Colleges and universities want your money. They shroud their avarice in flowing gowns and ivory towers, but they are not cradling knowledge so much as they are selling sheepskin.

I began my college career in a different time. It was the late '90s, and the economy was booming. I started at a junior college in California, not knowing what I wanted to do.

This, coupled with the fact that I was young and restless and was paying a total of about $600 a semester, did not impel me to any sort of urgency about completing my education.

I had grave doubts. I excelled in the humanities and soft sciences, but could not really justify buying a piece of paper with the governor's signature on it when I could read Shakespeare and learn Latin in my spare time.

After meeting with more than one counselor at that junior college and making clear that I would not make a good high school teacher, I was sold on the idea that I could do anything with a degree in the liberal arts.

"Corporations need good writers and thinkers," I was told. "Just get a degree ... in anything."

I transferred to the University of Minnesota after meeting the Minnesota woman of my dreams and studied history and Latin for three years. I did well enough at the U to gain entry to the University of Chicago's Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences.

On my visit to Chicago to learn more about this seemingly pointless degree, the director made a comment that has stuck with me. He said that the master's is the new bachelor's.

With this in mind, and with the assurance that a master's from one of the best universities in the world would make me more competitive than the average college graduate, I bit the bullet and filled out another aid application.

The idea that a "new bachelor's" would make me more attractive to those corporations looking for good writers and thinkers was important, as it was by then the depths of the so-called Great Recession.

Now, here I sit, two years after graduating from the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota, working a menial job in the service industry (luckily, I had contacts, otherwise I fear I would have been seen as an overqualified, underexperienced risk to most human-resources departments).

While I am grateful every day for my job, about half of what I bring in per month goes out in student loan remittance alone.

Luckily, that Minnesotan I moved to Minnesota for makes up the difference. The irony of her making as much as me, working a white-collar job with more immediate potential for advancement, and without a college diploma to hang on the wall, is not lost on me.

However, I don't think that the irony of my screening calls to avoid not creditors but my two former universities' continual fundraising efforts registers with those on the other end of the line.

In today's university-industrial complex, colleges are graded as well, and I have been told by many of these telemarketers (assumedly students at their respective universities) that the more alumni who donate, the better they look to the sellers of stature (U.S. News and World Reports and the like).

The easiest way to impact the scores handed out by the ranking pimps is to increase the percentage of alumni who donate; the hardest is to up the percentage of recent graduates with jobs.

I have yet to ask one of these callers how much I would have to donate for my degrees to gain enough stature to be worth more than the paper on which they are printed.

My advice to a student thinking about shelling out $40,000 to $80,000 on a diploma?

Perhaps you should invest in a luxury car. They hold their worth better than diplomas and, if you ever had the need, you can live in them.

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Nathan Marks is a blogger and poet in St. Cloud.