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Why Free College Is a Terrible Idea

One of the platforms in the 2016 US election is pushing the premise of “free college” to appeal to the youth vote.  I’m here to explain why “free college” is potentially a waste of tax dollars and not something that political candidates should be focusing on.

Tuition Is Unregulated, And We Don’t Need More Debt

Why do people rally behind the idea of “free college”?  One would assume because of how incredibly expensive the average four-year education has become.  If college were reasonably priced, and easily afforded, nobody would be griping about it’s increasingly astronomical price tag in the first place.  So basically, the argument boils down to: college has gotten too expensive, so now it should be covered fully by the tax dollar.

There’s one problem with this mentality though.  The U.S. is currently over 19 trillion in debt.  The U.S. is in debt because it has a tendency to recklessly spend far more money than it brings in.  To put it into perspective, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the U.S. a mere 1.6 trillion.  Roughly 1/10 of our debt can be attributed to these wars.  The other 90% is due to all the other instances of annual overspending of tax dollars.  The money spent on college is estimated to be about 300-400 billion dollars annually. (20 million students at 15-20k a year: a modest estimate)  This isn’t a very small number, when you keep in mind the U.S. brings in roughly 3 trillion in taxes per year currently.  All these expenditures add up of course, which is precisely why we are 19 trillion in debt to begin with.  College would be yet another drop in the bucket, driving the country further into an increased mountain of debt.

Perhaps we could actually afford “free” college if we radically cut back on all the other expenditures that got us into debt, but this would require a little bit of fiscal responsibility.  Unfortunately the candidate(s) who push the socialized college angle are not the same candidates who also lay out a plan for cutting current government expenditures.  Their general approach is to offer a bounty of services and promises to their constituents, without ever providing an honest discussion as to the negative effect it would have on the country’s finances.  Ultimately, the people who buy into this pipe dream are those who prefer that other people get taxed more to cover the expenditures of the government, rather than expecting the government to take responsibility for controlling their own zealous overspending.

A lot of the populace doesn’t seem to understand the basic economics behind government spending.  For example, many of the same people who are behind Bernie and his platform of increased tax expenditures tend to be the same people who praise Obama for chipping away at the deficit.  It’s almost as if they have a complete lack of understanding of basic finances.  Essentially, they’re applauding one person on lowering the governments expenditures, all the while backing someone else who aims to raise those same expenditures beyond where they previously were.  Does this math work out in some bizarro universe I’m not privy to, or is this merely a product of common-core math?

If this whole “free college” movement was born out of outrageous tuition costs, why not focus on the problem at hand?  Namely the fact that colleges are gouging students based on the increasingly erroneous assumption that having a piece of paper guarantees you some sort of fruitful future.  College is by no means a necessity in life, and there are many other alternatives for education out there.  If auto companies started rapidly increasing the cost of their cars, would these same people start clamoring for the government to pay for everybody’s automobiles?  Why is an individual’s choice to go out and purchase an automobile handled differently than their decision to pay for further education?  You have myriad choices in both instances.

As a final point, if tax dollars start funding college educations, and college costs haven’t been regulated in some manner, there is nothing to stop colleges from continuing to raise tuition costs.  People complain about tuition costs, because they themselves have to pay for what they chose to purchase.  If the government started paying for everyone’s college, universities could start charging a million dollars for a degree, and nobody would complain about it, because they would never actually see the bill.  Meanwhile, we end up setting a new world record by being the first country to surpass 100 trillion in debt.

Free College Is Classist

Nobody growing up in a poor area with a terrible K-12 education system is going to benefit from receiving free college.  If you graduated from high school and were provided a substandard education, colleges aren’t going to be scrambling to admit you entrance.  The kids who grew up in nice areas with good school systems will be the ones with the grades and SAT scores to get into college.  The kids from the other side of the tracks, living in broken homes will largely be getting the shaft on this deal.

If students no longer face having to finance their own college education, the number of people applying to colleges will jump drastically.  Why would you not go to college if you could avoid working for 4+ more years, get something for free and perhaps get to do a little bit of partying on the side?  With a surge in people applying to colleges, the kids with average to lower grades will have no chance getting into a college that is already burdened with deciding who it will admit, and who is out of luck.  Perhaps they’ll still take a scant number of the poor riff-raff merely as a publicity stunt for good will, but the rest will just have to go to trade school. (Where they may or may not statistically end up making more money on average than holders of increasingly devalued college degrees, but this is beside the point.)

This is why it’s far more important for government to actually focus on improving K-12 education across the board, rather than essentially providing a free “luxury” item.  Between the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core Initiative, K-12 education has been left in ruins, and put U.S. children even further behind the rest of the world.  Early education desperately needs to be reformed, long before college education even enters the discussion.  Increasing access to a good education for everybody, is ultimately better for the country than merely giving a bonus to those who actually need it less.  15-20% of children in this country grow up in poverty and realistically won’t be benefiting from socialized higher education.  Taxes shouldn’t be used for anything this substantial that isn’t available to the entirety of the populace.

Half of College Classes Are Pointless

Colleges are businesses, and as such, need to be able to spend as little money as possible in order to make the biggest returns possible.  One way to do this is by hiring under-qualified individuals to teach pointless classes rather than to hire well-educated individuals to teach meaningful courses.  Hence it costing the same per cred hour for a class in the STEM field as it does for a throw-away course that has no viable use in the job market.

Sure it’s all shits and giggles to sign up for a class like Politicizing Beyoncé, The Sociology of Miley Cyrus, or even Zombies in Popular Media (all real courses), but you’re paying $250 per credit hour on average ($650 out-of-state) to take these classes, not including whatever books you may need.  These classes aren’t worth your money, and certainly aren’t worth taxpayer money.  Go buy a book about zombies or a pop artist, and save a few hundred dollars.

On top of the cutesy meme courses, there exist too many degrees that really aren’t worth spending over $100k on.  The problem is, kids are pushed into college right after high school, because it’s seen as something they have to do to make a good living and be successful in life.  When an aimless kids gets to college and needs to choose a major, they will likely choose something in the liberal arts field, like communications, philosophy, sociology, creative writing, psychology, or some type of history.  Most of these undergraduate degrees either aren’t specialized enough to be very useful, or require further education to be of any use in the job market.

Roughly 35% of undergraduate degrees are in the STEM fields.  These are fields that will generally be worth the money you are paying for them, assuming you have a good work ethic and are proactive in finding a good job.  Obviously STEM fields aren’t the only important jobs, but STEM degrees tend to attract the individuals who go through college with a sense of purpose, rather than doing so merely to obtain a degree.  Merely obtaining a degree won’t guarantee you anything in the workforce if you aren’t adept in the field you decided to major in.

For the record, I have nothing against liberal arts majors such as philosophy.  In writing an article such as this one, I’m essentially philosophizing about what the negative impacts of sweeping legislature might be, mixed with a little bit of research and statistical data.  However, if you have half a million kids going to college and getting philosophy degrees, what exactly are they all going to do with those degrees?  Society needs philosophers, but it doesn’t need millions of them.  Luckily with “free” college, the taxpayer would be eating the debt on that investment, and not the individuals, or their parents.  Buyers remorse from impulse purchases would become a thing of the past in the new regime.

Colleges Have Become Regressive indoctrination Centers

This point is one that practically writes itself.  Anybody actually paying attention to the news in the last year or two has seen the dramatic shift colleges have taken, from being learning centers, to becoming indoctrination stations.  There was a time in the past, where colleges were places one would go to learn how to think critically and expand one’s horizons.  Now colleges are places where kids are taught to reject any idea they have been conditioned to believe is wrong, and to segregate themselves from anyone who thinks differently.

These kids protest and actively try to block speakers from talking at their schools.  If you are too much of a child to accept that people have opinions that differ from yours, perhaps you don’t understand why you don’t get to silence or block others from speaking.  Ultimately, the colleges are to blame, since they actively cancel speaking engagements, rather than teaching the children why this isn’t an acceptable way to act.  This mindset ends up snowballing out of control, the wardens lose control of the prison, and these kids end up becoming junior terrorists, making demands where they should have no power to do so.

The universities are starting to pay for their widespread incompetence, however.  Schools that make national headlines due to pandering to these baby fascists, end up taking hits in enrollment, and consequently funding.  No rational parent is going to want to send their kid to a school that will potentially turn their offspring into a safe space, trigger warning, thought-Nazi.  If you waltz into a McDonald’s and decide to act like an asshole, you would more than likely be removed from the premises.  If you act like an asshole on one of these campuses, you shouldn’t receive any sort of fame or special treatment for doing so.  Hence the social blow-back and damaging side-effects.

Entitled middle class liberals are being conditioned to believe that they are somehow an oppressed class, despite living in one of the wealthiest, most privileged counties in the world, and attending institutions that are largely homogeneous in an ideology they overwhelmingly follow.  What exactly are you being oppressed by?  Reality?  Adulthood?  If you want to experience actual oppression, you’re going to need to leave the comfort of your bedroom or dorm.

In Conclusion

Education is important and should be a much larger focus in this country than it currently is.  K-12 education is far more important in the long run, is in dire need of reform, and should be our primary focus, long before college education is even brought up.  Candidates need to be honest with the voting public about economics, rather than constantly pandering and promising stuff that merely adds to the national debt.  Colleges need to get their shit together and stop catering to these problem contingents.  They are technically businesses that reserve the right to refuse service to children whose parents never taught them to act right.  Kids need to stop going to universities, only to major in pointless things like Cambodian Feminist Pottery Studies.  Lastly, colleges need to be more open to differing views, rather than creating environments of insular thought.

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America Doesn’t Understand How To Protest

America is in a sad state of affairs right now.  People get more offended and outraged by absolutely anything these days than any other time in this country that I am aware of.  You have college kids complaining about Halloween costumes.  You have other college kids basically complaining that colleges aren’t segregated enough.  You have even more college students trying to boycott speakers they don’t agree with.  There are people protesting that police are killing citizens of a particular race, all the while seemingly uninterested with all the other colors of people that police have also been killing.  There are even people protesting that other people are dispensing actual factual statistics about constructed oppression narratives.

I tend to blame most of this on the narcissistic, one-sided, bias-affirming nature of social media.  In the past, if you held a view and felt the need to air that view out in public, you would also need to be willing to be confronted by people who might actually provide an opposing view.  In the current era of selective friend-collecting and rampant thumbs-up desperation, it’s possible for individuals to state an opinion while being surrounded by only people who share that same view, regardless of how well thought-out that view actually is.  If you hold some particular view, and only willingly surround yourself with people who parrot that same view, you tend to develop the sense that you are right about that view, regardless of the facts.  If I believe that the ocean is orange, and only surround myself with people who also believe the ocean is orange, I have effectively proven that the ocean is orange via my own self-constructed web of bias.

This largely explains what is wrong with many of these whiney college children out there.  They went from the life of high school student, dependent on their parents, rarely needing to formulate a well-developed opinion on anything, right into being a college student.  A college student who all of a sudden feels that they have an obligation to start voicing their opinions on the world, despite not being worldly, and not having learned how to formulate an opinion that isn’t merely regurgitated in the first place.  Colleges are predominantly liberal institutions, so it makes sense that college kids would adopt and mimic the sensibilities of those who are”teaching” them about the world.  This is quite similar to the way a racist father tends to raise a racist child, or why youngsters tend to mirror the political leanings of their parents.  Kids are being fed a one-sided dialogue instead of being taught how to engage in critical thinking and actually question the information they are bombarded with.

When kids decide to protest things on college campuses, the majority of the time, all they are doing is complaining that someone doesn’t express the same view that they do.  They have been taught that there is a “correct” way and a “wrong” way to think about given subjects, and then react in a childlike manner when that view is tested. The rise of trigger warnings and safe spaces is merely their way of trying to justify, via buzzwords, this childish mindset of being unable to handle perspectives outside of their own indoctrinated views.  This very much represents a failing of the college system to help kids grow into open-minded freethinkers.  Instead they have created waves of brats who protest things that aren’t remotely worthy of being protested.  If somebody says something you don’t agree with, your course of action as an intellectual, is to rightfully disagree and move on with your life, or engage in a civil debate on the topic.  You don’t take to social media and try to start a movement, or try to get some form of authority to block that individual’s freedom of speech.

Back when I was in college, in the pre-baby-era, groups with various agendas were given free reign to have peaceful protests in the main quad area of our campus.  It was not unusual to get out of class and pass a group of Christians with signs picketing abortion, complete with requisite graphic photos.  Members of the LaRouche movement could also regularly be found carrying on about something, of which I have no idea, because I was too busy racing back to my dorm to be antisocial and play some Quake3 on those speedy college servers.  Regardless of who was on campus though, there was never any violence that I’m aware of, and students never decided to protest or try to get anyone removed from campus.  The students seemed to understand the concepts of freedom of speech and differing opinions.  Needless to say, I’m thankful I went to college when I did, and avoided the baby-era altogether.

It’s not only college kids who can’t seem to grasp when something is worthy of protesting, and when it isn’t, however.  You have groups like third-wave feminists whose more extremist branches have taken to protesting anyone who doesn’t goosestep along to their ideology, even going so far as to assault people, make attempts to get people fired, and call in bomb threats at events.  Those all seem like rational adult ways to go about engaging in a public discourse about current events.  If all these toddler-sensibility types were recent college grads it might make sense that they believe that anyone with a dissenting opinion is an “enemy” who needs to be disposed of, rather than debated, but unfortunately some of these third-wavers are grown-ass adults.  Once again though, when you have a group of people who are isolated in their own group, left to stew in their own ideologies and anger, they start to view themselves as being on the right side of any discourse.

In steps social media again, as all the oppressed and disenfranchised are bombarded with stories and tweets about people acting like complete fools in the face of those they disagree with.  Word on the street is that when you disagree with something, all you need to do is act like a petulant child, receive a little press for doing so, and you’ve as good at won the battle.  Never mind the fact that most of the rational human beings witnessing these infantile outbursts can’t help but feel that you’re mildly underdeveloped in the grey matter department.

This mindset unfortunately starts to spread around the populace like a highly contagious disease.  The next thing you know, you’ve got people blocking traffic to somehow protest police violence.  Blocking a highway to protest a corrupt police force is like protesting female genital mutilation by refusing to floss your teeth.  It illustrates a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect.  Your protest needs to have at least something to do with whatever it is you’re protesting.  Otherwise you’re just aimlessly protesting for the sake of having a protest.  If aimless protests actually worked, I’d go protest human trafficking by throwing various lunch meats at school children.  You’re welcome world, for me solving the slave trade and all.  And you’re welcome school children for all that free tasty bologna I lobbed at your faces.

You can’t blame Americans for not quite grasping how to effectively protest though.  We have absolutely zero history of effective protesting after all.  Have a seat on my lap parts and I’ll share with you a story.  You see… there was a time in history when black folks weren’t allowed to sit in the front “white” rows of seats on buses in the United States.  Then one day, a woman took a stand and protested by throwing heads of cabbage at a Clydesdale horse.  Except that didn’t occur, because this event happened in 1955, back when people were evidently a little less dense than they seem to be today.  It also didn’t involve vegetables and horses, but rather a refusal to give up a seat, which happened to directly correlate with the subject that was being protested.  It was an effective protest because the protest actually correlated to what was being protested.  Outkast named a song after this chick.  Anyone name a songs after you yet?  Didn’t think so, Billy.

Somewhere along the way, protests have merely become the latest opiate of the masses.  These people don’t even seem to know why they protest, but it gives them some sort of comfort that they’re accomplishing something, regardless of whether the protest has any actual effect.  I guess the general consensus is that if you end up in a blurb on some online news blog, you’ve truly won a battle of some sort.  Except that when tomorrow rolls around, absolutely nothing will have changed.  People in the U.S. these days seem to have the passion, but completely lack direction.  Passion without direction doesn’t lead to results.

Unfortunately, there are even waves of people out there who actually think engaging in violence with people who have different views is not only acceptable, but a commendable course of action.  Recently, a group of KKK members decided to have a rally in Anaheim, California, and were violently attacked by a group of protesters.  To anyone of moderate intellect, the protesters were obviously in the wrong, since they decided to break the law and assault a group who were merely voicing a differing opinion.  Regardless of how wrong or harmful someone else’s views are, you are never justified in physically attacking that person.  Anyone who has made it to adulthood, shouldn’t need to have this explained to them.  You are free to challenge the views of those you disagree with, but that is where your rights end.

Further bolstering this theme of social media and anti-intellectualism, I noticed an alarming amount of people who were actually cheering these violent criminals for attacking the Klan members.  Most of our society agrees that the KKK harbor harmful views about race, but most of society also recognizes that violence is never a justifiable response to harmful views.  Those who don’t realize this usually end up in those places we have set aside, called prisons, which is hopefully where these violent protesters end up.  Anyone who feels it is acceptable to physically attack somebody who has a differing view, is more of a danger to our society than anyone who holds a harmful view but avoids violent confrontation.  In short, fuck both of these groups, and fuck you if you agree with either.  Also, learn how to protest like a grown-ass rational adult.

 

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Peanut Butter Nips and Other Tales

I’m not a great storyteller.  Let’s just get that out of the way from the get-go.  I’m not the type of person who can enthrall a group of people with my intriguing stories about larger-than-life things that happened to me.  Part of the problem is that I can’t bring myself to embellish and exaggerate on things that happen to me, because quite frankly, I find it to be a lame, desperate, attention-seeking thing to do.  If I went out to get milk and left my wallet at the 7-11, that’s the end of the story.  I’m not going to add in an armed robbery or an alien invasion to spice things up and make myself seem more interesting.  If a story isn’t that interesting, then perhaps it’s not a story worth telling in the first place.

That being said, I’m going to attempt to rattle off some stories from the past that might be slightly amusing at best, since I refuse to spice them up with mistruths and inaccuracies.  There might be a few small inaccuracies here and there, given that some of them happened many moons ago, but there won’t be any gang-wars or deaths added where none actually occurred.  To have any hope of making them interesting, I’ll have to put my best adjectives and flowery padding sentences to good work.  Wish me luck.

 

Peanutbutter Nips

Back in the day when I was in college, we used to do this thing called “hanging out and drinking”.  It was serious business, and quite frankly I don’t have the time to explain all the intricacies to you.  Nevertheless, this activity was taking place one night when there was a knock upon the front door of our abode.  Somebody in attendance got up and opened the door, only to see a few ladies standing there.  One of them, who I’ll call “Esmeralda” since I have no idea what her real name was, stated that they were playing truth or dare.  She went on to explain that it was her turn, she chose dare, and her dare was that she had to lick somebody’s shoe.  I’m sure she could have just licked a shoe over at their place, but my expert intuition told me that this was more of a ploy to get to meet some hot dudez, five of whom happened to live in the establishment they chose to visit.

She ended up licking someones shoe, we all pretended like it was zany and not a completely lame excuse of a dare, then they scurried back off to their place.  We went back to our serious drinking business, and after a few minutes, someone had the great idea of coming up with a ridiculous counter dare in order to get to go over to their place.  After very little brainstorming, it was decided that the dare would be for one of us to have peanut butter licked off our nipple by one of the gals.  It was so crazy, it just might work.  I thought it was a pretty funny, if obvious dare, but changed my tune after I was nominated as the candidate.  Today I wouldn’t blink an eye at something that tame, but at the time I was merely an insecure, inexperienced, young lad.  The thought of being put on the spot was unsettling.

After trying multiple times to get out of being “the” guy nominated for the mission, I finally accepted my fate.  We headed over to their place across the way and knocked once or twice, perhaps even thrice.  They answered, no doubt completely unsurprised that it was us, and let is in.  We told them that we too were playing truth or dare, and that I had taken a dare, of which my penance was to have peanut butter licked off one of the nipples in my possession.  I forget how it happened exactly, but by some intervention of the cosmos, the girl who either stepped forward or was nominated to engage in the peanut butter festivities was actually quite nice looking.  I’ll refer to her as “Jessica Alba”, since I have no idea what her actual name was, and she bore more than a passing resemblance to that actress, who was popular at the time.

So long story short, “Jessica Alba” licked peanut butter off my nipple and everybody probably went back to hanging out and drinking in their respective places of residence.  You see, there was so much hanging out and drinking back in those days that every day started to bleed into every other day and details became blurry.  In fact, maybe this story never actually happened, but instead exists as a completely fictitious account that I made up while inebriated all those years ago.  Maybe I actually died in that tragic Magic The Gathering™ accident and I’m not actually typing out all these words that I’m currently typing.  That would technically make Peanut Butter Nips a ghost story though.  So was it scary?  Yea it was.  It was scary good.  You’re welcome.  Next story.

 

The Frailty of Youth and Poorly Constructed Wooden Structures

This one time a bunch of us were hanging out and drinking on the front porch, when a lady friend and myself engaged in a hug, and another friend of mine totally yelled out “Group Hug” and bum rushed us, and we all ended up getting pushed up against the railing, which gave way and we all fell over the side in a tangle of wooden boards onto some bikes that were below us, but it wasn’t that bad because it was only like a four foot drop, so nobody really got hurt, so then we just went back to drinking and hanging out.

 

The Frailty of Youth and Cheaply Plastered Domicile Walls

Back in the day when I was in college, we used to do this thing called “hanging out and drinking”.  It was serious business, and quite frankly I don’t have the time to explain all the intricacies to you.  Nevertheless, a lot of the time while we were engaging in this activity, things would end up getting broken in the vicinity of our persons, as tends to happen in life.  Perhaps a bottle would get broken here, or a piece of furniture would get broken there, as tends to happen in life.  Every once in a while though, the walls would get broken, as tends to happen in life, and to a lesser degree in stage plays and television productions.

Sometimes, in our journey through this mortal coil, the need arises to put one’s fist, foot, and/or head through a layer of budget drywall and off-white paint.  The place we lived at the time was no different, as is to be expected, being that it was merely a microcosm representing the greater whole of life in general.  In the world there exists laughter and tears, joy and strife, wisdom and folly.  All these things existed in our residence as well, along with ample amounts of “hanging out and drinking” and wall hole producing.  Sometimes strife leads to wall holes.  Other times, joy leads to wall holes.  Wisdom rarely leads to wall holes, but It’s completely feasible, so one should never rule out the possibility altogether.

Throughout the course of the year, there were many joyous and strifeful occasions, and many wall holes to go along with those occasions.  A wall hole or two isn’t really that big of a deal, but if wall holes become too abundant, situations can tend to get a little complicated.  One such complication we were faced with was the existence of an individual called a Resident Advisor, or “R.A.” for short.  One of the many jobs of an R.A. is to make sure that everything is cool and that folks aren’t acting up.  Wall holes tend to give off the impression that things aren’t cool and that folks are acting up.

To keep the R.A. off our backs and to protect the sanctity of our place of drinking, hanging out, and wall hole production, we needed to give off the impression that no wall holes actually existed.  This was done through the careful act of placing glossy pieces of paper called “posters” over such holes.  This technique is quite brilliant, as it not only makes it seem as though no wall holes exist, but it also serves to make the environment seem more cultured and interesting.  A Randy Rhodes poster here, an advertisement for 15% off TempurPedic Sealy mattresses over there, and we quickly started to look like a cultured and interesting bunch of individuals.

By the end of the year, things looked a little suspect, with posters plastered all over the walls at heights both way higher and way lower than any poster would ever realistically be hung.  A few holes were so large that posters wouldn’t do the trick, and the use of dark cloth tapestries needed to be employed.  It looked like we had employed a blind person who may or may not have also been mentally retarded to decorate our living quarters.  It might not speak very well of the R.A. that she never seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary, but then again she was an R.A., and they tend to not give too much of a shit about anything in general.

As summer quickly approached, we reflected on our many accomplishments that year, including: drinking, hanging out, and wall hole acquisition.  We also realized that we needed to rid ourselves of our wall hole collection, lest we incur the wraith of the housing board in the form of arbitrary, unreasonable fees.  Luckily, one of the strapping young lads amongst our ranks was a wiz in the field of home repair.  He patched up the holes, painted over the evidence, and we all shed a tear at the loss of our most prized possessions.  We bid each other adieu for the semester and went our separate ways.  Later that summer, we each received a bill from the Department of Housing and Fascism charging us a few hundred dollars each for the repainting of our former housing unit.

The moral of this story is: Collecting wall holes is an enjoyable, yet expensive hobby, much like polo or yachting.  Make sure you truly understand the pros and cons of this activity before you dive into it.  Thanks.