College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

“Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the Peace Corps.” – Animal House

I also learned how to use magic markers to draw on a drunk guy’s face.  Life skills!

The current education system in the United States is part of the war against the United States.  I’ve written before about 4^th Generation war – to catch up on what 4^th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means).  In that post, I define what 4^th Generation warfare is, and link it to a single current event, namely the mass illegal influx on the southern border of the United States.  But the essence of 4^th Generation warfare is about removing the willingness of your opponent to fight – to making them see their own position as an immoral one, to winning ideologically.

What’s the easiest way to win ideologically?  Education.

After the recent presidential election, I was pretty surprised to see that college educated voters split very strongly for Hillary.  After Bill Clinton’s win in 1992, college graduates had been fairly neutral in how they voted – fifty percentish went for Democrats, fifty percentish went for Republicans, with the notable exception where they went for Obama by 7% or so in 2008.

This graph comes from Pew Research-not Pewdie Pie Research-here (LINK).

So what the heck is happening in college today and why might it be impacting elections?

I looked at all of the college degrees issued in the country (LINK), and pulled out my spreadsheet, since all life problems can be solved with either a shotgun or a spreadsheet, and a shotgun seemed to be overkill.  How many of the college degrees awarded are useless?  Yeah, I understand that this is subjective, but my numbers show that only about 40% of college degrees are worth the time and money – which leaves 60% not being worth it.  Facts prove my guesses are pretty good:  40% of recent college grads are working at a job that doesn’t require any degree at all.

When you’re talking two million degrees (which is way too hot a temperature to heat your Pizza Rolls® to) a year, that means 1.2 million people, every year, are graduating with crappy degrees.  Most of those people won’t be able to get a job in their field – ever.  When the graduate hits the job market and finds a degree in history of medieval computer viruses is useless, they become another victim.

Thankfully, at least college is cheap, right?

College costs are higher than Elon Musk.

I then guesstimated the number of people who have degrees that would comfortably pay off their student loans.  That number was much lower – and I’d guess that fully 1.6 million people are put at serious hardship to pay back what they owe.  Again, reality proves me to be correct.

This is from the Chicago Sun-Times® (LINK):

Amanda Spizzirri, 23, graduated from DePaul University last year with a bachelor’s degree in peace, justice and conflict studies. She owes $90,000 on her student loans — $30,000 of that in her name and $60,000 in “parent-plus” loans. Now living in North Center on the city’s North Side, she works multiple jobs, mostly in food service, in an effort to make her payments.

This is Amanda.  In addition to being in debt, she was also born without thumbs.  Photo – Chicago Sun-Times. 

The article on Amanda continues:  “She dreams of being able to find a career, possibly working in criminal justice reform, where she can cause social change.”  Perhaps Amanda should have dreamed of being Queen of Jupiter – it’s just as likely, since she wants a job that simply doesn’t exist.  I mean, no one deserves to have their life dreams, purpose, and reason for living crushed, but if it has to happen, let me be there.  I was thinking about starting a YouTube™ channel and could use the footage.

I’m betting Amanda is mad.  Not at her college.  No.  Not at her liberal professors who convinced her to pursue “her dreams” which she has yet to abandon despite ample evidence that her dreams are stupid maybe not grounded in reality.  Not the professors – they’re her friends, right?  I bet she’s not even mad at the people who charged her so much money for four years of parties while she took classes that are impossible to fail.  Heck, the average grade given at Harvard© now is an A minus, so at DePaul® you can probably not show up at all for a semester and get a B average.

I’m sure that Amanda would tell you that she’s happy with her choices and understands the ramifications of spending all that money to become a food service worker and doesn’t want any help in paying back the money she owes.  Right?

No, I’d bet that given the chance, she’d drop into a spittle-tossing froth about how unjust the system is, and how she deserves a real job and that maybe what we really need is socialism and for the government to forgive her student loans.  I’ve got nothing against Amanda.  Like anyone who was the victim of a con-artist, she was lied to and convinced that by pursuing her dreams that she could make the world a better place.  Admirable.

However, if she’s like most victims everywhere, she wants other people to pay for her responsibilities.  And I’d bet you money that if Amanda votes, she votes 100% with the left.  The college financing system is itself creating leftists.  And broke surly waitresses.

The second push to the left on colleges is due to indoctrination from the college, professors, and other students.  Despite a professed love of “diversity,” there appears to be zero thought to bringing in professors and administrators that have a diversity of the most important feature of any college:  a diversity of thought.  The Left outnumbers the right by 12 to 1 in administration, 6 to 1 in teaching staff, and 2 to 1 in incoming students.  In an atmosphere like that, what would one expect besides indoctrination?  And, no, this was not made up.  Here’s a link to that notorious bulwark of right-wing journalism, the New York Times (LINK).

But thankfully, the professor that wrote this, Samuel Abrams, was accepted and applauded for the academic honesty he showed in doing this research and speaking truth to power.  Nah, just kidding – the administrators have hinted he’s a jerk, and left-wing students left naughty notes on his door.

And this was one of the nicer signs . . . sadly, this is his wife’s handwriting.

In real science, math, accounting, and engineering ideology doesn’t matter a whole lot – answers are in numbers, and are right or wrong.  In squishier subjects?  If you don’t think like the professor, you’re not going to get good grades.  Again, from that notoriously right-wing rag the New York Times (LINK), “. . .  some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.”  There isn’t a Marxist calculus or a free-market calculus or LGBT calculus.  There’s just . . . calculus.  The (really crappy) data that I can find on this seems to show that people in non-ideological degrees, like construction and engineering skew right, while ideological degrees like journalism, sociology, and psychology skew very left.

Add it all up, and you get indoctrination for the left as a college feature in absolutely any degree that isn’t bounded by physical reality.

And this is not new.  I had one friend in high school who was amazingly conservative.  He was also a pretty good chess player, which I guess is as irrelevant as the number of tattoos of dragons on Angelina Jolie’s hiney (the answer is 40).  My friend went off to college – a fairly liberal college – not the one I went to.  I met with several friends at Christmas of our freshman year when I went home on break, and he was there.  Despite wearing slacks and, I swear, button up shirts with collars every day of his high school life, when he walked in he was wearing jeans.

Okay, that’s not a transformative change.  But the trench coat, beret, and small purple sunglasses were.  He looked like the French version of the movie “The Matrix” as directed by John Lennon.  But he was quoting not John Lennon, but Vladimir Lenin.  I was . . . shocked.  I was still wearing my jeans and Iron Maiden® t-shirt that I’d worn in high school, which is why his transformation really got to me.

So, what do you expect when you throw a young, impressionable person into nearly uniform wall of ideology?  In his case, it wasn’t a permanent transformation – I was again surprised when a mutual friend described him as now “very conservative,” so I guess he got over the indoctrination.  Or maybe he was deprogrammed by space Nazis?

Colleges used to be bastions of free speech, and they still are, as long as the speech in question consists of leftist ideas.  I could fill pages with lists of speakers from the right being disallowed on campus, and these aren’t horribly extremist people – Ann Coulter may scare Barack Obama enough that he checks to make sure that she isn’t hiding under his bed, but she’s a nationally syndicated columnist who has several bestselling books.  For Ann to be excluded based on desire to create “safe spaces” for the intolerant on the left, well, that stands exactly against the values the left indicated they were for in the 1960’s.

Speech is power, and the power to silence speech is the power to shape education.  As Aldous Huxley, noted, “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.  To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

4^th Generation warfare takes place on all fronts:  the media, economics and jobs, the will of the public, militarily (the least important), and most especially education.  If you can make your enemy’s children be educated to your standards, using your methods, setting your morals as the goal . . . you’ve won.

They’ll even vote you into office.