College For Everyone Sucks

A year or so ago, I learned of the existence of a post-doctoral program at an internationally-reknown American university. Apparently, PhDs are no longer the measure of who's an expert in a particular field. This phenomenon has happened before, of course. We all know that, decades ago, associate and bachelor degrees amounted to a whole hell of a lot more than they do today.

Now, however, it's the master's degree that usually dictates where in the workplace a recent college grad gets to start working. Thanks to the liberal propensity of wanting "college for everyone," the lower degrees have been devalued, almost to the point of being as almost as worthless as a high school diploma.

Of course, the conservatives/capitalists hold just as much to blame for this evolution of degree valuation as the liberals. After all, it is they that insisted on keeping the American post-secondary education system based on a business. College itself, obviously, is one huge money-making industry.

Still, every time an accomplishment becomes worth just a little bit less than it used to be, it tends to piss me off. Whether it's education, military (oh, boy... look how the military gives away and creates new medals to give away just to make their servicemembers feel better), or sports, devaluing something just plain sucks.

Many, many years ago, colleges were there to separate the intellectually egalitarian from the intellectually elite. Today they're there to continue the educations of people who are obviously underserved by the public primary and secondary education systems. Yes, there are a whole shitload of issues within this issue, and there's no way I'm even going to try to get into them all, but the end result is the same: college degrees continue to lose their value.

I say, "Fuck that."

We have, inarguably, the best college and university system in the world. We have, inarguably, one of the worst public primary and secondary school systems in the world. The catch-22 here is that, if we continue to devalue our degrees in the name of "everyone gets to go to college," we're going to lose our leg-up on the rest of the world.

Fix the public school system. Make college harder to get into. Get rid of some of these ridiculous, bullshit colleges that exist only to make money. Make our degrees worth something. Fucking Hell.