The Fallacy of College Education

I've had several interesting conversations on the value of a college education. In virtually all of those conversations I've heard the old argument, currently pushed by Obama, and backed by statistics, "College Graduates make more money therefore we must ensure everybody can go to college."

This is based on a logical fallacy called an Inductive Argument. Since people who earn more are more likely to have a degree, college education results in higher incomes.

It's like saying people who live homes where insulin is found are more likely to have diabetes, therefore insulin causes diabetes.

The fact is if we look at college dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire founder of Facebook, or Bill Gates, billionaire founder of Microsoft we see that being smart and savvy made them rich. If we look at just about any professional athlete, they make obscene amounts of money, not all are smart but all are talented. Smart, talented and ambitious people earn more money.

Ask any fifth grader two weeks into the school year who the smart kids are, who the dumb kids are, who the athletic kids are, who the funny kids are, and who the bullies (criminals) are, and the fifth grader can tell you. It’s just not politically correct (PC) to recognize those facts. There are simple facts, a smart person is more likely to earn a degree than a dumb one, and an ambitious person is more likely to earn a degree than a lazy person. It doesn’t take a genius to know that smart and/or ambitious people are more likely to have higher incomes than dumb and/or lazy people.

Not everyone is equal, some are smart, some are athletic, some are talented, and some are not. In a free enterprise system, society voluntarily rewards those who provide their fellow man with service more than those who don't. The reward is proportional to what others are willing to pay for the service. Bill Clinton makes tens of thousands of dollars to give a one hour speech, because others in society believe his speech has value and are willing to pay for it. The bag boy at the grocery store earns less than $8 an hour. The discrepancy is because society doesn’t value bagging groceries as much as an ex-president’s speech.

Because of his talent in the ring Mike Tyson made millions of dollars. Because of his lack of financial aptitude he has not been able to retain the wealth his fellow man has voluntarily given him in exchange for the entertainment he provided. Somebody like Steve Forbes would have leveraged those millions into more millions.

Providing everybody with equal opportunity, the most talented will inescapably rise, and the less talented will fall behind. This will follow a Bell curve. Whether athletically, artistically, academically, charismatically, or creatively, people with more talent will be rewarded by their fellow man more than people with less talent. It wouldn’t matter how hard I worked, or what coaches I had, how much access to the best facilities were made available to me, or how much I spent on having Michael Jordon teach me one on one, my fellow members of society would never pay to see me play basketball. There just isn’t much entertainment value in short dorky asthmatic white nerds with little natural basketball ability shootin’ hoops.

It is insane to think that everybody can and should receive a college education. It’s also a lie to tell every student if they get a degree they will earn more money. I know college graduates working at Walmart, under managers who have no college education but worked their way up through the company. Most jobs (outside of engineering type jobs) that require a college education, the employer doesn’t really care what the college degree is in, just that you have one. A degree is used by businesses as a screening tool to weed out dumb, less talented, less ambitious people. It is one of the few screening tools they are allowed to use. The government has caused this problem because if a business offered a job that required smarts, but didn’t require a college education, and ended up giving the job to a higher number of degreed people than non-degreed people, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) would take them to court for discrimination. According the EEOC, "If this job does not require a college degree, then any favoritism shown to college graduates is a disguised form of racial discrimination and illegal." Sense smart talented people are more likely to acquire a college degree than dumb people; business in order to be allowed to hire a smarter more talented employee must require a degree, even if a degree is irrelevant to the job. They don’t hire PhD’s, MBA’s, BA’s, and BS’s because of the arcane drivel that these students have learned. They are buying the brain power that was required earn those degrees.

Among other stupidity, this fallacy has lead to No Child Left Behind. Most teachers off the record will tell you that NCLB to mean No Child Gets Ahead. All of the money and effort is forced to be spent on and bringing the lowest performing students up to a minimum standard (a standard that is too low to be accepted to a university) at the expense of gifted students, whose programs have been cut back or eliminated. Imagine a Florida high school with 1000 students, where 400 earn full academic scholarships to universities across the nation, and 200 more were accepted with partial scholarships, but 250 failed the FCAT. It wouldn’t matter that 75% passed the FCAT, that 60% of the students were college bound and two thirds of those on full academic scholarships; it would be a failing school under NCLB. This is political correctness run amuck, and socialism at its worst. This is the typical leftist thought that equality is more important than success. It’s not “fair” that the smart kids get to go to college, earn degrees and earn more; so we’re going to put more of our resources into academically marginal students hoping that they can get the benefits of a college degree the same as a smart kid. This is stupid illogical thinking. Everybody should be provided the same opportunity and the best should be offered more challenges and opportunities to help them excel, and the less talented should be offered more realistic opportunities (trade schools, apprenticeships, etc.) that will better prepare them to be self sufficient. Telling everybody they should have a college education is a PC lie and hurts everybody. Less than half of students who start college earn a four year degree. They waste a huge amount of money because of a PC lie. It is a disservice to both the universities and the students to push academically marginal students into academic situations beyond their abilities.

Half the well paying jobs in this country don’t require a degree. Electrician, plumber, welder, pipefitter, iron worker, carpenter, machinist, operator, and a plethora of technical positions pay very well. Most of our high school students don’t even know what most of these jobs are, or what it takes to do them. Why are we not preparing our students for these jobs?

It’s acceptable for a coach to tell students who don’t perform on the court that they aren’t cut out for basketball, that they need to pursue something else, and it’s even acceptable to cut them from the team. Why isn’t it acceptable to tell students who don’t perform well academically that they aren’t cut out for college, and that they need to pursue something else?