It Took too Long to Identify the Education Bubble

Out of America's 320 million people there are enough independent, intelligent adults who can and have identified various asset bubbles in the US economy.  Some not only identified them, but they also had the foresight to predict them warning people long before the bubbles burst.

Had Normie and Conformie Americans listened to these people we would have avoided a world of pain.  The Great Depression, the Dotcom Crash (and the subsequent recession) and the most recent "Great Recession."  All of these bubbles and their consequential economic pain could have been avoided if the mainstream media, government officials, academics and just regular common folk...stopped...took a big breath...thought...and stopped buying into the bubble, ending the bubble in its tracks and thus limiting the economic damage it would wreak on the economy.  Sometimes it takes months, usually, it takes a couple years, but most people alive today have cummulatively and unnecessarily paid trillions in lost economic production and potential to these bubbles.

But the education bubble is different.  And the reason it is different is the APPALLING amount of time it has taken the American sheeple to wake up and get hip to the scam known as higher education.  Worse, our presumed American institutions that are to serve and protect us, failed the American people spectacularly.  The mainstream media was (as usual) asleep at the wheel, too busy peddling socialism under the guise of brown journalism.  Our politicians, as usual, are too stupid and short sighted to see what flooding the labor market with degrees would do.  And academia, who should presumably be studying education and the labor market and warning us about it, were complicit as much as bankers during the housing bubble as they were the drug peddlers profiting off the education bubble.  Without America's effective "nervous system" to tell us what is going on in the economy, country, and the labor market, the same worthless outdated advice was given to our children "the future"

"Any degree's a good degree!"
"It doesn't matter what you major in, it's what you do with your degree that matters."
"Follow your heart and the money will follow."

And thus we Idiot Americans kept our hands on the educational stove and for the past 20 years shoveled ever-so-roughly-around $6.5 trillion of our money on worthless degrees - much more if you consider the interest paid on those worthless debts - and more than what we spent on the Iraq war.

The costs, sadly, are not merely financial.  Students released into the wild real world suffer an indescribable psychological toll as they cannot find a job, are crippled with debt, and often times must return for pointless "advanced degrees" to make anything of their undergrad.  Worse is the insanity that must ensure when you realize you've been lied to the entire time, your entire SEVENTEEN YEAR educational career was wasted, and you now get to relearn everything from the ground up.  But if this psychological torture was not enough, all one has to do is look at the insanity that happens to today's unfortunate millennials in college on a daily basis.  From denying people the freedom of speech, to fake rape epidemics, to blatant racism and sexism, to the delusional obsession of creating synthetic genders, not only has academia become a laughing stock to normal, sane, working Americans, they have mentally impaired nearly a generation, condemning them to a life of misery and mental torture.  And if I were to estimate it about half of Gen X, all of the millennials, and soon to be all the Gen Z'ers will have their lives sacrificed into this education bubble.  When the totality of the damage of the education bubble is taken into account, it is simply the most costly bubble in US history.

But there is hope, and by "hope" I mean on the level of hope offered by President Obama.  Merely, a theory, a potential, a possibility for educating the American people, bursting this bubble, making our decisions based in the real world, and preventing our current and future children from wasting their youth on worthless degrees.

The MSM is FINALLY waking up.

Though way too little and way too late, when you have an article in PBS written by a man who is a worthless-degreed victim of the education bubble himself, highlighting that EVEN HIPPY DIPPY CALIFORNIA is throwing a token $6 million towards an initiative to start a conversation to raise awareness to form a committee to start a discussion about the merits of vocational training, it could be the snowflake that causes the avalanche.  Of course Mr. Krupnick is not the first snowflake from the MSM to hint at an education bubble.  There has been the rare article on CNN and your local newspaper that has identified the education bubble.  But as I said these are merely woefully inadequate tokens of hope.  A sign that SOME in the MSM, government, even intellectually honest academics are aware of the bubble...but the heck if anyone is going to do anything about it.

And this is where I have further bad news.

It took 20 years for just SOME nerve cells in America's Nervous System to identify that America has had its hand on the higher education stove for all this time.  And despite my and other's best efforts, do you have any clue how long it's going to take for America and her institutions to do something about it?

First, Academia is THOROUGHLY entrenched in its mob-like shake down of America's children.  No honest studies or efforts at reforming themselves for the betterment of America's labor force and America it self should be expected.  Yes, there's WGU and a movement to go online, but these institutions should have been the norm, not the exception, A DECADE AGO.

Second, the likes of Mr. Krupnick and Joe Soucheray are the exception, not the rule in the MSM.  They're actual journalists.  And though it may sound petty and sad, I believe most people in the media today simply have too much pride to admit their degrees were worthless, and are too steeped in pro-education-forever indoctrination commonly found in their heavily-left biased environment.  They may know their hands are on the stove, but just can't bring themselves to admit it.  At minimum it will be pulling teeth to get the MSM to admit there's an education bubble.

Third, basic ignorance of the normies and conformies.  Specifically American parents.  I still cannot believe that Gen X parents today, who were likely the first victims of earning worthless degrees, regurgitate the same slop their Baby Boomer parents feed them 35 years ago.  "Any degree's a good degree."  "You need that sheepskin."  Even if 16 year old read the newspapers, the stereo brainwashing they get between their teachers and parents that they MUST go to college is deafening.

And finally, "the college experience."  I've pointed it out before and I'll point it out again, "college" is not viewed by young college-bound Americans as a means to skills and a career, but a birthright to a 4 year party after a 13 year prison sentence.  We have NOT painted our children with a picture of the future that is anything but "college."  Worse, we have made it like a "Promised Land of Canaan" as we force them into the legal prison system of K-12 education, putting way more value and emphasis on college than their degrees could ever possibly provide.  The MSM, government, parents, and academia itself could warn these kids in a coordinated, uniform cacophony about the perils of the education bubble, but students would still line up to pay $100,000 for a "Masters in Puppetry" anyway. 

And so while it may have taken America's "adults" 20 years to IDENTIFY the education bubble, I'm afraid it will take 20 more to deflate it.  Gen Z is currently now getting the finishing touches on its brainwashing in high school about the merits, nay, mandatory nature of college.  Millennials are still flailing around as fish out of water, slinging coffee, desperately clinging on and citing their socialist talking points as to why they can't find meaningful employment and why taxpayers should bail them out of their student loans just like the bankers.  Politicians, in an attempt to get elected, are going to say they're for more money for education...failing to realize how flooding the market with more money causes tuition inflation.  Academics have absolutely NO incentive admit to the realities of worthless degrees.  And the MSM, though the rare Mr. Krupnick and Soucheray may point out the folly of "African American Studies" degrees, is so far removed from genuine journalism its in the late stages of Huntington's disease offering nothing of value to America.

America and Americans can expect to wander the desert another 20 years as it slowly digests this education bubble.  And like the previous two decades before it, you can expect to pay an equivalent price, both financial and mental.  But if you dare to be a truly independent thinker and don't want to suffer the consequences of another bubble, ensure you or your children major in the right thing.  You don't have to sling coffee with a masters degree.  You don't have to be in debt until you're 40.  You don't have to eat like a college student until you're 45.  And you don't have to shamefully and parasticially demand the taxpayers bail you out just like the bankers.
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