I don't think that anybody can argue that learning is bad for you. Or that the educational system is reponsible for our standard of living. What i object to is the cost of college and how colleges or college in general is marketed. The impression in our society is that if you earn a college degree you will find a good paying job. Families empty their bank accounts senting their children to college based on this impression. The fact is , except for a few occupations , there are far too many college graduates for college level jobs. I've heard tom bokaw when he was at NBC stating how important a college degree was in finding a job , i heard a woman on nightly business report state keep writing those big tuition checks because it will pay off and periodically you heard stories on how much more college grads earn than anybody else. I think many if not most people go to college because they think once thev've graduated they will find a good paying job. If college was cheaper and people understood that a college degree in terms of finding a job may be worthless then that be a better situation. I've had friends who graduated with degrees in history or english tell me employers and agencies laughed at them when they went looking for a job. One of the founders of askjeeves recently married an escort. Not just any escort but a stanford law school grad. I believe she either couldn't find a high paying legal position if she found any at all { law firms typically only hire the top ten percent from a place like stanford of harvard , the top ones don't even recruit anywhere else}. What she did have were student loans from her days at stanford law totalling i believe almost 150,000 or 200,000. If she had gotten her undergrad degree from stanford the same way the loans probably would have approached 500,000. How many people can afford to pay off , when they're young , a 200,000 loan ? She assumed a law firm would hire her starting her off at over 100,000 a year. That didn't happen. She was staggering under her debt so she become a prostitute. I ran across a woman in sf who had an mba in accounting who was doing the same thing. If you go to college as a financial decison rather than an intellectual decision and then if there's no return on your investment { because that is what it is then } then its a real bad investment sort of like investing in enron. For some reason , over the past few years , i don't know how , males have realized this and their enrollment has been declining while female enrollment has increased { but for them they have the options of office work and teaching }. Some colleges are now 70 percent female which ain't too bad in other ways.
