11021 Should I stay in college?

You don’t have to go to college to have a good life.

That is certainly contrary to the pro-college propaganda, but the actual purpose of pro-college propaganda is to increase tuition revenue and profits for colleges and universities. Education of students is secondary to the need for a constant source of revenue to support the infrastructure and overhead of higher education. Call this the economic theory of modern university education.

First Unpleasant Fact: People tell young people to take actions against their best interest all the time.

Years ago student loan lender Sallie Mae encouraged me to consolidate my student loans before the interest rates changed. I asked their customer service representatives, “what will the new rate be?” They said, “No one knows what the rate may be at this time so you better lock in your present rate and avoid any future interest rate increases.”

Based on Sallie Mae’s advice, I consolidated my student loans and locked in my interest rate — just before student loan interest rates plunged to the lowest level in history. In fact, the interest rate they locked me in to was higher than the rate I had been paying.

As things turned out, once I began doing my own research, I discovered that the Salle Mae people repeatedly and consistently lied to me during this consolidation process.

The advice Sallie Mae gave me benefitted Sallie Mae. Following their advice cost me thousands of dollars of additional interest payments that I would not have had to pay if I had not taken their advice.

Yet. . . Everything they did was legal. In other words, it was completely legal for them to lie to me and give me advice that was to their benefit, not my benefit, while telling me “this is for your own good.” Burn this into your brain before you go shopping for a student loan: It is legal for student loan lenders to cheat their borrowers using tactics that would be illegal for other types of loans.

That's exactly how corrupt our system is. Congress authorized the student loan industry to use practices forbidden everywhere else in the debt markets.

If you don’t think the system stacks the deck against you as a student loan borrower, read the previous two paragraphs again and think about the implications. Trusting Sallie Mae cost me big bucks. I should have been less trusting, more skeptical, and sought outside advice from someone with experience with the student loan system.

This is typical of the way things work for young people these days.

College degree requirements have as much to do with keeping faculty employed as they do with providing an actual education. Colleges require students to take — and pay for — useless courses that have nothing to do with their career plans or even with being an educated person. University administrators distort the learning process by padding degree requirements. This increases the price of their degrees and the revenues of their schools.

The concept of General Education Requirements is rooted in the educational system of the 19th century. In an era of the internet, where I can sit at my desk in Oklahoma City and reach out to somebody in the wilds of Outer Mongolia, "General Education," as requirements for a degree, are an expensive relic outdated by the technological changes of our time.

I am not opposed to students taking a broad selection of class work. I am opposed to using General Education Requirements as a way to inflate the cost of a degree without a corresponding increase in the value of the degree.

The university-industrial education system has its own purpose and dynamics. Educating young people is only part of the deal. At some schools, it is not at all clear that educating students is the most important activity.

How can this be known with such certainty?

Follow the money. The highest paid people in academia are not the people who teach a lot of students.

At modern universities, money flows first and foremost to those who coach and manage winning sports teams. Next on the plunder list are those who research, publish, and administer. Actual teachers will always be lower on the totem pole of faculty compensation.

Your money, your parent’s money, your scholarship money, and your loan money support a bloated and often indolent and parasitic class of academic aristocrats. These folks are perfectly fine with the idea that you should be indentured to a bank for your entire life in order to pay off your student loans so that they can continue their refined lifestyles of academic leisure.

If you have any questions about whose side a university’s administration is on, look no further than Pennsylvania State University, where the most senior administrators conspired to cover up years of sex abuse by a popular coach. This action caused physical and emotional harm to many young men. Janitors at Penn State, interviewed by investigators, admitted that they had seen evidence of Sandusky’s attacks on young men and boys. Without exception they were afraid to say anything, lest they lose their jobs. That speaks volumes about the culture of colleges and universities in the United States.

So the question about whether you should stay in school is complex.

The system is not necessarily designed to educate you, but is designed to get your money. You certainly should not trust anything that a university or college tells you about the advantages of a particular school or the general utility of a college education.

These are broad generalizations and here and there, we may find exceptions. You may actually be getting value for your money at your school. If so, that is an argument for staying in your particular school. It says nothing about what others, in programs elsewhere, should do. Context is everything!

Second Unpleasant Fact: You may experience financial privation, bankruptcy, and disaster in your life if you do go to college.

The truth of this matter is that half of all the students who graduated from college since 2006 are either unemployed or working at low-paid hourly jobs that have nothing to do with their degrees.

Wait One Year. At Least.

Don’t be in a hurry. We don’t have time to be in a hurry. You can have a fine, happy, and prosperous life without ever going to college.

The decision to college or not to college is such a big decision that it is unlikely to be improved by making it in a hurry. Many young people rush right out of high school and immediately jam into college and what is the point of that? I suppose if a school throws actual scholarship dollars at someone, that’s a point in favor of proceeding immediately to school. Even in that situation, what about asking the school if you can wait one year before taking up their scholarship?

Most young people would be much better off if instead of going to college right after high school, they found a job, even if it is a cheap job-job, and worked for a couple of years and looked for interesting experiences.

If you must borrow every penny of your expenses, while earning a degree that is not likely to get you a good job when you complete your degree, your best choice is to get out of school, the sooner the better. Finish your current semester or quarter and go look for a job.

This doesn’t mean that you turn your back on getting a degree, if a degree is something you really have a passion for. It does mean that you shouldn’t pursue that dream on borrowed money. Work a while, save your money, go back to school until the money runs out. Go to work, save your money, go back to school until the money runs out. Repeat as necessary until you get a degree.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a passion, like English literature, or art history. Never do something like that on borrowed money.

If you do, you may well enslave yourself for life to a vampire bank that will suck you dry. If English literature is your passion, get that degree, but pay for it as you go, even if that means work a year, go to school a year, work a year, go to school a year.

Or. . . dump the college expense and study English literature on your own.

Start reading clubs in low income housing projects. Read Great Expectations with a class of prisoners at a local jail. Study the Red Badge of Courage with disabled veterans at a hospital. Read the Grapes of Wrath with unemployed auto workers. Blog about your experiences. Start a community of support. Who knows where such a path would lead? It will be as great an education as any university could give you. Unless you’re lucky, you’ll be working at some kind of a cheap job-job anyway once you graduate, so skip the expense of the four-year degree, get the cheap job-job, and pursue your passion with freedom and joy and have fun with it.

And after a while maybe you can learn a way to make some money from your passion and eventually free yourself from the cheap job-job to get paid for what you really enjoy doing with a passion.

The prime argument for going to college.

College graduates make a million dollars more during their lifetimes than their peers without degrees.

People pitch this at young people as if that million extra dollars of lifetime salary is a slam dunk reality if you just punch your ticket enough to get a four-year degree. The problem is that the statement is only half true.

Average numbers are popular with scam artists and propagandists everywhere. They are useless — and often dangerous — for making plans for real life.

If someone shoots at me six times, misses me five times, and kills me with the sixth shot, I am not “on average” alive, even though 83% of the shots missed and only 17% of the shots hit me.

If you come out of school with a degree in medicine, law, nursing, or engineering, you have a chance of hitting the “million extra dollars in your lifetime salary” target.

But there are other degrees where the “million dollars more during your lifetime” is an “only in your dreams” statement. They won't earn the first million during their working careers.

Average numbers promise nothing about individual outcomes. Statements like this are examples of the things that people advise young people to do that are actually contrary to their best interest.

There’s a certain amount of social and economic elitism in such statements.

Suppose all young people wake up some morning and decide — “I have to go to college.”

They make their plans accordingly and enroll in four year colleges to work on bachelor’s degrees in various fields.

Who will do the plumbing? The electrical work? Who will cook in restaurants? Who will tailor clothes? Who will clean toilets?

These are all honorable and necessary jobs and no one needs a college education to do them. Yet, the college pushers dismiss these careers as unworthy of notice. The unstated message is — “Only losers don’t go to college.”

Here are some of the losers who not only didn’t go to college — some of them dropped out of high school:

• Paul Allen, billionaire cofounder of Microsoft.
• Sheldon Adelson, billionaire casino owner, dropped out of college to take a job as a court reporter.
• Woody Allen — screenwriter, actor, director, producer — was kicked out of college for poor grades.
• Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, programmer.
• Ben Affleck, actor, college dropout.
• Winston Churchill, prime minister of England during WW II. Flunked 6th grade, graduated high school, no college.
• Simon Cowell, British entertainer/producer, Britain’s Got Talent, dropped out of school at age 16.
• Johnny Depp, high school dropout
• Bobby Flay, TV chef, high school dropout.

Many more listed at http://collegedropoutshalloffame.com/.

With permaculture you can design your life in accordance with your desires and passions and the permaculture ethics of caring for people, caring for the planet, and having a care for the future. It’s about not taking things for granted nor making assumptions nor allowing someone else to use you for their own purposes. It’s about breaking free from the default designs of society that lead to gluttony, injustice, and war, and developing a design for your own life that meets your needs and responsibilities to society and the planet.

Your personal educational plan is an integral part of the permaculture design of your life. Don’t work on your parent’s design or your school’s design or your friends’ design. Make your educational plan your design and own it with a passion.