Goddamnit. It's late and I have studying to do tomorrow (today), but it's the weekend and I already read and liked the first link when it was posted... Now that I've read 3/4 of them, this question is sort of tangential. Hipsters on Foodstamps. Great article, even through to the end which makes me scroll back to the top: Perhaps the amount of time I've been awake is wearing on my ability to pull this all together, but the conclusion here is supported by... well, college educated hipsters relying food stamps? As an example of a B.A.'s lack of utility? A B.A. as a gateway to a woman's relationship being ridiculous? I must be missing a lot, since the case I'm reading is "everything you can get at a college, you can find elsewhere" (B.A. representing certification of what 'you can get'). Hell, if this is all true what am I even doing in college. Going to try and sleep on this one. More than likely going to come back and add an edit if I gain any clarity pre-maturely.In other words, the choice to major in English was predicated on information she received from multiple sources like schools and TV-- sources I will collectively call the Matrix-- that every generation does better than the last, that there was a safety net of sorts, a bailout at the end, that future happiness was inevitable, and so we return to economics: the general name for that safety net is credit. America was the land of the minimum monthly payment. And if this analogy isn't clear enough for you, let me reverse it: the ability of the economy to offer English as a major required a massive subsidy to make you feel like $20k/yr was the same as free. If you had to pay it up front, you'd either be an engineer or $80k richer. That subsidy is now worthless, not because the money doesn't exist but because the bailout at the end, e.g the four options I suggested were operational 1977-1999 which guaranteed the payments would be made, won't help.
Fact: college is a waste, but we haven't yet hit that point in society where we can bypass it. So we have to pass through another generation of massive college debt. How to pull in the suckers in? Answer: these articles. By getting you to say, "these hipsters should be able to get jobs because they are college graduates!" you are saying, "college is worth something." It isn't. But by directing your hate towards hipsters, you are protecting the system against change.
Two things about TLP: 1) He's bipolar and only wrote this stuff when he was manic (my guess). 2) He uses the lots-of-words sleight of hand in order to substitute one argument for another. Here, he's using two definitions of "worthless" interchangeably: On the one hand, college is "worthless" because that degree won't help you get a job. On the other hand, college is "worthless" because it's life experience that really teaches you what you need to know, yadda yadda. To the former, any college degree is better than no college degree in the majority of fields you might care to go into. To the latter, life experience and college are not mutually exclusive fields. Here's the real issue: Francis Fukuyama wrote a book in 1992 called The End Of History and the Last Man. The idea was, well, communism lost which meant there wasn't anything more to talk about. From here on out it'd be nothing but champagne, caviar and free market capitalism. Which obviously lasted not quite until Serbia. We look back now and mock. Boomers, though? Grew up in what we're now calling The Golden Age of Capitalism. Shit was never going to stop getting better. The future was The Jetsons. Your kids would live better than you, theirs would live better than them. From a Boomer perspective, mom'n'dad lived through the depression, they grew up in Levittowns, pensions were de rigeur and mom'n'dad had the phattest retirement the world had ever seen and the idea that the future wasn't so bright was anathema. Particularly when it was revealed by those annoying kids that weren't yours but were in the way of yours. Slackers. Malcontents. "Generation X."