(2021-07-13) Solana Masters In Poverty

Mike Solana: Masters in Poverty. Colleges around the country, and especially graduate schools, are destroying the lives of young people. Product both of a pyramid-scheming academic class and bi-partisan commitment from the United States government, the problem is genuinely systemic. My suggestion is we burn this system to the ground.

For whatever you want to become, we’re led to believe, there’s a college degree. But no one in any position of power or success believes this is actually true.

For most jobs in America a bachelor’s degree is not necessary. This is not only true of coding or construction or any of the trades we tend to focus on in this conversation, the sort of work where the only thing that really matters is tangible output. It’s also true of almost all of our highest paying jobs, including especially entrepreneurship.

But it is especially true that a master’s degree in any of the liberal arts provides no meaningful path to wealth, including a degree in the sciences, where formal schooling is a necessary cost of entry to most important subfields but tends almost never to translate into meaningful earning (a separate enormous problem, and subject for another wire). Then, among master’s degrees there is a terrifying sublevel in our basement of “academic” horrors: the MFA, a master’s in fine arts, is a woodland witch’s Gingerbread House from Hell for optimistic, creative young people with no mentors to guide them away from the danger.

The explosive Wall Street Journal piece on Columbia University’s master’s degree in poverty touched on a separate graduate program for publishing out of New York University, which also echoes something strangely personal.

An advanced degree tacitly offering my job as its brass ring, a best-case scenario landing graduates work as an editorial assistant in an already stagnant, dying industry? It made no sense.

Last year, in Bad Education, I traced our student debt crisis back to George Bush the Second’s “disastrous, Orwellian ‘Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act,’ which exempts student loans from discharge.”

I offered a non-partisan solution

Abolish the institution of Federal student loans.

force private lenders to actually assess the ability of any future students to pay back their debt. As the vast majority of Americans cannot presently afford college, colleges under the new system would be forced to slash the cost of tuition. The worst colleges, which provide very little value in terms of education, and practically no value, or even negative value, in terms of signaling and network, would be forced to close. But wait, wouldn’t this mean less people would end up enrolling in a four-year degree program? Yes, thank God, and more on that in a moment.

By the mid-2000s, also under Bush, we signed into existence the institution of Grad PLUS loans. Students could now go back to school for mostly-worthless advanced degrees to take on even more federal debt

“A key motive for letting graduate students borrow unlimited amounts was to use the projected profits from such lending to reduce federal deficits, said two congressional aides who helped draft the legislation.”

College degrees are not a moral good, college degrees are an extremely expensive consumer good. Many degrees, including the vast majority of masters degrees in the liberal arts, and every single MFA, are little more than four-year Prada bags.