As I hope you would suppose, I was a good kid. I was confirmed into the church. I went to Sunday School every week and Bible School every summer. I was in Indian Guides. Cub Scouts. Webelos. Boy Scout. I was an Eagle Scout at 13 and consistently made good grades in school. All of this was tacitly expected of me, as was the fact that I attended, and paid for, a higher education.
 

Taken by my lifelong partner one night at Stanford

All of this was expected of me, not the least of which reason was that my three older siblings had done the same. Since I attended an expensive private college and was paying for it by writing, I wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as I could, so I graduated with a 4 year degree in 2.5 years. Such is the result of being highly motivated.

I bring this up to examine whether a college (or higher) degree is even worth it in these times. After all, folks like Peter Thiel have made no secret about how stupid they think kids going to college by default is. I think his view may be warped by the fact he’s surrounded by super-intelligent tech bros and has lost sight of the fact that, let’s face it, most people are idiots.

Of course, going to college used to be the exception as opposed to the rule. For centuries, the only people attending higher education were men attending divinity school (which was Harvard’s first purpose) or attaining a degree in law or medicine. If you’re a strapping 14-year-old growing up on the family farm in the 19th century, it wouldn’t make any sense at all to have you waste four valuable years attaining a mastery of gender studies. If you could read and write, that was more than enough.

In my utterly uninformed opinion, the sea change in the attitude toward college was thanks to the GI Bill, which endeavored to make the idea of going to a 4 year college more widespread and affordable. As with every government program ever created, the intentions were good, and the outcomes were horrific. Over the course of the past 80 years, as the federal government has made countless trillions of dollars available in the form of loans and grants, the cost of school has gone absolutely berserk…………

Same idea, but a different perspective…………..
 

The change across the board has been amazing, as going to college has changed from a rarity to something about 30% of people accomplish. Indeed, getting a high school diploma in the 1940s was something only about 1 in 4 people managed to achieve. One would assume the public is now vastly more intelligent, but I’m confident you realize this is not the case.
 

When I was a kid, my brothers paid a few hundred dollars per semester to go to LSU. Fast forward to today, and I’m shelling out nearly $100,000 per year for room and board for one child. This is all thanks in small part to inflation and in large part to the darling people in D.C. who wanted so badly to “help.”

Unfortunately, American society is now constructed so that if you only have a high school diploma, you’re expected to never advance from being a retail clerk or flipping burgers. Thus, one must go through this four-year, $400,000 rite of passage which performs the following functions, in order of importance:

• Acts as a filtering mechanism, since a kid who has been admitted to and survived the likes of Stanford, Duke, or Harvard is assumed to be top shelf;
• Establish personal peer contacts which can be exploited later for business or personal purposes;
• Maybe learn some skills along the way, although this is not necessarily the case.

The distribution of intelligence hasn’t changed. I daresay 90% of the “colleges” that exist right now are the equivalent in terms of rigor as a good high school, with the only difference being that they make a huge amount of money in the process for their staff and endowments. Yes, there are exceptional instances in which a high school student can set the world on fire, but by definition, they have to be………….exceptional!

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