The College Scam part 2

Here's a familiar story. Americans had a near-religious belief in the soundness of this investment. Uncle Sam encouraged it with tax breaks and subsidized it with government-backed loans. But then, in the 1990s and especially the 2000s, easy money perverted the market. Prices detached from reality. Suddenly, millions of Americans found themselves holding wildly overvalued assets. They also found themselves without the salaries or jobs necessary to pay off the huge loans they took out to buy the assets.

This is not just the story of American real estate. It is also the story of higher education, at least if you believe the dozens of different thinkers and publications that have come to this conclusion in the past few months. They say that higher education is a bubble, just like housing was a bubble, and that it is getting ready to burst. Famed entrepreneur Peter Thiel, for instance, insists that just about every degree is worth little more than the paper it is printed on: Schooling is not education, he says, and ambitious kids should drop out and skip forward to the workplace. New York magazine calls it one of "this year's most fashionable ideas." But is it really true?

[Source]

School is a scam.  I've been saying it as long as I can remember.  A: School isn't for everyone contrary to popular belief.  B:There may have been a time when a college degree was useful, but that time has passed.  I'm generally considered an intelligent person, and I do have a Bachelors degree, but I didn't learn a thing in college I didn't already know.  Chances are you didn't either if you attended.  Furthermore the attainment of said degree hasn't benefited me in the least bit.  Chances are if you attended and completed college it hasn't benefited you much either. The only thing school gave me was my God damned student loan.

Let me tell you that student loan, is the debt of all debts.  Once you sign your name on the dotted line you can't shake it.  Not through bankruptcy, not even death.  I don't know any stories of it, but I know it to be legally true, that they can come after your next of kin for that money.  

If Obama didn't do anything else when he cut the middle man out of the loan process, he did a great thing in my opinion.  Student loans are one of the biggest legal cons I'm aware of.  They lent you government money, at no risk to the bank, even if the lend their own money it's guaranteed by Uncle Sam, charge you interest, AND you have to pay it back no matter what.  How can you beat that?

For all that guaranteed debt, you get no promise of learning anything, no promise of employment, no promise of even finishing your so called education.

Besides all of that, I think the idea of college is simply overrated on it's face.  George Washington never attended college, Abraham Lincoln never went to college, Harry Truman never went to college, Frederick Douglass never went to college, Malcolm X never went to college, Bill Gates dropped out, Micheal Dell dropped out, Henry Ford never attended, John D. Rockefeller never attended, Mark Zuckerburg dropped out, and on and on. 

I don't know when it is that the notion a person must attend college to succeed in life took hold, but that's a dead notion in my mind.  Sure a person should educate themselves as much as possible.  Learning is a beautiful and essential thing.  Ofcourse every child should have a basic education.  But to assume that everyone should, or even want to go to college is a joke.


There are some very good points in the video below, but it seems like it's pushing some other agenda to me.  Chief among these buying gold and silver.  On the one hand they complain about government involvement in student loans, on the other they don't suggest any real remedy, besides get rid of government back loans and prices will magically drop,  plus some of the solutions they say need to be in place require the very government intervention they claim to be against in the first place.  Also there is certainly some fuzzy math and unproven assumptions one has to take on faith in there.  Not to mention a lot of wishful thinking regarding their pet solution of online education.  Plus there are some clear contradictions to be found.  But there is plenty of fact in there as well.  So while I suggest you watch it, I also suggest taking it all with a grain or two of salt.  I don't trust these free market types any further than I can throw them.  Their ideas always trace back to their pockets.