About an Hour. This is a bit hysterical, but does address the college loan scam.
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Ha, Ha. Thats not exactly what I was told about College. In my day, it was how to stay out of Vietnam. And it did work that way for me–kinda/mostly. No real complaints.
I pity the kiddies today. I worked thru college and graduated without any debt and did find jobs I enjoyed doing. I don’t think that happens today as often as it did in my day.
All my friends who have college kiddies report they can’t get jobs–other than as language instructors over seas. Ok for a first job but not the applied advance degrees they worked for and their parents paid for.
Tough market out there. Not everybody can start their own business or get hired at a company that is laying people off. I wonder if the stats are kept accurately enough to show the gap between college and high school degree life time wages/net worth over time? Even in my day the rumor was that if you got a good (Union) blue collar job out of high school you could near break even with going to college. Today with neithere group getting hired, I wonder how that pans out. Who’s ahead if both are unemployed but one has no debt?
Ha, ha. Yes==the number of jobs available is social engineering. From the left: government jobs. From the right: in prison. As usual, the rights solution cost more.
Poor kiddies.
Thanks John, you and Jerry Pournelle are the only tech guys that get it.
Interesting find, but…
Wow, this video reminds me of a discussion John and Adam had regarding Alex Jones. It is almost like this was made as a prop to support their point.
Spoiler alert!
This is an interesting documentary with some points, but no actual depth. It seems as though the whole thing is designed to put you into a mindset that the world will end rather than examine the reality that there is a significant scam aspect to college education. The topic of college education being a scam seemed more of a pretext to produce an alarmist documentary that ultimately is a marketing piece to scam Americans into hoarding metals at inflated and unsustainable prices.
Near the end, when the silver push goes from being a nascent sell to an outright sell it superficially promotes the idea that online education would be a suitable alternative. That is an interesting point, but again lacking in depth and it completely ignores the points that the documentary made less than ten minutes earlier that 75% of the US economy is service employment. Teaching at colleges can more or less be considered service employment like the bankers or the lawyers that the film was criticizing. Congress is not going to intervene against one particular group scamming the public, congress will instead codify that scam. In other words, the problem will fester because congress will intervene (as it did this spring against private corporate colleges) to prevent one group of service employees (Democratic college employees/donors) from loosing jobs to a competitive upstart.
Sounds like a infomercial for gold and silver. Did Adam have anything to do with this? The college information losses its meaning when they push gold and silver. Online tuition is about the same as going to a B&M.
Is this the video produced by the gold shills in order for you to sign up for the newsletter subscription?
College isn’t a rip-off. College tuition, however, is. No question.
Well…. the cost side certainly is a scam as documented. No doubt about that. Then again, knowledge is actually being dished out as well. And don;t forget that the rest of society ‘demands’ that you have a degree to be taken seriously, as society expect to be taken seriously as they have a degree.
Sure, you can become a Clemente, or Trump or something, but that is for the very few.
I having dealt with en EMBA program from an Ivy league institution on a business level, and it is very clear that it is all about money. Their contribution – or selling proposition -besides a dose of scripted knowledge, is relations building. So effectively you pay USD 100,000 to know the potential movers and shakers of biz…
A scam? Maybe no, but certainly a less altruistic ivory tower stands that what they portray themselves to be.
This is private institutions.
The state run institutions are definitely all about screwing people off their money, potentially to contribute to the state coffers.
Best solution for HS grads – do all your prerequisites at your local JC over two years, get As in Bs in cake-walk classes, then transfer into schools like NYU and UCLA that have policy to prioritize JC transfers. Viola, you just saved at least $25,000. Also, if you have the grade in HS, you can get a crummy private school to give you a free ride. DENNIS RODMAN got a free ride to a JC, seriously …. how hard could it be?
On the other hand, it’s probably a good idea to panic! College is a scam! Don’t go!
Pay your loans, SLAVES!
If you are a highly skilled worker you can make as much as a college grad or more in many cases. That often means a year or two of tech training but you avoid those nasty student loans.
There are also jobs that pay well with only a high school degree like hauling hazardous waste or even in highway construction but there may be serious downsides to each of them. Some are bleeping dangerous. Some are seasonal, etc.
The people at the gravel pit I talked to got paid well but they also got fired the first time they broke a safety rule assuming they were still alive that is. You don’t make many mistakes around the kind of machinery these people were using and the work was seasonal. Of course that meant you got a month or so off.
My wife has just graduated cum laude from college and owes $0.00 for her bachelor’s degree in education an art history.
Okay, I’m now just about broke, (seeing the end of the cash and asset pile,) but we owe nothing so when she starts student-teaching in September she can focus on the kids* and her future career and not have the weight of the loans dragging her down.
Right now, the student loan racket in the ‘States is exactly that, a racket.
The sole, only and unique justification for the whole sordid business is that we have much better educated waiters, waitresses and retail sales clerks, while being uneducated is synonymous with being unemployed.
I will be donating to No Agenda again before September and calling for karma, because you don’t neglect any possible avenue for assistance, regardless of how silly it sounds. 😉
*) Ever notice how infant mortality is higher in the ‘States than in lots of other countries?
Funny, in a country where they’re supposed to care so much for kith, kinder and kin, why are so many supposedly second and even third-world countries faring better that right here in the Good Ol’ You-Ess-Ay?
Hypocrisy maybe?
You don’t actually expect us to swallow this tripe?
This video is BS. The narrator constantly refers to the “average cost of college tuition is $27,240 per year”. Thats all find and dandy, but you are referring to PRIVATE COLLEGE TUITION. While I dont have numbers I can quote to prove it, I KNOW FOR A FACT that PUBLIC colleges have MANY more times the number of students that a private college does. Let me tell you what numbers that I DO HAVE: The median cost of PUBLIC tuition in the US is $9,418…OR NEARLY 1/3 of your OVERINFLATED estimates in this ridiculous video. And I have no idea WHERE you got the BS number of $35,000/year average of a HS graduate straight out of HS, but that number as well, has to be absolute BS. I cant even find a job that pays $35,000 NOW, and I am 35 years old. I didnt even watch all of the video…it proved to be meaningless with all the BS in the numbers and references to the Hyperinflation Institute.
#14–Hey Peapod==last week you bragged you were moderately wealthy–today you are broke? Most people don’t define/experience moderate wealth as having $17.64 in the bank. What happened? Trust fund finally run out?
Art History huh? Sounds like a double fail but atleast she can explain to you what the doves/dogs/calla lilies mean in every tapestry you come across.
We can’t all be stock brokers.
‘Lo Bobbo,
Okay, I feeling a bit poor-ish these days. But I have just finished paying for 4 years of private Catholic college for my wife without getting a loan, so I’m allowed to. 🙂
She’s going to teach little diaper shedders and knee pants fillers (grade 1) and for that you neither need nor particularly want a degree in advanced particle physics or even in mathematics.
But its a wise idea to have a degree in education; meaning they teach you
• how to maintain order in the class, preferably while avoiding nailing the li’l bastards to the ceiling and playing piñata with a mace,
• how to assess the stoonts progress, (The question: “Did ya ever think, maybe your kid’s an idiot?” really doesn’t sell well at parent-teacher night,)
• how to navigate the morass of laws (They actually have rights now? Who knew?) and
* how to administer the tests in such a way that they actually have some meaning by the time the kids get on to the next grade. (Bush’s No child left behind my freakin’ ass…)
My wife actually had to take two years of Spanish (ça fera une autre flèche a carquoi,) history, maths, methods in pedagogy, child psychology, all kind of shit.
She’s got my respect for putting up with the school for that four years and earning a double major cum laude.
Now she’s going to be on the receiving end, spoiling young minds as they enter the school system, only to emerge from its cloaca, possibly decades later, crushed under the weight of debt acquired, spirit broken, hopes dashed, limbs and egos shredded as they face the dubious fact that while it may not have been worth it, its infinitely better that getting out earlier and never having the possibility of getting more than than menial labor, like assistant crack whore.
Where is the BS meter? Peter Schiff has already debunked the NIA.
National Inflation Association co-founder admits NIA is a FRAUD!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XYOclEsKHtc
#19–Peepod==I paid for my wifey’s higher edumacation. First a Nursing Degree then an unrelated PhD. The girl loved books. Can read them by flipping the pages–just like a magic act with 99% comprehension and recall. Had to research some early Flemish BS of one sort so she learned Old Phlem in a few months–said it was easy because it was so close to Latin. Just like a magic act. Not much use in the real world, but she could explain to me what the dove/dog/and calla lilies mean every time we pass a tapestry.
Thank god one of us is a stock trader.
The above is true only poetically, and only in parts. Truly, the only wealth one can have is in the appreciation of life and love. Who among us is ever rich?
Um, school costs money. You got out of it what you put into it. There’s no guarantees. If you want to retire, you have to actively manage your money.
Now I suddenly have an urge to buy gold, and I don’t know why.
The real conspiracy is that one must go to a college, to get a degree, to earn decide pay. As if they teach you anything you can’t learn on your own time. And for far less money. Lincoln was largely self-taught. Never attended any college. Got elected, practices law, and eventually became the most popular and US President, after George Washington. And if Sarah Palin ends up being President. She’ll prove again that a Republican doesn’t need a formal education in law, of any kind, to get the country into another costly war. We’ll see.
Bill Gates, barely had one semester of college. Probably avoiding the draft. Before running off to start Microsoft. Eventually Harvard gave him an Honorary Degree, just for being so damn rich and successful. I guess.
So the question is, why, beside using their financial and political influence, should colleges be allowed to hold the degree issuing system hostage? Yes, there are some business and marketing degrees, available from online institutions. But doubtful they’ll make that much of s difference in salary levels.
My nephew is a building contractor, and never had any formal business training. And he’s pretty good at it. But it makes no difference whether he had a degree or not. Because right now the building market is way down. Thanks largely to all those crap heads, with business degrees, who managed to screw up the US economy with their faulty derivatives and default swaps. Alan Greenspan ought to be reviled, for being the dangerous phony, he was.
But he was just allowed to quietly split away, after everything he predict, went wrong.