College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils

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

skills

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 4th Generation war – to catch up on what 4th Generation war is, my overview is here (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means).  In that post, I define what 4th 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 4th 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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.”

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4th 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.

 

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

11 thoughts on “College: Debt, Indoctrination, Intolerance, and Nose Pencils”

  1. I’ve supervised many paving patching projects over the years. Included were city streets, and interstates. All require some form of traffic control, and all have their special flavor of dummy drivers to deal with.

    Out of all of the projects I’ve supervised, the worst for clueless drivers was near a university. To add insult to injury, a driver stopped, asked a really ignorant question about how to proceed, and as I shook my head after he left, one of the workers remarked: “That’s one of my professors.” The worker was attending the university and working part time.

    Universities, with the backing of easily acquired student loans, made much money with promises that could never be fulfilled, and increased prices to take advantage of the market. A less polite society would demand the universities, since they were so ready to accept money for useless degrees, give refunds for their defective product.

  2. Amada Spizzirri?

    I’ve mentioned elsewhere that most modern undergrad course could be reasonably named ‘Pre-Barista’

  3. “His wife’s handwritting”. Priceless. I never went to college despite a rich stepfather offering for the most mundane reason. I refused to be forced to take any more math classes. I’m a nerd, not a dweeb. I went into the military to get my PC indoctrination. In both places, plenty of beer helps with the propaganda. Luckily, the military teaches you how bad socialism is. The diversity hire handing out mail is paid as much as the guy doing the fighting. Well, now we have equality of pay here in the private sector, too. In a bad way.

  4. If you don’t, I will.

    As in “Evita Guevara-Castro, a pre-barista major at the local JC before dropping out…”

    Oh, and the AOC diary post is a scream.

  5. Great post. Keep writing. This post makes me wonder if this trend in education has been influenced at a high level or the result of many small decisions by many people.

    1. I wondered, too. I’d really, really, like to believe the “small decisions” but I remember that totalitarianism is always better organized than liberty . . .

  6. I’d say you about nailed it. I am the owner of one of those worthless degrees. Actually it is priceless in terms of personal enrichment, but worthless in terms of income potential. Tried to make a career out of it, but life intervened and I had to leave grad school midstream with $65k in debt and no marketable skills. However, I got lucky…

    By accident, I stumbled onto an idea for a business that worked out better than I could have ever imagined. Within a few years the loans were paid off, I was debt free, and saving for an early retirement. This was a complete fluke. If not for the whims of fate, I would be working one or more dead end jobs hopeslessly mired in debt, with no real shot at ever digging myself out and achieving any of life’s typical aspirations.

    Thanks to my $65k education, I would be able to (loosely) attach a label to my predicament–debt servitude, and I would understand it was a major factor in Rome’s struggle of the orders in which the Plebs rose up against the Patricians and demanded a fairer deal. I would have doubtless supported Bernie or AOC or any other leftist who dangled the carrot of student loan forgiveness as a potential reality. When you have nothing, any notion that a giveaway might bankrupt the country barely even registers as a concern.

    1. That’s a really good story with a great ending. Yeah, debt is a systemic failure mechanism for civilizations . . .

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