No Sympathy for Those In The Ivy Tower

I’m sure a lot of people were distressed after reading about the hard economic times at Harvard that lost 27 percent of its endowment this past year gambling on risky investments. The sad tale was printed in the New York Times on October 9, 2009.

I’m not shedding any tears. I believe the economic hard times at Harvard and numerous other campuses around the country is in fact a good thing. About 80 percent of the kids who go to college would be better off doing something else, like learning a marketable skill offered and paid for by the corporation that needs workers instead of having the cash strapped public pick up part of the tab at some college. Almost anything can be learned off campus, particularly today with all the high technology.

Cut  college enrollments and the nation would save tens of billions of dollars that could be used for more vital needs. Reserve the seats in colleges for those who want to serve society rather than themselves.

Second, a college education can be a bad thing. Wall Street is loaded with college educated  “brains” who helped drain an estimated $14 trillion out of the economy and left a large segment of the middle and lower classes fighting for their financial life while the Masters of the Universe counted their loot. In other words, the general public helped pay for the college education of the Wall Street Wizards who then ruined 401 k Plans, created the foreclosure mess, created financial weapons of mass destruction (such collateral debt obligations) that blew up the economy like bombs blew up buildings in the middle east.

And it’s the college grads who came up with such schemes as buying an undervalued company with borrowed money followed by more borrowed money after the sale took place in order to pay big fees and bonuses and salaries to the top dogs before placing the carcass of the company in bankruptcy. See what an “education” can do. 

These are the kind of guys that get big play in alumni magazines and the choice seats at football and basketball games. Pillars of the community, we’re told

And for those who get tears in their eyes over the financial problems now facing the colleges and universities just think about the tens of thousands of former students in debt up to their eyeballs, living at home with mom and dad, walking the streets in hopes of finding a job, even if it means being a greeter at WalMart. 

And think of all those big guys with fancy degrees who ship jobs overseas by the tens of thousands and then say we need to create an even larger college educated workforce to fill jobs that in reality don’t exist, or if they do exist, will eventually be long gone to low wage nations. 

We don’t need to cough up more money for the colleges and universities. What we need to do as a nation is to look closely at what the colleges and universities have become, what they are doing with the money they already have, and learn what is really going on behind those Ivy Covered Walls that are so closely linked to Wall Street and corporate America.