Grandma and Grandpa, maybe you shouldn't have wasted your money!

Good reasons not to go to college…

1. You’re probably dumb.

2. Since the evaporation of viable blue-collar careers, college graduates have flooded the labor market. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of economics knows that if you flood the market with a commodity, the commodity loses value, which is exactly what has happened to the undergraduate degree. The BA is the new high school diploma, the minimum level of educational attainment for jobs that didn’t require a 4-year degree as recently as a decade ago. These days, secretaries, data-entry clerks, and bank tellers are college graduates. It’s not as though these jobs realistically need to be filled by people who have a solid understanding of modern English poetry, but in any given year there are enough young adults moving from academia into the working world that companies can afford to have discriminating tastes.

3. It’s crazy expensive, and you can’t afford it. Almost no one can, hence student loans, which are a massive source of debt. When I say massive, I mean massive. The amount of debt incurred by students attempting to cover their school fees is over $800 billion. And what was a major contributing factor to the complete collapse of the US economy? Well, debt, of course. All those graduates now working as unpaid interns and part-time administrative assistants will spend the rest of their lives paying off vast student loans, with interest. That’s a serious problem.

4. Yes, these days it’s essentially impossible to cultivate a lucrative career without an undergraduate degree, but it’s also become essentially impossible to cultivate a lucrative career with one, so fuck it. Try your hand at organic farming or go to New Zealand to shear sheep or something. Learn the art of cheese-making. Live simply, and save yourself the time and debt.

5. As if the sheer number of college graduates hadn’t already destroyed the value of a college education, now we have to contend with for-profit universities doling out degrees willy-nilly. The fact that you can earn an economics degree at the University of Phoenix makes my economics degree from an actual university less attractive to potential employers, who’ve encountered plenty of functionally illiterate econ grads. I say down with the for-profits. Their tuitions are high, their accreditations questionable, and their educations shitty. If your degree is from a school that allows you to earn your GED while accumulating college credits, it shouldn’t count.

6. Even the educations offered by elite schools have gone downhill, which I suspect has a lot to do with the low-quality of the average high school education; getting all A’s at a public school is no great achievement these days. That coupled with the fact that the SAT is becoming less and less important in the determinations of university admissions officers leads me to wonder just how exactly schools are vetting prospective students these days. My suspicion is that there’s a lot of emphasis unduly placed on extracurricular activities, and other pretty useless bullshit, which is why your average college freshman is all energy and enthusiasm signifying nothing. For my American readers that was a witty allusion to Shakespeare, best known on these shores for his CliffsNotes.