Richard Vedder and Andrew Gillen
NationalReview.com
“You must go to college!” Every student is now told that a college degree is essential to a good job and a good life, said Richard Vedder and Andrew Gillen. Sadly, this is a lie. For years, our nation’s colleges have been churning out vastly more graduates than there are jobs requiring degrees; indeed, one third of all college grads hold jobs for which their expensive diplomas are unnecessary. More than 19,000 college grads now work as parking-lot attendants, and 300,000 as waiters and waitresses.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The reality is that “many people lack the cognitive skills and discipline” to benefit from higher-level academic work. Yet unqualified students enroll in droves, running up vast amounts of debt in low-interest government loans—which now total an estimated $771 billion. And a growing number of borrowers aren’t earning enough to pay back that debt. “This is economic and academic child abuse.” The world still needs plumbers, carpenters, and truck drivers. What it doesn’t need are additional legions of college grads and dropouts with no employable skills and $100,000 in debt.
-
Viewpoint: Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winterfeature From The New York Times: “Nearly half of all people now live in countries where women, on average, give birth to fewer than 2.1 babies...
-
Snowden’s silence on Putin
feature If Edward Snowden truly is a moral paragon, then he should announce that he can no longer stomach Vladimir Putin’s oppressive behavior.
-
The irrelevance of the United Nations
feature Once again, the United Nations has been “rendered impotent by a small group of thugs.”
-
Millions of closeted gay men
feature “What percent of American men are gay?”
-
The smug confidence of libertarians
feature Why are most libertarians white dudes?
-
Seeing racism for what it is
feature Riley Cooper’s case shows just how poorly he and most other Americans understand “what a racist is.”
-
Searching for a libertarian paradise
feature Not one of the world’s 193 sovereign states—not even a tiny one—has adopted a full-on libertarian system.
-
Viewpoint: Juliette Kayyem
feature From The Boston Globe: “It is now clear that the Tsarnaev brothers had no strategic plan but to kill in a very public fashion....