Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“…against working class”.. men & women of all colors, especially men, especially white.”
I never went to college. Instead, I went to Naval Nuclear Power School and a fast attack nuclear submarine chasing Russians away in the North Atlantic. Best education in the world. As a result, I have had a successful 45 year career as a nuclear energy professional. I am also a certified nuclear training instructor and I have spent decades training these college graduates to become nukes. What angers me is that so much of my tax money is used to finance their worthless education, and they come into my industry and don’t know a damn freaking thing. BTW, my son is following in my footsteps. He is also on a fast attack submarine – same class as what I was on 45 years ago – and has spent some time on patrol chasing Russians under the Artic ice in March of this year. Again, that’s the best education in the world. Frack the liberals and their higher education all to hades.
Sadly, I went the college route, under extreme pressure from parents to do so, and achieved a degree in one of the humanities. 🙄
Spent the first few years of married life killing off college debt while working in jobs that were not related to my degree.
Spent the rest of my working life in positions that either did not care about the degree or just used it as an arbitrary tool to narrow the applicant field.
The ONLY reason I can say college was worthwhile was because what I saw and lived there pushed me into the Church. (as such, worth twice its price)
NB This is not to discourage the college route for folks who will learn specialized useful knowledge. Engineers, doctors etc. However, as a very expensive letter of introduction to the working world, college is more than a failure – it is a cruel lie.
One point that seems to be ignored in comments. Ideally the purpose of a university education is not to prepare you for work (exceptions: law?, medicine, science, music) but to give you a perspective on what knowledge has been obtained and what its place in the world might be. There are institutions that act on this purpose: St. John’s College, Christendom College, St. Thomas Aquinas, to mention just a few. Note that the last two are “Catholic” and it’s been said of St. John’s College (Annapolis and Santa Fe) that it’s a place where Jews teach Protestants to become Catholic. I’m not sure that applies now.
Student loan bailouts are not only a way to buy the votes of indebted recipients of increasingly irrelevant degrees, but also a way to shore up Academia. Bailouts stave off any reckoning Big Academia would otherwise face for peddling unmarketable, irrelevant degrees. Bailouts insulate universities from any need to trim bloated bureaucracy, and make it possible for hothouse ideologies (Marxism, Trans nonsense, DEI absurdity) to flourish; when those tender ideologies would wilt and wither if exposed to the real world outside their incubator in academia.
Soaring college costs can make the academic pursuit of knowledge and culture prohibitively expensive. As Clinton points out, a lot of the student loan money is a wealth transfer to academia. Leftists supporting their fellow leftists.
The meme of the working class bailing out rich kids going to college would have worked 30 years ago, but the idea that each and every single person should go to college has been pushed hard since then.
If you are from a lower class family and do not aspire higher than to work at a local corner store, you will still be pushed into college by friends, relatives and teachers. If you are really lower class you might not be able to afford it after trying, but upper lower class and above are probably going to end up in college unless they come from a family willing to firmly push against this narrative.
There’s a good chance that the guy running the cash register when you go to the gas station went to at least a few years of college. Even if he didn’t complete the degree, he still has the debt. Telling him that you are in his corner because you want to make sure that he doesn’t have to pay for the education of laywers isn’t effective rhetoric.
This is of course all a separate discussion from the morality and tactical value of supporting or opposing loan forgiveness.
The real way forward is this:
-Heavily fine universities for defrauding their students.
-Forgive existing loans, or at bare minimum allow them to be discharged through bankruptcy.
-Outlaw student loans as the usurious society destroying things that they are.
Rudolph, the Universities are heavily subsidized … What you suggest would still amount to the taxpayers paying off the loans of deadbeats. It would just allow some of the proceeds to go to lawyers.
You seem to think that 19–20-year-olds are too incompetent to enter into loan agreements?
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