A no-nonsense discussion about College. Part One.

It’s June and that means that many recent high school graduates are already planning out their educational future. This guide will be of some help to them, but really it is aimed at those who will be seniors this coming fall, as well as parents helping to make those educational decisions.

As someone who spent most of his adult life in college and grad school, I feel like now is the time to talk about college. This is the first in a series of articles I’m going to write that will cover all major aspects of college in the United States in the current year. Future topics will include financing college, picking a major, where to go, should you go to grad school and the social aspects of college. But this being the first article in the series let’s talk about the most basic question you’ll face: should you even go to college?

America is overproducing college graduates. There is no other way to say it, there are too many people with bachelor’s degrees competing for jobs right now. That’s part of why so many recent college graduates have trouble finding any work, let alone work in their field. But who can blame them for investing in a four-year university? Millennials have been told their entire lives they must go to college to earn a decent middle-class living. And so many dedicate an extraordinary amount of time in high school preparing for college. But here is an observation I’ve made over my years in academia, most people would be better off if they either got a job in high school, then opened their own business several years down the line. Or they would be better off learning a trade and eventually opening their own business.

Taking time to go to college is not only going to cost you money in terms of what you spend, it will cost you in terms of money you never made. Assuming you can get through a four-year program in four years those years cost earning time you can never recover. Talk to any finance person, time is one of the most (if not the most) important factors in determining how much wealth you can accumulate.

So who should go? The only people who should invest their time in a university education are those who need a credential or those with very high IQs who can attend top universities.

If you want to teach, practice law, medicine or participate in any other career that requires governmental certification, college is almost certainly going to be necessary. The people who tend to be successful lawyers and doctors do so because it is not a job for them, it is a vocation. Few people just decide one day in their junior year of college that they’d really like to get into podiatry. Some people do decide law is for them in college, usually after realizing there aren’t many options for a philosophy major unless you want to spend a decade in grad school and possibly end up on food stamps.

The next group of people who should attend college are those with extremely high IQs, and who are attending a top university, and who don’t mind being in college until they are thirty-five. that really is what it takes to become a research scientist or college professor. The investment is enormous for a paycheck that isn’t particularly high. If you have the brain power to work at NASA you can easily pick up an MBA and head for more lucrative pastures. Recently there has been a push to get more women into STEM fields. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that after a woman finishes her Ph.D. and probably a post-doc she will be well beyond her prime years. It’s a plan by feminists that will only result in more miserable cat ladies. It also pushes men of similar talents out so universities can claim they are diverse.

Now, the right often mocks the stupid “studies” majors or humanities, and with good reason. There is a perception among many that the best way to get a university education without the Marxist, anti-white, anti-male indoctrination is to go into a STEM field. And for now this is correct. There really aren’t feminist petrology classes offered at any reputable geology school. But this opens up a larger question, what is the point of going into STEM in the first place? If you’re passionate about it great, but it is a simple fact that there is an overabundance of engineering and science degrees floating around. It’s easy to make fun of the people who get African American studies degrees, but we’re not that far off from seeing many young STEM majors in the same boat, working alongside their SJW friends at Starbucks. True, part of this is the H-1B visa program and that can be changed if enough pressure is applied to Congress and the president, but it is also true that the American educational system is overproducing even STEM college graduates.

And here is a very simple fact, you may have worked hard for that physics degree, but unless you went to a top university and had nearly perfect grades, and did a lot of undergraduate research, you’re probably not going to a top graduate program. And to be a scientist or professor, you’ll need to attend one of the best universities in the country. It’s no secret that graduate programs are overproducing PhDs. That’s true across all fields, not just in the humanities. This gives universities the pick of the litter when hiring new professors. It also gives large corporations the ability to pick and choose who gets the jobs and promotions. With the current corporate obsession with diversity and getting women and PoC into positions of authority, young white males will find out very quickly that there is a “lace ceiling” in place in many corporate jobs today. The reasons for this are complex and will be the subject of another article, but believe me, there is no pot of gold at the end of that sixteen years of university rainbow.

So unless you are either in need of a credential to work in your chosen field or if you’re very smart, dedicated and able to attend a top university, the simple fact is that you’re probably better off not attending a four-year university.