Being contrarian again!
Seems like you can’t go five minutes anymore without yet another hand-wringing commentary hitting the internet in which the author Gloomily Foreshadows The Impending University Apocalypse wherein everyone suddenly wakes up to find themselves in debt up to their eyeballs with college degrees that turned out to be completely shitty investments. And it’s all getting pretty boring! Because every one of these recycled trend pieces says the exact same goddamned thing!
How about the obvious alternative: don’t look at your education as a financial investment. Investments always underperform anyway—at least in a world where for every Hyundai there’s a BMW and for every BMW a Porsche, a world in which you’re ultimately just going to end up resenting your undergraduate degree anyway because it didn’t leave you with sufficient purchasing power to buy that brownstone on the Upper West and fill it with every last new goddamned Apple gizmo.
So why not look at it as something completely different? As a sort of inverted retirement, as four generally pretty relaxing years that just like any other years of our lives have to be paid for, except these are four years in which our only responsibility is to fucking read books? Really! Because when you stop and think about it the median income for college grads still vastly outweighs the annual cost of most undergraduate institutions, even after interest—and you can totally pay for that! Because college is only four years; it’s retirement that’s forever! And if college means that much to you then retirement can wait for four more years a little later on down the road. So go. Go read as much George Eliot and weave as many baskets as your little heart desires—because it’s not like anybody ever ends up going into the field they studied anyway.
And look, the real reason you’re in debt up to your eyeballs and not making any money has nothing to do with the uselessness of your college degree and everything to do with the governing cadre of bankers and moneyed elite who are bilking you out of every penny you’re worth (and maybe if you hadn’t been so busy “preparing for a career in applied sciences” you’d have enrolled in “English 317: 20th Century Literary Criticism and the Specter of Marx” and had all that made clear for you).
