, Ivy League, Mike Rowe
Nice article. However, I didn't see much attention handed to the issue of international professors and other "tenured" professors who have no interest in equal opportunity. Major universities hire abroad to look "international" -- they think it adds prestige. However, these international professors aren't necessarily up-to-speed on American meritocracy. I distinctly recall having several professors in math and science classes (hired directly from universities in foreign countries) who would point out my skin color when I asked a grading question during office hours. They didn't hide that they wanted only their countrymen/women to get A's in their class--despite myself having more correct answers. I also had several liberal arts professors who outright told us the first day that no STEM majors would be allowed to get an A in their class.
It's no secret to students that these are autocratic professors and, unless mommy and daddy can afford a good lawyer, complaining about the classroom dictator would do more harm than good for your future. If there is even a place to file a complaint.
from Grok:
Did Bush Volunteer for Vietnam?No Evidence of Volunteering: There is no documented evidence that Bush volunteered for active combat duty in Vietnam. His National Guard service was stateside, primarily at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas. The Guard was rarely deployed to Vietnam, and Bush’s unit was not sent overseas during his service.
“Check-the-Box” Claim: In his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, and during his 2000 presidential campaign, Bush and his team stated that he checked a box on his Guard application indicating a willingness to volunteer for overseas service. However:No official records, such as his enlistment papers, have been released showing he explicitly volunteered for Vietnam.
The Air National Guard application form from that era did not always include a specific “overseas service” checkbox, and no such document has been verified.
A 1999 Associated Press report quoted a Bush campaign spokesperson saying he checked a box for “overseas assignment” eligibility, but Bush himself said, “I don’t remember checking a box,” and no Vietnam-specific volunteer program was pursued.
Palace Alert Program: The Texas Air National Guard’s 147th Fighter Group was briefly eligible for a Vietnam rotation program called Palace Alert in 1968–1969, where pilots could volunteer for three-month combat deployments. Records show:Bush began flight training in 1968 and wasn’t qualified to fly F-102s until late 1969, after the Palace Alert program had largely phased out for his unit.
No evidence confirms Bush applied for or was offered a Vietnam rotation. In a 1999 interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he was “willing to go” but didn’t recall specific discussions about volunteering.
Lt. Col. Albert Lloyd, a Guard official who reviewed Bush’s records for his campaign, said Bush’s unit was transitioning away from F-102s, making Vietnam deployment unlikely, and found no indication Bush sought active duty.
Whatever the truth is, a whole lot of us are incensed about what appears to have been a campaign of coordinated deceit to get us into Iraq. Which was a ghastly failure no matter how you slice it. Vets still suiciding too. Incredibly it appears "TDS" to the rescue, All Is Forgiven and some mediots even expressing nostalgia for Bush! ("AM Joke" for one).
There are some good CCs but all too often the ones in the one-party-rule cities parallel the tragic tale of K-12 being turned into political operations with little marketplace responsiveness. Try and find one that teaches plumbing for instance. The pattern is they are run primarily for the benefit of the people who are employed by them. Currently there is the 'ghost student" scandal in California up around 100K benefit streams derived by con artists.
A+ this should be "force read" to every politician. Though it would be like talking to a wall with the Ds they've been in on this con all along.
The "go to college get a job" market died in 1973-4 after the oil embargo hit. By 1979 Lester Thurow published econometrics it was only 50/50 that a degree would pay for itself. The economics departments promptly buried their heads and kept all mention of this out of their "research". The field has been so corrupted they gave a Nobel Prize to a carney barker from Cal-Berkeley for "research" showing immigration did NOT lower wages (he cherry-picked data from Miami after the Cuban boatlift in '79).
Complicit News Media has been a partner in crime. A lone academic, Prof. Norm Matloff at UC Davis (of Comp Sci & Statistics) was online during the dot-com "boom" showing B-1 visas were replacing people as the corporations wailed about "shortages". Prof Matloff got 5 seconds on one PBS report. Disney fired 600 and made them train their replacement B-1s from India. (Didn't see that on ABC!). More recently a Chinese B-1 suicided at Facebook all the firm cared about was "keep this quiet" and the corporate media complied (so did NPR, PBS).
Even when it could be shown firms were competing for grads in "in-demand" fields the college's response was often to RATION access to these fields, NOT expand. For-profits like DeVry started teaching game programming, not theory, and people got hired after being denied access to public instituions (which had turned into infestations of all manner of "DEI" madness, no matter if students failied or dropped out after taking a slot somebody else could have used.
All this was on top of the mismanagement and even sabotage of K-12 by the Left. A horrific case study can be found at the EndTeacherAbuse.org site search for the Jaime Escalante affair, he was the genius teacher in the film "Stand and Deliver". LA killed that calculus program-when it could have been used as a model system-wide.
Just one note re: women in science. Though Larry "Foot in Mouth" Summers had to leave the Presidency of Harvard after some dumb statements, he apparently did not know what was going on in his own institution: the place you find the women is the life sciences (they've been half the med schools for ages) see for instance Ms. Doudna recent Nobel Prize winner for the CRISPR technology. They are still vastly outnumbered in engineering though. Curiously History of Science scholars seem to have missed this artifact as young female prodigies found their way into advanced research going back to the 1950s like Bernice Eddy, Sarah Powell, Mary Sherman, Judith Vary Baker, Candace Pert-an interesting experiment in web search can be had by putting those names into the Yandex search engine you may deduce why their stories are not featured as "role models" despite their unusual talents.
Take the money and run!
I humbly disagree with your insulting comment regarding community colleges. Being from a rural area and having family whom greatly benefited from these two year schools, my perspective is polar opposite of yours. They do unfortunately serve as a high school extension for students failed by the K-12 education system and for the students lacking the maturity in high school to master skills. Therefore, it is not to be mocked but appreciated. Most CC in my area offer technical training and skills which you continue to mention as important and much needed. Plumbing, welding, auto repair, cosmetology, accounting/marketing, and nursing programs. Many employers contribute scholarships and partner in the programs. Often, adults return to school for a few classes (not a degree) to advance skills or obtain certification. It is a useful opportunity. Not all things can be taught online (a poor way of learning though convenient) and hand-on is needed. In addition, STATE LAWS too often prevent young people from working jobs that develop many of these needed "skills" . I know a man, while in high school, who worked as a garden center manager at a big box store in the late 1980s. Today, that big box will not hire anyone under 18 because they use fork lifts on the property (state law issue) etc. I know a young lady who recently inquired about a job in a local shop (small business) and was not allowed to even apply because she was not 18. The reason was she would have to operate a cash register. Such foolery abounds!
Construction, agriculture, and other professions now employ migrants and illegals instead of young people. This is a circular problem including parents who bring up idle children with no work ethic or focus on grades and sports (only examples) but also businesses preferring to avoid the hassle of teens and a type of discrimination against youth. Insurance companies and lawyers do not want young people on sites working and impose limitations and restrictions also. It is a big MESS restricting young men and women from developing some skills before adulthood. Therefore, they are not prepared for jobs requiring skills and companies do not want to train them. The community college fills that void. Put your complaints to the state and federal governments regarding restrictive laws and failing schools! Until that system is repaired, perhaps we should appreciate the community colleges more. They are NOT like the universities (thankfully)
I wasn't disparaging community colleges, just pointing out -- as you observe -- that they are glorified high schools. They should become trade schools. The real enemy is state-required credentialism. But it all starts with the "college for everyone" notion, which is manifestly fallacious in both concept and practice.
Another reason these junk degrees, like the grievance studies, or the anthropology of environmentalism (?) still exist is because the professors who teach these courses will be out of work if many lesser students are not shunted over to their department to complete a degree.
If you want to see real academic warfare, attend a meeting where one department is trying to appropriate a new class proposed by another department!
Excellent points. Baccalaureate degrees in many disciplines are increasingly worthless for gaining choice jobs. Even graduate degrees have suffered (e.g. only 39% of English PhDs from Yale obtained tenure track positions after graduation (2009-2015).
At this point, the main argument for a bachelor's degree may be that it is a prerequisite for graduate study. The issue then becomes choosing the appropriate discipline. My four children's undergraduate education collectively cost over $1.1m, the only saving grace being that they are all gainfully employed having gone on to get graduate degrees (MBA, MHA, LLD, LCSW(MSW).
American Universities should truncate the undergraduate requirement for a number of professional disciplines as they do in Europe, e.g. Medicine.
Interesting article in spite of or possibly due to the snark of a well educated mind. Tradesman all over the place driving pickups approaching 100K gives credence. Talk to a multimillionaire regular guy with outsized ambition as a yute for more supportive evidence. The thing is I'm imagining Mike holds a degree from a once fine collegiate experience. There'll always be demand for folks with a meaningful liberal arts education to write critical articles for folks who can understand and appreciate the historical. references. If not, said literature will have no marketable value.
I find this as "torn between 2 lovers"if you will. We have our son in LSU. He was a NHS member at a highly regarded HS . Ended up receiving some $$$ to attend LSU. Most of his classes are online AND most of his teachers hardly speak English. That's not racist it's a FACT.
Me being a college drop out (not because I was dumb,I wanted to make money)
I found it difficult to land a job and I insisted our boy get a degree.
BIG MISTAKE
He wants to finish on line from home(1200 miles from LSU) and start his journey.
I was able to patent a product for the home building industry and we are taking it to market currently.
No degree just brains.
Herculespost.com
You write okay, but it comes off as trying way too hard. Like listening to WF Buckley speak. Lotsa nice $5 words but not especially efficient when it comes to making a point. How about a little more Hemmingway and a lot less Faulkner?
I tink your overall message is spot on!
There are more fields that will be wide open as the illegals are "re-homed"! Carpenters, roofers, concrete, and road construction all will face labor shortages much worse than now. I'm not advocating for keeping illegals just to do those jobs - I prefer to see young Americans working in good jobs and creating FAMILIES! Oblama knew when he took over the Loans that there would be massive debts shoveled onto the backs of millions of stupid kids - loans they would never have the skills to get the jobs necessary to repay - he and the other DEMOcrats didn't care because another part of the plan was FURTHER Vote Buying through the carrot of "Loan Forgiveness"! All that "free money" also led to the explosion of college costs and college "administrators" - MORE DEMOcrats being paid off for nothing "work"! Insidious! Disgusting! Destroyed futures ! In reality, it's just the DEMOcrat way! PRESIDENT TRUMP and his TEAM are trying to undo some of the damages with common sense solutions. One thing we do need is a Department of COMMON SENSE that is the ultimate decider of Laws and Actions - if it's not COMMON SENSE then "NO"! We'll see - it's getting better, but it's a long haul!
Good article, but you left out the biggest driver of the need for a college degree: Griggs v Duke Power, in which the Supreme court invented "disparate impact" and ruled that companies couldn't test applicants for skill that current employees didn't need to do their jobs.
The effect of this was that employers eschewed aptitude testing and instead relied on a certification of smarts by gaining a 4 year college degree.
Dubya also flew the F-1o2 Delta Dagger, a dangerous and difficult plane to fly. A supersonic high-altitude interceptor, intended for use against Soviet bomber formations, it proved ill-suited for the ground attack role which predominated the operational use of fighter aircraft in the Vietnam War. Few were deployed to Southeast Asia, and by 1968 all had been withdrawn from service.
As Quartermaster pointed out, Dubya did indeed volunteer for service in the Vietnam War. He served his country honorably as military aviator.
I didn't say he didn't.
Dubya volunteered for Vietnam after he was rated. He didn't dodge it.