What if most money spent for university degrees is useless?

By David McElroy · July 11, 2012

What if the whole system of college education in this country is mostly a scam? What if it’s a system that sucks untold billions of dollars out of our pockets, but provides very little in tangible value?

I felt that college was an absolute waste of time and money for me. There were a very few classes in which I learned things that felt worth the time and effort. (Thank you, Dr. Pound.) For the most part, I was jumping through hoops that didn’t matter. I learned almost everything that mattered (and absolutely everything I ever learned related to journalism) by doing the work, not by sitting in a class.

For a long time, I wondered if it was just me. Everybody else seemed to assume that a college degree was great and gave them a golden ticket for life. In the years since then, though, it seems as though more and more people are questioning this system.

Zachary Caceres has a new article at the Radical Social Entrepreneurs website that should make you question the value of traditional colleges — even elite colleges. It’s about how a Google engineer and ex-Stanford University professor is shaking up the world of higher education. (Read the article. It’s worth it.)

Last year, Sebastian Thrun was teaching a graduate-level class at Stanford about artificial intelligence. (Thrun is the man behind Google’s self-driving car, so he knows a thing or two about the subject.) He became frustrated that he was only reaching 200 students in one location, so he did something unprecedented. He sent out one announcement that he was offering the same lectures, quizzes and tests to anyone, for free. His simple offer found 160,000 takers.

Even if it were possible to get high-quality teaching to all of these thousands of people, it’s obvious that the elite colleges still serve a purpose. Right? The Stanfords and Harvards of the world earn their exorbitant tuition by attracting the best of the best. That’s the idea. But when Thrun looked at the test data, he found that it wasn’t true.

If his Stanford students were have been the best, they should have scored at the top of the collection of 160,000 students. Instead, his best Stanford student was the 411th best performer of the group. So 410 of these random Joes and Janes scored better than the best and brightest, which Stanford is supposed to be delivering.

If all we want is to set aside an elite group to brand as the best, the current elite college system works. But if we want there to be any meaning to that — if we want there to be any reality to it — the current system is a failure.

Thrun was so happy with the results of his experiment that he started Udacity, which he calls the 21st century university. It only offers 11 courses so far, but anyone can take the classes without charge. If you choose to get certification for the class, you can pay a fee to be certified for a particular course. The company says its plan is to “democratize education.”

As you might expect, Stanford isn’t exactly happy with this turn of events.

What is the purpose of our universities? If it’s to educate people about things they need to know for life, there are better ways to do it than the current bloated and expensive college system. If the goal is to simply perpetuate the myth that a select few people who go to top colleges are actually better than everyone else, the current system is great. The problem is that the story the system is selling is a lie.

Colleges are going to have to find a way to adapt to the model that radicals such as Thrun are creating. If people can learn the things they need to learn (for free) and then pay for certification if they need it, why will smart people bother shelling out the money for the old system? Why will employers keep asking for traditional college degrees?

The change might not come quickly, but I suspect it’s going to come. It’s going to bring educational opportunities to people who could never afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars — or even much more — in the traditional system. It’s going to give opportunities to people who the elite admissions systems would have never accepted. It’s going to make merit — and not all the other games that currently influence admission — the real measure of education.

Changing the educational system in this way will inevitably destroy the university system as we know it today. Whether they adapt or die will be up to them. What seems undeniable is that people such as Thrun are finding ways to get around these lumbering dinosaurs. We’re all going to be better off because of that.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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