Give Biden's student loan cancellation a chance; with luck, it will end academia as we know it
/
f’em
…
Let’s understand what academia really is – a network of colleges and universities that provide nearly meaningless credentials mostly to upper middle class post-adolescents in exchange for tons of money and access to their soft, malleable minds for indoctrination in the current commie consensus. Unless you are going to Hillsdale or the like, you are not getting what they are selling – a mind-opening experience where you will learn to think as you become an educated citizen. More likely, you will get a piece of paper certifying your readiness to take your place as a cog in both the corporate and cultural machines.
Academia, outside of some STEM research (though STEM is being decolonialized and unpatriarched and generally turned into a joke like Transgender Medieval Karaoke Studies is, except with a little math – and don’t worry, there are no right answers because right answers are racist), is useless and a drain on society. Four-year college is a four-year intense brainwashing session broken up by bouts of drinking and fumbling sex with other students of all the 673 different genders. The purpose, besides to render you docile and eager to conform, is to provide a safe and lucrative sinecure for millions of faculty and administrators, living high off the hog and unaccountable thanks to Uncle Sucker’s student loan guarantees.
Not surprisingly, when the government offered free money to students, the universities cranked up the prices to exactly what the government would fund. That the student ended up on the hook was no biggie – totally protected from any sort of accountability for graduating a generation of useless basket cases fit only for fetching lattes and crying about how their penis and/or vagina makes them sad because they want the one they don’t have, academia betrayed the kids by touting how their useless credentials would open doors for them, but sadly it is often the front doors to the local Starbucks when the grads draw the opening shift.
The government offered money and the schools raised the prices – no one is more of a capitalist than a collegiate communist.
Now, morally we should make the stupid students pay back every red cent that they foolishly borrowed. But the Democrats want to pay off their graduate constituents – weird how suckers and dummies are always Democrat constituents – and “cancel college debt.” Let’s leave aside the first problem, that the Constitution does not provide the alleged president with a magic wand to make people’s private bills disappear. For one thing, that seemingly dispositive fact might not matter. How do you stop him? Sue? Who sues? Who has standing to sue? Maybe someone who spent good money on law school could tell you. Regardless, even if we can’t stop this, we might not want to.
I mean, if Brian Stelter, who is a potato, was walking footloose and fancy free toward a bunch of hungry Irishmen, would you yell “Yo Tater, watch out for the micks!” or would you pull up a chair and a bag of popcorn and watch the fun begin.
That’s kind of where we are here, because if Grandpa Badfinger decides to decree that the current crop of student loan debtors will have their debts for their degrees paid off by the rest of America, including people who did not take out dumb loans or who paid theirs off, the righteous fury is going to be glorious. That dust puppet in the Oval Office might well be opening up the Overton Window, and I say we defenestrate him and his whole party.
People will be livid, and they will be calling for reform. Oh, and we should be all for reform. We should reform academia from a commie conformity machine into something at least marginally useful to society. As Elon Musk recently pointed out, you can get all the hard knowledge you would ever get in college online for free. The argument for college is that you get intangible educational experiences, like arguing about Plato with a world renown professor under an oak tree in the quad. But that’s not a thing. Instead, you sit in a lecture hall with a thousand other saps listening to some pony-tailed grad student demand you respect xis pronouns.
…
As a society, we need to stop paying for that. We need to move to a system that does not take you out of society for four to eight years, depending on your degrees, and instead focuses on imparting the knowledge you need for your chosen profession. And we need to ensure everyone has skin in the game except those of us with no investment in a particular student’s future. If the young scholar wants to take a loan, fine. We – the government – are out of it. Make it eligible for discharge in bankruptcy. Of course, lenders will then care about their investment since We the People are no longer cosigning. So, that young scholar will have to justify why The First National Bank of Savings and Loans should risk its dough on a Maori Patriarchy Painting major’s future earnings.
It won’t. In fact, as the (seemingly) free money dries up, students will become pickier consumers. Colleges will need to compete by providing value – and value will no longer just be a piece of sheepskin after four years. Yeah, lots of colleges will go under. The big, formerly prestigious ones won’t – some people will always want to begin every conversation reminding us that they went to Harvard – but we have something for them too. We need to tax their endowments. Call it reparations for the massive damage the Ivy League has done to America.
One part of Schlicter’s screed did make me realize how fortunate I was in my own education: while we weren’t seated under an oak tree, I really did get to spend hours, days, in a small Athens classroom arguing about Plato with Dr. John Silber. Most students today don’t know what they missed.
