Last week Yahoo featured a news article (http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/uspoliticsobamaeducation) talking about Obama’s speaking trip at the University of Texas and its focus on the “need” to acquire a higher education in order to thrive in today’s marketplace. I’m currently working on an article critiquing this absolutely nonsensical notion – for expediency I can pretty easily summarize the flaws with his thesis therein:
1) Education is not a homogenous commodity – surely Obama wouldn’t think that having a 200% increase in B.As in basket weaving will help our economy.
2) Our education system is – in the aggregate – massively lacking in its instruction of actual marketable skills. The emphasis has shifted over time, tragically, to the acquisition of getting a degree instead of the acquisition of a truly solid education represented by the awarding of a degree
3) College is extremely expensive right now, thanks to countless regulations on schools, subsizidation of loans that people can barely afford to pay, etc. How exactly is going $20,000 into debt to get a communications degree a good investment? How is that sage advice in an economy that the Fed destroyed after Greenspan’s interest rate slashes in 2002, and on the precipice of a double-dip (d)e(pr)ession?
4) For those who will contest Point #3 by stating that you can get a “more marketable” degree such as one in scientific fields, engineering, etc should be reminded that a) there are cheaper alternatives to the Leviathan educational-industrial-complex schools where it can be acquired, and b) though they may not be as marketable as a degree from a “big school” (aka a super expensive educational-industrial-complex school), this would not be the case in a laissez-fare market for education, which we don’t have and which individuals cannot have thanks to armies of bureaucrats.
I probably missed some other points as well. But this is just the start.
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