Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth

Handwaving Freakoutery:

Somewhere at some point some useful idiot came up with the idea of giving anyone who wants to go to college a loan, regardless of their ability to pay it back, on the understanding that the diploma itself would convey enough value to them that they would be able to earn more and pay back the loan. This useful idiot confused correlation with causation, assigned a value to a piece of paper that the paper didn’t necessarily convey, and presumed that if every person in the country got a college degree they would all get a college level job, everyone would be richer, and everyone could pay back the loan.

This useful idiot did not consider the fact that handing out more degrees does nothing to change the job profile of the United States. The job market still needs just as many garbage men and ditch diggers and baristas today as it did thirty years ago, it’s just now the baristas have college degrees and debt. The federally backed student loan program did achieve its objective. There are doctors, lawyers, engineers, and accountants today who come from poor backgrounds and made their way because of student loans. But because of the way the useful idiot set the program up, their success is on the backs of the rest of the indebted poor.

This useful idiot was not one man, but rather fifty years of all of us, involving dozens of laws and changes to those laws, going back to 1956. Half a century of useful idiots who all confused correlation with causation, building the giant that exists today to eat Millennials and grind their bones to make its bread. But the useful idiots in government who provided a vehicle for permanent debt to acquire a mostly valueless piece of paper are only half of the beast.