My post on the most worthless college degrees sparked some great back and forth on the relative merits and demerits of different degrees. As always, the conversation was lively.
My bottom line is that I don’t care what degree you get so long as you're not reaching into my pocket to pay for it. Major in dwarf tossing or gerbil ranching for all I care, but do it on your own dime, and don’t take to the streets screaming in outrage when you can't find a job.
I am against the federal government handing out money to college students
All it ends up doing is inflating the cost of higher education many times greater than the overall rate of inflation. If government must hand out money, it should only subsidize that which we need more of and that which will benefit the nation. As it stands, we do not produce enough STEM graduates (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or medical doctors, so if we must hand out money for college, that is where it should go.
Countries that provide free or highly subsidized college are spilling over with pseudo-intellectual mental manipulators and professional troublemakers with advanced degrees.
Indeed, places like Italy and Paraguay enjoy a surfeit of tour guides and bartenders with PhDs who can quote great passages of Foucault and explain how Middle Ages scholasticism smuggled its way through The Renaissance to reemerge as the modern-day republican party shorn of all knowledge and possessing only the narrow-minded hatred of all that is non-white or female.
In those countries, ordinary people pay no attention to such fanciful pedantry, since it sprouts like weeds and serves no practical purpose to a society that cannot afford frivolities. The incoherent and impenetrable psychobabble of these self-styled thinkers never makes it out of the corner wine shops, shabby union halls and dilapidated communist party storefronts. It does, however make for lively intellectual conversation among the unemployed.
Extra-Spicy Political Thought
I’ve been there, I’ve seen it. I was in Quito, hanging out with a very leftwing crowd I'd gotten chummy with, great people. I did music sets every weekend at a little artsy combination folk museum, coffee shop, restaurant and bar overlooking the Cumbaya Valley.
I showed up one afternoon after work and it was an anthill of excited activity, with people smoking even more than usual. Rigoberta Menchu was coming! Yes, the discredited lying Nobel Prize winner, and she had at that time already been discredited, but not among the highly educated Latin American left! I wisely shut my mouth and went out drinking with an Army buddy.
Having a degree doesn't make you smart
Government subsidy of non-productive, easy-to-get degrees just produces entitled people who confuse having a degree with being smart. It encourages, resentment, sneering condescension, sloth and social agitation.
Conservative American scientist Razib Khan makes a compelling case for how liberalism has skewed the social sciences, and his anecdotes about the ignorance he encountered among the supposedly well-educated reminded me of a few of my own.
A year of so after the Iran Contra scandal, I thought I'd impress a pretty young Social Sciences major I met at a New Years Eve party by telling her I'd just gotten back from a tour in Central America. She completely deflated me by responding, "Oh? Oklahoma?" That was almost as bad as the Political Science undergrad I engaged in conversation with on an airline flight who said she enjoyed reading Political Science books. "Locke, Marx perhaps?" No. John Grisham.
This is the equivalent of an Electrical Engineering major telling you he's recreating Frankenstein's science experiments using electricity to revive the dead. People are entitled to their ignorance, but not on my dime.
So what is the meaning of your life? That should drive your degree choice. I was not smart enough to be a doctor, and I don’t possess the skill and daring of an entrepreneur. My conscious choice put me on a path to wage slavery, and I will never be a millionaire, but I am happy.
Please see also: Jack Camwell's blog post response
