By Desiree Alonso on Jun 03, 2011

“It’s called The American Dream because you have to asleep to believe it.”  Very telling words stated once by George Carlin.  Wish I could prove him wrong.  But the truth is, the American way of life is not only a dream, it’s a racket.

If you haven’t heard about the news buzzing around regarding The College Loan scandal. A scandal that I am sure will be resolved the way government solves the problems it creates, more agencies to oversee the problem so that everyone feels like somebody is doing something.

Here are some of the headlines and background info on what is happening.

• Student Financial Aid Scandal grows. “…Documents also show the bank, JPMorgan Chase, paid five college student-loan officers to work for the bank while they still held their jobs at the colleges….”
• Education Dept. Rules on For-profit Schools created with Investor’s help. “A proposed regulation from the Education Department threatens to devastate for-profit career or trade schools, but one thing is even more controversial than the regulation — how it was crafted.  Education Department officials were encouraged and advised about the content of the regulation by a man who stood to make millions if it were issued.  It’s all part of a growing scandal, in which lenders gave colleges and top officials money and perks — sometimes based on how many students signed up for their loans…”
• Student Loans make Education affordable or do they? “Everyone knows we Americans are swimming in credit card debt.   But just this year a new debt has quietly surpassed our consumer spending addiction.  Student loans, now at $829 billion.”
• Price of Admission:  America’s College Debt Crisis. “As millions of American families struggle to cope with college costs that are rising at twice the rate of inflation, CNBC investigates a system that encourages widespread borrowing—often with little regard to a student’s ability to pay—leaving the average college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt.”
• College Conspiracy.PLEASE Watch this.  Period.

Long story short,  the bubble is about to burst… the cat is out of the bag.  What cat?  An American College Education and the Government’s push through the Department of Ed and all the Testing companies to push “The College Education Agenda” is beginning to being exposed for what it is, a system designed to create lifetime indentured servants.  The entire loan industry is a scheme to make a few rich and make everyone else poor and indebted for life.

Friends, follow the money… just follow the money.  Wars i.e. The Military Industrial complex; Education i.e. The Education   industrial complex; Medicine i.e. The FDA and Big Pharm industry. It’s all big  racket.  Just follow the money.  It’s not rocket science.  It just takes an ounce of your interest and curiosity ( the very traits that our well organized and effective Government Schooling has succeeded in schooling out of us )  it just takes your interest to *see*.   To see the machine and to see it for what it is.  Money is what keeps it moving.   I think many of us still believe we live in a period that wrestles between political ideologies and ideas.  However, that time has passed.  Nobody really believes in that system anymore and certainly not the ones who reap all the benefits.  Only the poor souls who still think we live in a Democracy do.  I won’t even call it a Republic, that died a silent death to cheers a long time ago.

It’s a machine and every day that we send our kids to it’s schools, that we swipe that credit card, that we buy the car and house we can’t afford, that we take out that loan that we will never pay back, that we tell ourselves we are sick and depressed and need a pill to make us happy, that we believe there is something wrong with our children because their bodies and souls are screaming to us to not imprison them in jails called schools with overwhelmed and trained guards called teachers and so we drug them so they can sit still… so the machine can do it’s thing.

Every single day that you participate in this madness, you hand over a part of your freedom.  You hand over a part of your humanity. You hand over good old common sense.   All so that a handful make huge profits.   There is no Freedom.  There is no choice.  The only Freedom and Choice is to pull away, to unplug from these institutions of control and death.  There are only 2 million Home Ed Families in America today.  Let’s make that 5 million, 15 million, 20 million.  Let’s work together to wipe out Government Regulation of our families.  Let’s prepare our children for real life, action and responsibility and not some Job and the illusion of choice.   Choosing between job security A or B, 600 channels and between puppet Red or puppet Blue is not a choice.

It’s all a big racket.   All of it.    They make money and we keep paying.  We pay with our children, our health, our financial freedom. We pay.

What’s left to do?   Leave it.  Don’t try to change it, IT CAN’T BE DONE.   Want to see it end?  Walk away from it.  Take that first step… and don’t look back.  Starve it.  Only then can we begin something new.

Original Articel

- Professor X teaches at a private college and at a community college in the northeastern United States.

Americans are finally starting to ask: “Is all this higher education really necessary?”

Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower” (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I’ve discovered that rather than a lone crank, I’m a voice in a growing movement.

I hadn’t expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic’s web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.

 In the months and years since then - and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article - I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I’m seeing it everywhere? I don’t think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college.

“Some Say Bypassing a Higher Education Is Smarter Than Paying for a Degree,” reads a recent headline in The Washington Post. (The article, which addresses everything from higher education’s outsize price tag to its questionable correlation with career success, garnered more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations on the Post’s web site.) And just last month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a study suggesting that (gasp!) four-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial.

Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question. “Is Going to an Elite College Worth The Cost?,” asked New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg in December. He surveyed economic studies, perused labor reports, and interviewed economists and sociologists to ascertain whether there’s really a significant payoff for choosing a swanky private college over someplace less glamorous. The answer?  Inconclusive. Parents, of course, obsess over the Ivy League admissions game, carefully studying up on how to give their kids an edge. And U.S. News & World Report’s annual college breakdown gets as much publicity these days as the Oscar nominations. But are those students fortunate enough to gain admission really getting an education worthy of the fuss? Reports of rampant grade inflation at many of these schools throws even a straight-A transcript from a prestigious university into question. (Some colleges, including Princeton, have taken to imposing limits on how many A’s instructors can award in any course, while the University of North Carolina has resorted to including median class grades on students’ transcripts so as to make it more readily apparent which A’s were earned in easy courses.) And a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants.

Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation’s total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion - for the first time surpassing the nation’s credit card debt. Student loan debt, it should be noted, is in many respects less forgiving than credit card debt: “These loans typically can’t be discharged in bankruptcy,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “They have different repayment terms, some of which have heavy consequences for borrowers who miss payments.” Some commentators have even suggested that the crimp the financial downturn is putting on students’ ability to get loans may in fact be doing those students a favor. In a piece titled, “Huge Debt Incurred for College Tuition Just Doesn’t Make the Grade,” syndicated financial columnist Michelle Singletary writes, “I’ll be honest. I think if college students and their parents have a harder time getting loans, that’s a good thing. Perhaps now more people will stop and consider the long-term implications of taking on so much of this so-called good debt.”

Adding to the anti-academic backlash is the fact that at a time when most businesses are contracting, colleges are growing inexorably, swallowing up residential neighborhoods in ways that alienate the towns and cities that host them. NYU’s ongoing expansion, for example, has angered many, leading some to dub it the “2031 Plan to Take Over the World.” (A June 2010 Bloomberg article, titled “New York University Assails Greenwich Village,” derides the university’s recent spate of building as an “overbearing onslaught.”)

And at the other end of Manhattan, Nick Sprayregen, the owner of several self-storage facilities in West Harlem has been making headlines with his battle to prevent his properties from eminent domain seizure for a planned Columbia University expansion. (Sprayregen was ultimately denied a hearing by the Supreme Court, but a New York appellate court ruled in 2009 that Columbia had inappropriately colluded with the state in its effort to take his land. “The record overwhelmingly establishes,” the judge wrote, “that the true beneficiary of the scheme to redevelop Manhattanville is not the community that is supposedly blighted, but rather Columbia University, a private elite education institution.”) Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Harvard is regularly lambasted these days for having bought up large swaths of land in working class neighborhoods across the Charles River, then failed to build as promised, leaving vacant lots and gaping, rat-infested holes in the ground.

*            *            *

Since when have colleges become so controversial? They used to embody humankind at its most elevated; now, they’re just another institution to be wary of.

I attended college in the 1970s, when higher education wasn’t newsworthy. When you went away to college, you really went away. I checked into a sylvan campus far away from everything, signed up for a meal plan, submerged myself in the library stacks, and essentially disappeared. Society took little note of academia’s somnolent doings because there was little to take note of. Student activism on any significant scale was moribund. The Vietnam War was over.

Colleges were viewed, in the main, as a hiatus from the real world. In my cinderblock dormitory, I watched no television and read no newspapers. We went to see few current movies—it wasn’t all that easy to get oneself off campus and to a theater, even for the likes of Woody Allen and Jill Clayburgh and Burt Reynolds—but we did dig revivals, Duck Soup and Flying Down to Rio and Sunset Boulevard. We seemed to dwell more in the dusty, monochromatic past than the present, even when we weren’t reading Chaucer and Tacitus. I spent four leisurely years imbibing great books and ideas. I could write a good literature paper—it seemed one of the few things I was suited to do—so a degree in English was my destiny. In those days, college was a lot cheaper, so I didn’t rack up much debt. I knew my degree wouldn’t get me a job, but no one had promised that it would. It wasn’t as though the college was hoodwinking me. My pursuit was rather solipsistic and no doubt shortsighted but harmless—a solitary pastime, like collecting penguin figurines or breeding orchids.

Twenty years later, I found myself teaching part-time at a small private college, and I was struck by the extent to which the institution had changed. College wasn’t the old place of retreat and meditation that I remembered—a place to quietly condition one’s mind with four years of intellectual crunches and sets and reps. It no longer seemed that intellectual a place at all. Now it was a place where students accumulated credits to advance at their jobs. College was very much part of the workaday world. All kinds of people attended because, if they wanted a bigger paycheck, they had no choice in the matter. The rolls had expanded dramatically, which seemed initially like a good thing. But I was teaching many students who weren’t prepared to do even high school work. I was expected to coax critically reasoned research papers from students who possessed no life of the mind at all: young and not-so-young men and women who didn’t read and thought not a whit about ideas.

The task was impossible. I couldn’t shake the sense that the college simply wanted to enroll as many students as possible - and that colleges in general had become more focused on the bottom line than in my day. The system had ended up expanding in ways that industry always expands: by jacking up prices, putting money into public relations, and broadening the customer base by marketing even to customers dubiously served by the product.

If my informal observations about the tenor of our national discourse are accurate, however, many of those customers are finally starting to ask some tough questions - chief among them: Is all this higher education really necessary?

And while the colleges do claim to instill critical thinking skills, these days, I’m not sure they’re thrilled to be the focus of so much critical thought.

Original Article

The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.
By Professor X
June 2008 Atlantic Magazine

I work part-time in the evenings as an adjunct instructor of English. I teach two courses, Introduction to College Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English 102), at a small private college and at a community college. The campuses are physically lovely—quiet havens of ornate stonework and columns, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and tidy Victorian scalloping. Students chat or examine their cell phones or study languidly under spreading trees. Balls click faintly against bats on the athletic fields. Inside the arts and humanities building, my students and I discuss Shakespeare, Dubliners, poetic rhythms, and Edward Said. We might seem, at first glance, to be enacting some sort of college idyll. We could be at Harvard. But this is not Harvard, and our classes are no idyll. Beneath the surface of this serene and scholarly mise-en-scène roil waters of frustration and bad feeling, for these colleges teem with students who are in over their heads.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.

My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?

The goal of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. My students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is performed—as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper, complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all in Modern Language Association format. In 102, we read short stories, poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised Writing About Literature.

Class time passes in a flash—for me, anyway, if not always for my students. I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point. When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood—generally, early in the semester—the room crackles with positive energy. Even the cops-to-be feel driven to succeed in the class, to read and love the great books, to explore potent themes, to write well.

The bursting of our collective bubble comes quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it has all come to naught.

Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.

In each of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable, what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I’m sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home, solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile.

Our textbook boils effective writing down to a series of steps. It devotes pages and pages to the composition of a compare-and-contrast essay, with lots of examples and tips and checklists. “Develop a plan of organization and stick to it,” the text chirrups not so helpfully. Of course any student who can, does, and does so automatically, without the textbook’s directive. For others, this seems an impossible task. Over the course of 15 weeks, some of my best writers improve a little. Sometimes my worst writers improve too, though they rarely, if ever, approach base-level competence.

How I envy professors in other disciplines! How appealing seems the straightforwardness of their task! These are the properties of a cell membrane, kid. Memorize ’em, and be ready to spit ’em back at me. The biology teacher also enjoys the psychic ease of grading multiple-choice tests. Answers are right or wrong. The grades cannot be questioned. Quantifying the value of a piece of writing, however, is intensely subjective, and English teachers are burdened with discretion. (My students seem to believe that my discretion is limitless. Some of them come to me at the conclusion of a course and matter-of-factly ask that I change a failing grade because they need to graduate this semester or because they worked really hard in the class or because they need to pass in order to receive tuition reimbursement from their employer.)

I wonder, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I fail nine out of 15 students, whether the college will send me a note either (1) informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement and demanding that I pass more students, or (2) commending me on my fiscal ingenuity—my high failure rate forces students to pay for classes two or three times over.

What actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.

Recently, I gave a student a failing grade on her research paper. She was a woman in her 40s; I will call her Ms. L. She looked at her paper, and my comments, and the grade. “I can’t believe it,” she said softly. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”

From the beginning of our association vis-à-vis the research paper, I knew that there would be trouble with Ms. L.

When I give out this assignment, I usually bring the class to the college library for a lesson on Internet-based research. I ask them about their computer skills, and some say they have none, fessing up to being computer illiterate and saying, timorously, how hopeless they are at that sort of thing. It often turns out, though, that many of them have at least sent and received e-mail and Googled their neighbors, and it doesn’t take me long to demonstrate how to search for journal articles in such databases as Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.

Ms. L., it was clear to me, had never been on the Internet. She quite possibly had never sat in front of a computer. The concept of a link was news to her. She didn’t know that if something was blue and underlined, you could click on it. She was preserved in the amber of 1990, struggling with the basic syntax of the World Wide Web. She peered intently at the screen and chewed a fingernail. She was flummoxed.

I had responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn’t go well. She wasn’t absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall known to every teacher at every level: the wall of defeat and hopelessness and humiliation, the wall that is an impenetrable barrier to learning. She wasn’t hearing a word I said.

“You might want to get some extra help,” I told her. “You can schedule a private session with the librarian.”

“I’ll get it,” she said. “I just need a little time.”

“You have some computer-skills deficits,” I told her. “You should address them as soon as you can.” I don’t have cause to use much educational jargon, but deficits has often come in handy. It conveys the seriousness of the situation, the student’s jaw-dropping lack of ability, without being judgmental. I tried to jostle her along. “You should schedule that appointment right now. The librarian is at the desk. ”

“I realize I have a lot of work to do,” she said.

Our dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now inhabited a Pinter play.

The research-paper assignment is meant to teach the fundamental mechanics of the thing: how to find sources, summarize or quote them, and cite them, all the while not plagiarizing. Students must develop a strong thesis, not just write what is called a “passive report,” the sort of thing one knocks out in fifth grade on Thomas Edison. This time around, the students were to elucidate the positions of scholars on two sides of a historical controversy. Why did Truman remove MacArthur? Did the United States covertly support the construction of the Berlin Wall? What really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin? Their job in the paper, as I explained it, was to take my arm and introduce me as a stranger to scholars A, B, and C, who stood on one side of the issue, and to scholars D, E, and F, who were firmly on the other—as though they were hosting a party.

A future state trooper snorted. “That’s some dull party,” he said.

At our next meeting after class in the library, Ms. L. asked me whether she could do her paper on abortion. What exactly, I asked, was the historical controversy? Well, she replied, whether it should be allowed. She was stuck, I realized, in the well-worn groove of assignments she had done in high school. I told her that I thought the abortion question was more of an ethical dilemma than a historical controversy.

“I’ll have to figure it all out,” she said.

She switched her topic a half-dozen times; perhaps it would be fairer to say that she never really came up with one. I wondered whether I should just give her one, then decided against it. Devising a topic was part of the assignment.

“What about gun control?” she asked.

I sighed. You could write, I told her, about a particular piece of firearms-related legislation. Historians might disagree, I said, about certain aspects of the bill’s drafting. Remember, though, the paper must be grounded in history. It could not be a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control.

“All right,” she said softly.

Needless to say, the paper she turned in was a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control. At least, I think that was the subject. There was no real thesis. The paper often lapsed into incoherence. Sentences broke off in the middle of a line and resumed on the next one, with the first word inappropriately capitalized. There was some wavering between single- and double-spacing. She did quote articles, but cited only databases—where were the journals themselves? The paper was also too short: a bad job, and such small portions.

“I can’t believe it,” she said when she received her F. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”

She most certainly hadn’t written a college paper, and she was a long way from doing so. Yet there she was in college, paying lots of tuition for the privilege of pursuing a degree, which she very likely needed to advance at work. Her deficits don’t make her a bad person or even unintelligent or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to do so in their workaday life. But let’s be frank: she wasn’t working at anything resembling a college level.

I gave Ms. L. the F and slept poorly that night. Some of the failing grades I issue gnaw at me more than others. In my ears rang her plaintive words, so emblematic of the tough spot in which we both now found ourselves. Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments. She simply was not qualified for college. What exactly, I wondered, was I grading? I thought briefly of passing Ms. L., of slipping her the old gentlewoman’s C-minus. But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students. By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C? Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

We think of college professors as being profoundly indifferent to the grades they hand out. My own professors were fairly haughty and aloof, showing little concern for the petty worries, grades in particular, of their students. There was an enormous distance between students and professors. The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on their parents’ dime. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.

But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

During breaks, my students scatter to various corners and niches of the building, whip out their cell phones, and try to maintain a home life. Burdened with their own assignments, they gamely try to stay on top of their children’s. Which problems do you have to do? … That’s not too many. Finish that and then do the spelling … No, you can’t watch Grey’s Anatomy.

Adult education, nontraditional education, education for returning students—whatever you want to call it—is a substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners, school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry Ford’s Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe that they would.

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”

I knew that Ms. L.’s paper would fail. I knew it that first night in the library. But I couldn’t tell her that she wasn’t ready for an introductory English class. I wouldn’t be saving her from the humiliation of defeat by a class she simply couldn’t handle. I’d be a sexist, ageist, intellectual snob.

In her own mind, Ms. L. had triumphed over adversity. In her own mind, she was a feel-good segment on Oprah. Everyone wants to triumph. But not everyone can—in fact, most can’t. If they could, it wouldn’t be any kind of a triumph at all. Never would I want to cheapen the accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were able to get past their deficits and earn a diploma, maybe even climbing onto the college honor roll. That is truly something.

One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors.

Posted on 06.8.11
By Sahil Kapur

Acting on orders from the U.S. Department of Education, a S.W.A.T. team broke into a California home Tuesday at 6 a.m. and reportedly roughed up a man — all because of his estranged wife’s defaulted student loans. She wasn’t there.

Yet, Kenneth Wright of the city of Stockton was grabbed by the neck by handcuffed before he and his three young children were put in a police car as the officers searched his house, he told ABC News10. He said he was in his underwear the whole time.

“They busted down my door for this. It wasn’t even me,” Wright told the local news station. “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.”

Local police were reportedly not involved in the incident.

Original Article

I am a 24 year old who was unschooled since the 4th grade.

Roger Porter
June 1, 2011

It’s insane how they slang education like dope in this country. And all the unemployed higher education junkies are so quick to hop in line for their next fix. To make matters worse they raise college tuition every semester. I mean at least marijuana and cocaine are somewhat affordable. It’s sad when you have people in their mid 20’s who are upwards of $50,000 in debt and discover after graduation that there are no jobs; so what do they do—they go back to school.

It’s a sick cycle that I myself have managed to get wrapped up in. It bothers me that my generation was lied to continuously about pursuing higher education, as if that would solve all of our financial problems. On the contrary it actually creates severe financial problems.

Sometimes I feel as though the Education Industrial Complex has surpassed the Prison Industrial Complex in terms of sheer treachery. They distribute thousands upon thousands of dollars in loans to teenagers, leading them to believe that as long as they are in school they won’t have to worry about them. But Sally Mae doesn’t forget, Citibank doesn’t forget, Bank of America doesn’t forget, and 6 months after graduation if one is not in school then please believe they will hunt you down like the mafia.

To make money off the backs of young people who are trying to do something positive with their lives is extremely shady. It appears that the University has become nothing more than a grand hustle; it is merely a manufacturer of false dreams.

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The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.

By Daniel B. Smith
Published May 1, 2011

Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.

As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture—an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.

It’s no surprise, given how the Great Recession has corroded public faith in other once-unassailable American institutions, that college should come in for a drubbing. But inevitability is just another word for opportunity, and the two most vocal critics are easy to identify and strikingly similar in entrepreneurial self-­image. In the past year or so, James Altucher, a New York–based venture capitalist and finance writer, has emerged through frequent media appearances as something of a poster boy, and his column “8 Alternatives to College” something of an essential text, for the anti-college crusade. The father of two young girls, Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it. “What am I going to do?” he asked last March on Tech Ticker, a popular investment show on Yahoo. “When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?” To Altucher, higher education is nothing less than an institutionalized scam—college graduates hire only college graduates, creating a closed system that permits schools to charge exorbitant ­prices and forces students to take on crippling debt. “The cost of college in the past 30 years has gone up tenfold. Health care has only gone up sixfold, and inflation has only gone up threefold. Not only is it a scam, but the college presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”

Like Altucher, Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist with strong misgivings about college. Unlike Altucher, he’s a billionaire and Silicon Valley royalty. In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, and six years later, he made the first angel investment in Facebook. (In The Social Network, he is the imposing figure who conspires to oust Eduardo Saverin from the company.) A passionate libertarian—he was a generous supporter of Ron Paul in 2008 and is the main funder of the fringe Seasteading Institute, which aims to establish experimental political communities on offshore platforms—Thiel is deeply skeptical of top-down R&D and anything that smells like groupthink. At PayPal, he hustled $100 million in venture capital just ahead of the dot-com crash, which he anticipated, and he made another well-timed bet for his Clarium Capital Management hedge fund against the housing market in 2007. In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—­hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.

When I asked Altucher what his aim was in railing against college, he replied that he wanted to “reduce demand so costs go down”: Persuade enough kids not to enroll and colleges will be forced to change their ways. When I spoke to Thiel from his home in San Francisco in late February, he offered much the same justification for his major salvo in the fight against college—a philanthropic initiative called 20 Under 20. The program, also known as the Thiel Fellowship, will award twenty students 19 years old and younger $100,000 each and the mentor­ship of some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The catch? The winners have to stay out of college for two years. They are to be announced this month.

Their advocacy has made Altucher and Thiel no few enemies. Jacob Weisberg, of Slate, has called the Thiel Fellowship a “nasty” and narcissistic idea that will retard the participants’ intellectual development and funnel whatever altruistic energies they have into getting rich, like Thiel. Altucher has received voluminous hate mail as the result of his media appearances and blog posts, including one from a fan who threatened to murder him and then eat his remains.

But the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines. In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped. Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning. Then, last month, a front-page article in the Times delivered striking news: Student-loan debt in the U.S. is approaching the trillion-dollar mark, outpacing credit-card debt for the first time in history. With all that debt, more and more are asking, what are we buying?

James Altucher is a self-made man. A onetime New Jersey high-school chess champion, he was raised in a middle-class home and taught himself how to invest by preparing for the role as if it were a do-or-die match, obsessively studying the ways of the established masters. (He claims he read every letter Warren Buffett wrote to shareholders and investors from 1957 on.) Yet unlike many of the figures associated with the view that college isn’t needed for success—Gates, Jobs, Zucker­berg—­Altucher didn’t find his fortune young, and he didn’t drop out of college to pursue it. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Cornell, and he did two years of graduate work in the subject at Carnegie Mellon.

Not surprisingly, Altucher’s detractors often cite his credentials as evidence that he would like to deprive others of a privilege from which he’s benefited. To this, Altucher responds that his college experience is exactly what gives him the knowledge to criticize the institution. “People come back to me,” he says over lunch at a crowded restaurant in Union Square, “very smart, intelligent people, and say, ‘Look, college teaches you how to think, college teaches you how to network, college teaches you how to write.’ Personally, I didn’t learn how to do any of those things in college.” What Altucher learned to do in college, he says, is what all young men—“with almost no exceptions”—learn to do: drink and talk to women.

Altucher has a very personal perspective on college: He doesn’t think he should pay for it.

That training didn’t come cheap. By the time Altucher enrolled, in 1986, private-college tuition was already so high that he had to borrow heavily to attend. “Except for the first semester, I paid for my whole education,” he says. “I borrowed every dime.” He did everything he could to mitigate the expense. He took six classes a semester, stayed on for summer sessions, worked 40 hours a week at the computer lab. In the end, he managed to graduate a year early and still wound up about $40,000 in the hole.

Altucher’s views on higher education aren’t always consistent. “College is like the best thing in the world,” I was surprised to hear him say when I first called him. “It’s idyllic.” Indeed, he sometimes suggests that college is so idyllic it’s wrong to populate it with the young. Instead, he urges students to take time off and take advantage of their youth—to start a business, travel around the world, work for a charity. “What everyone asks then is, ‘How are they going to pay for that?’ Well, it’s one fiftieth of the price of college to do any of those things.”

This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. “Let’s take a step back,” Altucher says. “What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.” For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. “So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.”

The economic recession that began at the end of 2007 has had numerous, cascading effects: a decline in property values, retirement savings, birthrates, geographical mobility; an increase in the national deficit, political rancor, ­mental-health complaints. One effect the recession has conspicuously not had, however—despite what economists say may be the worst job market for graduates since the Great Depression—is on the number of American families who send children off to college each September. Fifty years ago, 48 percent of recent high-school graduates enrolled in a college or university. In 2009, that number was more than 70 percent—a historic high.

What is perhaps even more striking than these figures is that in the opinion of the vast majority of Americans, they’re too low. A 1999 survey sponsored by the Educational Testing Service found that 87 percent of Americans felt the lack of a college education to be a disadvantage in life. Ninety percent of high-school seniors expect they will go on to college, with seven out of ten of those believing they’ll progress from there into a professional career. “Education has been central to the American Dream since the time of the nation’s founding,” Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard, wrote in 2009. But in the decades since World War II, it has been college—not just elementary or high school, as before—that has become “fundamental to cherished values of opportunity.”

Social scientists and historians long ago identified this transformation in American educational expectations as the “college for all” movement, and public leaders and private philanthropists enthusiastically rallied support for it. But the data gathered in recent years on the value of college has been mixed at best, blunting the moral edge of “college for all” and turning some higher-ed advocates into skeptics like Altucher and Thiel.

This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-­dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.

The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours. In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”

If college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it?

But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are under­performing, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-­college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-­increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”

This analysis, of course, takes a purely utilitarian view of college—higher education, as its many defenders hasten to point out, has a significance for students that defies the cost-benefit ratio. Last year, in response to a Times article titled “Plan B: Skip College,” The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a rousing defense of college’s ability to, among other things, “expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind.” In an essay published in March in The New York Review of Books, critic and professor Peter Brooks dismissed the swelling discontent with college as cranky and ­narrow-minded. The university is, he wrote, “one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve.”

“What kind of an economic good is college?” Peter Thiel likes to ask. One answer is that college is a luxury good—a high-end commodity whose appeal, like a designer handbag, grows in direct proportion with the size of the sticker price. This is the answer given by such recent polemics as Higher Education?: How ­Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It, by the Queens College sociologist Andrew Hacker and the Times science writer ­Claudia Dreifus. Higher Education? contends that American colleges have transformed from rigorous scholarly communities into corporate-minded youth resorts, where some presidents command salaries of more than $1 million and competition centers on outdoing one another in acquiring high-end amenities (duplex-apartment dormitories, $70 million gyms).

Another possibility is that college is an investment—an expenditure on which one can expect high future returns. This answer is one to which many mainstream economists subscribe. When I spoke to Stephen Rose, a research professor at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce and the author of Rebound, an optimistic forecast of the postrecession economy, he pointed again and again to what he calls the “totemic number”: 74 percent. That is the financial benefit—the so-called B.A. wage premium—that economists calculate college graduates can now expect to reap relative to their peers with high-school diplomas. It is a number that has nearly doubled over the past 30 years.

Still another possibility is that the primary role of college today is to serve a “signaling” function—like an elegant business suit, an impressive B.A. advertises talent, pedigree, and ambition employers can use as a hiring shorthand. Thiel, for instance, received both an undergraduate and a law degree from Stanford, credentials that he was able to parlay into a clerkship with a federal judge, an associate position at a white-shoe Manhattan firm, and a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush.

But of course, Silicon Valley is a mecca of countersignaling—witness the super-status Zuckerbergian hoodie—and it’s no surprise to discover that in the land of the billionaire dropout, an Internet entrepreneur like Thiel sees evidence that higher education inhibits innovation. All he has to do is look around to see a new model university—the college of innovation and pluck.

Thiel does not dismiss those who say that higher education is a luxury good or that for some it might be a worthy investment, but he finds neither account adequate to explain the college bubble. It’s undoubtedly true, he said, that “it’s a lot more fun to go to college than to work.” And yet the fact that college now costs so much, and requires so much debt to complete, “probably leads people to be a lot more stressed out than they otherwise would be, so it’s probably a lot less fun than when it cost less.” His hunch is borne out by a comprehensive 2010 survey of freshmen that found emotional health to be at a record low—in large part because of financial worries.

“Not only is college a scam, but the presidents know it. That’s why they keep raising tuition.”— James Altucher

“College debt means getting stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.”—Peter Thiel

As for college being a good investment, Thiel believes the 74 percent wage-­premium figure to be as inflated as tuition prices. A Clarium report Thiel commissioned in 2009 analyzed government data to argue that, while the return on a college diploma indeed increased markedly between 1978 and 2000, that’s only because the return on a high-school diploma decreased markedly during that same period. “Relative to the past,” the report stated, “students who go to college do better than their peers who do not, but this is simply a mathematical result of their peers doing worse than in the 1970s.” At the same time, more college debt means it takes students much longer to pay back their loans—a consideration Thiel thinks economists are wrong to omit from their calculations. “It’s not just a question of if you get [a degree], you make more money,” he says. “It’s also a question of how many options you’re precluding for the future.” Just as during the real-estate boom people bought more house than they could afford, trapping themselves in burdensome decades-long mortgages, “lots of college debt means that you’re maybe stuck on a particular career track for the next twenty years.”

But if college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it? For Thiel, the commodity college most closely resembles is the humble insurance policy. Americans have become terrified, he says, of what will happen to their children if they don’t send them to college. The recession, widening income inequality, growing job insecurity, the uncertain future of the welfare state, the increasing costs of health care—all have deepened the anxieties that made college such an attractive option for a rising middle class in the first place. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe, to be protected from the chaos. You’re paying for college because it’s an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class.” The larger question this raises, he says, is, “Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago? And does that tell us something has gone really badly wrong with our country?”

At the core of the Thiel Fellowship application is a pair of open-ended, Miss America–like prompts: “Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true but that most people believe is not true” and “How do you want to change the world?” Within weeks of the applications going out, responses began to appear ­online—on Facebook, on student blogs, and on YouTube in the form of PowerPoint and HD-video presentations.

Among the first responses I came across, in February, was on the website of Dale Stephens, a freshman at Hendrix College, in Central Arkansas, which routinely shows up on rankings of the best liberal-arts schools in America. Stephens’s answer to the second question was to propose a new airline that would utilize a single aircraft family, secondary airports, and a single-class seating system to provide inexpensive transatlantic flights. This was no mere daydream: He had already forged contacts with Boeing, Southwest, and several major airport authorities, and he’d devised a business plan that, with adequate seed money, he was convinced could be brought to profitable fruition.

After I read his proposal, I tried to schedule an interview with Stephens. This proved harder than expected. He told me to check his online calendar for an opening; he was booked solid for weeks. When I finally did get through, a couple of days later, it became clear why he was so busy. Stephens’s 19-year-old life is crammed full with intellectual and creative ventures. He is writing a book. He participates in workshops, seminars, conferences. A month before we spoke, he put his airline idea on ice in order to launch an organization that applies the methods of “unschooling”—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised—to the realm of higher education. UnCollege, as Stephens calls it, has already garnered coverage from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Huffington Post, and ABC News. Then, of course, there was his classwork—though he’d already resolved to jettison that distraction. Whether he was awarded a Thiel Fellowship or not, he said, he was going to drop out. He did, at the beginning of last month.

I spoke to a half-dozen applicants, and nearly all offered the same lament: College is impractical. The liberal arts are hazy, its lessons inapplicable to the real world. “The best way to learn is through purpose-driven education,” Max Marmer, a Stanford student who also dropped out recently in favor of entrepreneurship, told me. “Taking classes in itself is worthless.” Listening to these kids—these inordinately gifted, monumentally confident kids—was at once inspiring, intimidating, and a reminder of just how limited in reach the efforts of the anti-college leaders have been. Inevitably, perhaps, both Altucher’s rhetoric and Thiel’s philanthropy have appealed most to that segment of the college population that is bound least by the college system. With their sophistication, self-motivation, and autodidacticism, these students don’t truly need college. Lock the gates of the campus behind them and you can be reasonably certain they’ll do just fine—maybe better.

Attending to these outliers has been a PR boon for the Thiel Fellowship, which is intended, Thiel told me, “to reset the values all the way down the system”—a program of trickle-down entrepreneurship aimed to launch us out of our great stagnation. As Thiel and Altucher surely understand well, now is precisely the moment, with all its uncertainty and anxiety and instability, when systems as stalwart as college seem most in need of reconfiguration. But it is also the time—with all that uncertainty and anxiety and instability—when the millions reliant on a system as stalwart as college are least eager to do any real reconfiguring. The vast majority of undergraduates are in a peculiar and as yet unresolved bind. On the one hand, a college education will likely saddle them with crippling debt and consign them to four underwhelming years in classrooms with fluorescent lighting and drop-tile ceilings. On the other hand, opting out will likely consign them to a lifetime of unsatisfying, low-wage employment. What’s an average kid to do?

Original Article