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."