Scams and the Scamming Scammers, Student Loan Edition

If you've ever had a real job, you probably have noticed that most professions and most careers would be better if the people populating them did not have a four-year college degree.  There's no reason for the IT staff, the programmers, the systems techs to have four-year degrees, especially since most of them will have majored in something that has nothing to with job, making college a very expensive social event.  Why would a facility manager for UPS need a college degree?  Hell, why do the supervisors at FedEx need college degrees?  They watch a bunch of temps toss packages onto conveyor belts and load trucks.  Frankly, most school teachers don't need four-year degrees.  A certification for elementary and middle schools should be a two-year deal maximum, like LPN vs. RN.  Sure, high school might need more basic knowledge, but many many people still teaching only majored in education and thus know much less about the math or science or history or English that they teach than you or I do--or many of their better students within a year or two of leaving high school.  Engineering sounds like a job that needs a four year degree until you graduate in engineering and then get a job.  That job could have been done--and would have been better in every way--with the work of a two year degree followed by all the shit you learn on the job that has nothing to do with the bullshit with which you wasted much of your time at RIT.  Why should the guy running your distribution facility have an MBA from the night program at a state school in Oklahoma on top of the barely-passed general business undergrad degree?  None of that garbage helps him or helps your business.  It's all absolutely pointless.  (Is there a bigger academic joke than the MBA in any segment of education starting as far down as all-day preschool?)

The four-year degree scam is a result two things for the most part.  The first is the student loan boondoggle.  For many kids and young adults, the four year degree requires a giant, debilitating debt, unless you are a drug-addled, brain-damaged scion of a traitorous family (or perhaps actual son of third-world dictator), legitimate super-genius who really should be in college studying something interesting, or a scholarship athlete.  Everyone else has to pay, especially if you believe that Williams for full pop is somehow better for the future B-minus student college-bound type than in-state tuition at places like UMBC or UMass Lowell or Salem State.  Those big-times loans will follow you forever, so the banks always get paid.  It's a good deal for them and bad for you.  The second major driver of the scam is the legion of sub-50th percentile Ph.D's from sub-50th percentile programs who get jobs teaching at sub-50th percentile universities.  Like the banks making their loans, these clowns and their bosses need these institutions to be filled to the brim each and every semester with students going into hock for useless, overpriced degrees that they don't really want, don't shouldn't really need, and aren't at all suited to.  All those bottom-tier university assholes make a nice salary perpetuating their lack of achievement and talent for another generation on the backs of their victims.

It's long past time to stop making overpriced and pointless four-year degrees a jobs program for people who couldn't find success in any sort of academic meritocracy at any level since they were 13.  Make the admissions programs uniformly rigorous and selective at the best schools to fill them with the people who deserve to be there and will actually study something interesting in order to further the knowledge base of humanity.  Let all the lesser degree mills, horrible private colleges, and tax-payer funded binge-drinking sleepaway camps wither, and let all the newswriters, IT staff, school teachers and administrators, service professionals, most engineers, manufacturing managers, bank employees and everyone else get their jobs with only the education they need to be successful at that job without obscene and otherwise worthless college debt, whether that education is a certificate, apprenticeship, two-year degree or in rare cases four or four-plus year degree.  The only ones who get hurt are the villains in the banks and the shitty schools pushing their junk on the kids.