<p>In all honesty, I think that higher education is a scam. Unfortunately, I didn't come to that conclusion until I accumulated over 100,000 dollars in debt; a virtual black hole of screaming nothingness that threatens to swallow me whole on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Who am I? Well, I am somebody that has made some mistakes – I will certainly admit to that. The first pitfall I stumbled into was listening to my parents, my peers, and my teachers, all of whom urged me to take my relatively-high SAT scores and good grades and turn them into a degree. By the time I graduated high school, I was chomping at the bit – virtually drunk with excitement over my coming journey into adulthood via the University of Connecticut.</p>
<p>Four and a half frenetic years later, I graduated with a double major degree in history and geography and still didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. I quickly discovered that, due to my choice in majors – neither of which I was ever for even a moment counseled against selecting – my degree was virtually worthless. I couldn't teach at public school because I didn't have a certificate, I couldn't teach at most private schools because they wanted people with actual classroom experience (which is fair), and I couldn't work in a museum – an industry that was booming at the time – because they required a masters.</p>
<p>I did have a mild amount of skill in writing and editing, and after dicking around in a night auditing job at an Econolodge for 10 months – a period during which I drank heavily – I managed to land a position as a reporter for a local collection of newspapers. The work wasn't challenging, and only paid 29k, but it was enough to at least mail off the bills every month, although I couldn't afford to live outside my parents' house. As a bachelor at the time, it wasn’t that big a deal.</p>
<p>A few years passed and the newspaper's owners, a nice couple who had worked in the business for nearly 30 years, abruptly decided to sell, and the new ownership made it clear very quickly that big changes were in the offing – in particular, the likely elimination of my department. At about this time, I met the woman who would be my future wife. She was living and going to college in Texas, a good 1,000 miles away, and – with things looking rather bleak in my career – I moved down there to be with her, landing a job as a social studies teacher at a charter school in Austin. The work was horrid; the school being run by a Turkish organization that had a barely-disguised hatred for all things American. There were no U.S. flags displayed in the school, no student ever said the pledge of allegiance, no child attending the school ever played an American sport like football or baseball, and children of hispanic or white decent were openly discriminated against in favor of a minority population of Turkish ancestry.</p>
<p>I parted ways with the school after a year, and with the economy rapidly going south and no realistic prospects on the horizon, I decided to go back to college. I still loved history, and I thought that – perhaps with a little more training – I might go on to get my PhD and teach college.</p>
<p>But although I was an exceptional student, I was repulsed by academia this time around. I couldn’t stand the overt liberal bias, the additional amount of money and time that would be required to get the degree was going to be staggering, and – worst of all – I learned that the job market for history professors was apparently almost nonexistent. Perhaps the most damning thing of all, however, was the simple fact that my classmates were in many cases borderline handicapped, such was their mental acuity. </p>
<p>While I accepted that a certain percentage of absolutely mindless individuals would slime their way into undergraduate degrees, I wasn’t prepared to face the same bumbling of fools in this higher echelon. Everywhere I turned there were people with monstrous deficiencies that should have precluded their attending a school like this: a complete, and total inability to write coherently; profound struggles with basic comprehension; ghastly attendance records – the list ran on and on.</p>
<p>After one semester, all I wanted to do was escape, and thanks to a bout of summer school and loading up on classes in my final 8 months, I was able to break out with a degree in a year and a half.</p>
<p>But what I found on the outside was a hopeless desert of prospects. It was if a bomb had gone off. The economy had caused the museum business to virtually collapse. What hiring was going on was directed – not at people with master’s degrees anymore – but at individuals with decades of experience. A job that I might have been able to land as a fresh MA graduate 5 years prior was now reserved only for people my parents’ age – I need not bother applying.</p>
<p>My wife, who graduated with her undergraduate degree at the same time as me (her’s in elementary education – a far more practical choice than mine, one would think) could find no real work either, and so we moved in with my parents, where we have been living for the past seven months. I am married, nearly 30, and I am sharing two rooms with my wife in my parents’ basement.</p>
<p>I cannot describe the agony that we are both in.</p>
<p>We want to have independent, self-sufficient lives. We want to own a house; own vehicles; have children, and NONE of these things are possible as it stands now. Unable to find a real job, I slipped back into the newspaper business; a field that is on its heels, and will likely never recover from the rapid dawn of the internet age. My pay? One third of what it was four years prior. My wife is doing no better – she’s cleaning up dirty diapers at a daycare center.</p>
<p>Both of us have bills… oh-so-many bills. We could swim in our debt. We could build little boats and push off from the beach and sail for hours without seeing the other side of it. But beyond that endless horizon, we have simply lost hope. It has now been a decade since I first entered my undergraduate career, and I have never once worked a job that paid enough money for me to be financially independent; that paid REAL money. I didn’t sign up for college to make 30k a year for the rest of my life – I was promised; almost assured by the prognosticators of my distant youth that, in getting a higher education, I was casting my net into a bay of infinite plenty.</p>
<p>That was a lie.</p>
<p>And, in coming to realize this, I have zeroed in on two magnificently clear truisms about degrees:</p>
<p>1) First, college is only good if you are learning a practical trade, and if you are unfortunate enough to graduate during uncertain times, even this is meaningless. The simple fact of the matter is that in nearly all fields, experience trumps education. There are, of course glass ceilings that you can’t breach without possessing a degree, but in order to position yourself to even look up at those lofty heights, you have to have experience. This is the problem with college (and, in particular, with majors such as my MA in history); without the PhD, or some level of accompanying experience (say, 5 years of grant-writing for charities), the degree itself is worthless. This is the same thing that’s true for psychology and philosophy and social sciences majors – everyone like me who was suckered into these classes because we liked what we were learning but didn’t have any realistic plans of getting our PhDs. Our degrees, we found, were passcards and not keys – we could wave them idly as we strode confidently through the checkpoints that required it, but they wouldn’t open any doors, and they certainly wouldn’t position us to get to the checkpoints. </p>
<p>2) Second, college is a scam. It a massively-overblown lie that has developed out of a misguided attempted during the 1960s to bring education to the masses. </p>
<p>Why is this a bad thing? Because EVERYONE has some kind of an education these days. If you turned back the clock half a century, a ridiculously small percentage of the population had degrees. Why? Well, very few industries required an education to succeed – success instead being built around a triad of experience, seniority and personal production, and thus only those who were driven enough to seek an education for its merits actually got one. Oh, and they were a lot more difficult to get, but more on that in a moment.</p>
<p>Enter the 1960s, and that all changed. Here were planted the ugly seeds of equality and opportunity. At almost the same moment that people began to believe that everybody should go the college, applicants decided that a good way to differentiate themselves from other candidates was to flash a shiny new degree (the G.I. Bill certainly didn’t help matters). The result was that not only were a lot more people attending college than ever before, but a lot more businesses began to expect at least some kind of degree in order for a candidate to pass muster.</p>
<p>Grind forward 50 years, and you have the mess that we’re in now: where high school students who aren’t really cut out for book learnin’, let alone real research, are told that they are either going to go to college or destroy their lives by failing to attend. Meanwhile, universities have mushroomed into huge, multi-billion dollar businesses who are far more interested in raking in titanic quantities of cash rather than churning out educated or worldly individuals. Can you pass a few tests? Can you (barely) read? Can you (barely) write? Well, you can take out a loan and go to school, son, because EVERYONE should get a college education.</p>
<p>The result of all this has been to muddy the waters that job recruiters swim through on a daily basis. Now that nearly every candidate has a degree – and those who do not are promptly discarded – the degrees themselves aren’t worth anything. They’re a requirement for consideration, to be sure, but they don’t actually mean anything beyond that. </p>
<p>To put that another way: since all the candidates now possess a degree, the degrees themselves aren’t proof of anything. Whereas Bill could flash that transcript in 1965 and Jim the recruiter instantly knew that Bill was a go-getter who had made it through a very narrowly-focused and rigorous education system (you know, back when every class required a term paper of 30 pages? – a clue that our standards have dropped: I wrote a grand total of ONE of these my entire undergraduate career at the top-ranked public university in New England), Jim’s replacement has no idea that Barry, who has essentially the same degree Bill did, is any more of a sure choice than Nathan. To Jim’s replacement, they’re identical candidates in this regard – and since almost everybody not only gets into some kind of college or other, and those who have even the most modest abilities can graduate, Nathan and Barry’s diplomas don’t really mean what they should. By extension, the degrees don’t really earn either man anything – they’ve become, as I said, passcards. </p>
<p>But the lie in all this was one that Barry, and Nathan, and myself, and thousands of others were sold in high school: that our degrees were going to prove profoundly more powerful and useful than simply being a checkmark on a list of requirements for any given position.</p>
<p>And the problem with the system that we’ve built is that when the economy takes a downturn, people such as myself go from having very little hope, to having no hope in an instant. Young (but not for much longer), willing to learn, and (potentially) able to accept a reduced salary, we are nonetheless disregarded because we have no experience. But, with the floodwaters of debt closing in around our ankles, there is no higher ground for us to run to. We can’t go back to school, we can’t take out more loans, and we can’t pay the loans that we have. Meanwhile, friends of mine who left high school and got practical careers – from jobs in the military, to basic positions in dental hygiene, to working as a receptionist – are generally doing fine. Not only do they have real-world experience to fall back on, they don’t have the strangling fingers of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of school bills wrapped around their necks, choking the life out of them. Sure, they don’t make as much money as my parents or my wife’s parents do, but they don’t have any debt, either.</p>
<p>It is a tradeoff that I would merrily make in a heartbeat given the opportunity again. I would, whilst whistling Dixie, cast all my years of worthless schooling into a pit and burry it by the light of a blazing bonfire if I could dispense with the associated debt.</p>
<p>My wife and I talk about suicide. We speak about driving off the road into a tree and just ending it all. Regardless of how the economy turns, we aren’t ever getting this time in our lives back. These days, weeks, months and years; supposedly the best of our lives, when we are young, and independent, and married without children – it’s never coming back. It doesn’t matter what happens in a decade – at that point, our youth will have been stolen away from us. It will not return.</p>
<p>I hate the choices that I made. I hate that I decided to listen to people who I should not have lent an ear to, and I loathe that I gave into the hope of false promises and ridiculous stories of instant success. I blame nobody other than myself for these decisions; I own up to them whole-heartedly. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t, in turn, place a little blame on the system that stole away my twenties and is about to pilfer me of my thirties. I am at the bottom of a dark well, with my feet in the icy waters and a cold winter moon rising overhead. Not only are my cries being ignored, but the system that trapped me in here is cashing in on the certainty that I will fail to ever escape.</p>
<p>There are wolves on the doorstep. They hunger.</p>