Tag Archives: useless college degrees

June 28, 2018

‘Diversity Been Very, Very Good to Me!’

By leeduigon

Image result for images of burning money

(Thanks to Sidney for the news tip)

I missed this when it happened in 2016: the University of Michigan awarded some bozo a salary of $385,000 to be a “chief diversity and inclusion officer” (https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/22910). It was part of an $85 million “diversity plan” which would bring a golden age of “inclusive scholarship,” whatever the deuce that is.

Coincidentally, the looniversity raised tuition 3.9%.

Think about it: $85 million for pure, unadulterated crapola. Think about that while you break your backs working to pay your kids’ tuition. Think about it when they finally graduate and come back home to live in your cellar because their degrees in Gender Studies and Wise Women of Color Super-Hero Studies disqualify them for any gainful employment.

I wonder what the chief diversity and inclusion officer earns now, two years later.

Somehow I just haven’t got the heart to look it up.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Public Education

February 13, 2018

A Market Waiting to be Filled: College Degree Removal Service

By leeduigon

See the source image

With virtually everybody going to college and earning (or buying) some kind of degree or other, and with so many degrees awarded to mastering perfectly useless or inane fields of pseudo-study, employers are no longer much impressed by a job applicant’s status as a college grad. A hamster can probably get a degree, as long as someone pays his tuition. It’s gotten so bad, even applicant-helping websites like “Jobscan” are admitting that there are times when you definitely want to leave your college degree off your resume (https://www.jobscan.co/blog/education-on-resume/).

But we need to go a step farther. Why should your college degree follow you, like a felony conviction, all through your life? Why should a spate of youthful carelessness and gullibility render you forever unemployable?

If you’ve got a degree in Superhero Studies, Lesbian Literature, or whatnot, don’t give up hope! You’re in exactly the same position as some poor devil who, in a moment of folly, had himself decorated with a big fat tattoo that now embarrasses him to death.

Well, he can go to a tattoo removal service and get this emblem of shame permanently erased from his skin. And someday you ought to be able to do the same to your superfluous college degree. Sooner or later someone will devise a way to purge this embarrassment from all your records, leaving you unencumbered in your quest to find a job.

Whoever’s first to grab this market is gonna make a lot of money!

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Just for Fun, Pop Culture, Public Education

November 21, 2017

Default on Student Debt–and Lose Your License

By leeduigon

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Remember debtors’ prison–they throw you in the clink until you pay off your debt? Really stupid idea, wasn’t it? Eventually they discovered that it’s next to impossible to pay off anything while you’re in jail.

But if we really do know better nowadays, how come 22 states revoke your driver’s license, or even your professional license, as punishment for failure to pay off your student debt? (http://www.jwj.org/in-22-states-your-student-debt-could-cost-you-your-job) You could read all about it in this recently updated Jobs With Justice article, if only WordPress hadn’t killed all my news links.

Let’s see, now… You go to collidge and run up a $200,000 student debt–and when you can’t keep up with the payments, they take away your right to drive a car, or even revoke your professional license. Either way, you probably lose your livelihood and certainly lose your ability to pay down the debt. Bad enough you’ve got a master’s degree in Gender Studies or Superhero Studies and it isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. But just try to get and keep a job if you can’t drive to work. And just try paying down a debt if you haven’t got a job.

America would be better served if there were some other punishment for student debt default–suspending the defaulter’s right to vote, that would be a good start. Refusal to grant student loans in the first place to anyone “studying” completely useless subjects.Why should the taxpayers loan anyone money to get a degree in Lesbian Chicano Studies?

But it’s just plain mean to take away some poor collidge grad’s ability to eke out a living serving up slurpees at his hometown Seven-Eleven.

17 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

April 18, 2017

Instead of Your Final Exam–Protest!

By leeduigon

Image result for images of idiot college students

The latest college howler comes from Arizona State University, where students are being given credit for their final exams if they organize an “anti-Trump protest” instead of taking the test ( https://heatst.com/culture-wars/arizona-state-u-lets-students-organize-anti-trump-protest-instead-of-taking-final-exam/ ).

Not that it matters. The professor who’s doing this is a professor of “Global Politics of Human Rights.” Whatever the hell that is. “Hire me right away! I’ve got a degree in Global Politics of Human Rights!”

At least one Women and Gender Studies student–hey, can I please wake up now?–joined the protest, even though she wasn’t in the professor’s class.

Does even the least shred of doubt remain, that these colleges and universities are incontinently wasting time and money on a scale hitherto only seen in government? Is there any sane reason for continuing to pump public money into these institutions? Is there even any half-baked silly reason to continue to send young people there?

All rhetorical questions, of course.

I almost wonder what a final exam would look like, in Global Politics of Human Rights, and what kind of blather you would have to spew to pass it. But I’m not sure I’d be up to actually looking at it.

I estimate at least 90% of our country’s higher education is sheer waste and pure twaddle. Very little that is good can happen here until we get rid of it.

Any self-respecting nation would have already done so.

15 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

April 11, 2017

Wahoo! Free College!

By leeduigon

Image result for images of snowman as college graduate

Your tax dollars at work!

If you live in New York state and have been wondering how you would ever get that Gender Studies degree that you wanted to much, but couldn’t afford, wonder no more!

Because collidge is, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo says, the new high school, and literally everybody’s gotta go to collidge, the state has ponied up $163 million in tax monies to provide free tuition at any state-run four-year university or two-year community collidge–if your family does not earn more than $125,000 a year ( http://www.csmonitor.com/EqualEd/2017/0410/A-first-New-York-will-offer-free-tuition-at-all-four-year-state-colleges-for-qualifying-families ).

Did I say “free”? What I meant was that other people have to pay for it. The state sucks it out of people’s paychecks, that they worked for, in taxes. I mention it because many people don’t understand that the government has no money of its own. It only has what it can take from the people.

Another thing that a lot of people, including Gov. Cuomo, don’t understand is that value is closely tied to scarcity: the law of supply and demand.

What does he suppose a college degree will be worth, if literally everybody has one? And what happens when employers look at some 30-year-old recent grad’s degree in Comic Book Interpretation and say to him, gently but firmly, “Go away”?

I suppose it just might make some small amount of sense if, say, a state had a crying need for engineers, so it offered a financial incentive to students who earned a degree in engineering. But this is not what is being proposed. They are talking about degrees in bloody anything.

All this does is cram multitudes of young people into an already bloated and over-funded university system, where they provide the Democrat Party with an army of chumps available on short notice to protest whatever they are told to protest.

The only upside to this, in the long term, is that anybody in New York state with the foresight to become a plumber or an electrician will be able to write his own ticket in golden letters.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in news, Public Education

January 18, 2017

Have Hooey, Will Travel

By leeduigon

Image result for stupid protesters

Just when it seemed there was finally a job for recent college graduates… a job that even millenials could do…

It turns out to be a hoax.

“Demand Protest” raised some hackles this month by running ads offering to pay idiots $2,500 to be anti-Trump protesters. A lot of people who checked out the “Demand Protest” website were appalled. Here it is, for now: https://www.demandprotest.com/

They claim to be activating “millenials across the globe with seeded audiences… convincing scenes… When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it…”

And April Fool on you. In January.

I admit it had me going. What was unbelievable about it? We’ve already seen Democrat operatives hiring goons to disrupt Trump rallies. We’ve already seen stacked opinion polls, and plenty of them. The profound mendacity of our public discourse is an established fact. We’re almost proud of it.

But it was a hoax. Snopes.com says so. Tucker Carlson says so. Reading the thing again, after I’d calmed down, says so. All that was missing was a centaur.

Way to go, whoever you are. You got me.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in news

January 8, 2017

William the Conqueror’s Favorite Movie

By leeduigon

Image result for images of william the conqueror

Y2K wasn’t all end-of-the-world alarmism. I do remember assorted sages urging people to sell everything they had, convert it all to cash, and head for the nearest and deepest abandoned lead mine: although what good cash was going to do you, with all of civilization in ruins, I never quite understood.

Some of Y2K was, well, goofy. Like the effort to decide what was the best movie of the past thousand years, the Movie of the Millenium. Like, after he invaded and conquered England in 1066, William the Conqueror took Queen Matilda to the nabe so they could watch A Bug’s Life.

This leads us down a path of fascinatingly useless conjecture. Think of major historical figures down through the centuries, from 1001 to 2000, and try to figure out what their favorite movies would have been. Wouldn’t you just love to know ? Take Peter the Hermit: how do you think he’d have liked Forbidden Planet? Or the Bronte sisters, grooving on Singin’ in the Rain. What sort of flick would have most appealed to Jim Bowie? Wow, you could stay up all night, racking your brain over this.

Doesn’t it sound like it has the potential to become a whole new degree program at a lot of colleges? I am sure it would catch on quickly.

(Great Scott, what have I done?)

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Just for Fun, Movie Reviews, satire

October 31, 2016

Work Wanted (College Grad)

By leeduigon

Image result for images of idiots in college

So push has come to shove, and Mom and Pop have threatened to evict you from the  basement if you don’t get at least a part-time job.

Well, here at Beezer University, we have a whole bulletin board set aside for our graduates who are looking for employment commensurate with their degrees. [Note to self: How many BU grads will know what “commensurate” means?]

Here are a few samples.

WORK WANTED–HONEYMOON CHAPERONE. Just because it’s your honeymoon doesn’t mean you should let Mr. Man get away with hanky-panky! Feminist Relationship Studies degree: I WILL KEEP HIM IN HIS PLACE.

WORK WANTED–PLAY DATE SUPERVISOR. Make sure your child understands Diversity! My degree in Advanced Chicano Physics gives me insight into childish minds! Salary negotiatable!

WORK WANTED–TOILET PAPER RECYCLING. Let me wash your toilet paper so you can use it again and again! Together we can Save the Planet! I have a seven-year Batcheler’s Degree in Saving The Planet Studies.

WORK WANTED–FOOD TASTER. You never knows when someone he is trying to poison you! That’s why you need a food taster. That’s why you need me! I am udderly fearless, I will taste anything. You’ll believe it when you see me! I come compleate with a degree in Superhero Studies.

Well, what are you waiting for? Just $20 will display your “Work Wanted” index card for a whole five days! And if you don’t have the cash, we make it easy for you to just tack it on to your outstanding student loan.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Just for Fun, Public Education, satire

July 10, 2015

University Scandal! Brain-Removal Operations

By leeduigon

Our cracked investigative reporter George Steppanoplace has uncovered a major academic scandal.

At Happythought State University, part of the University of California system, Ph.D. candidates are required to undergo brain-removal surgery before they can be awarded a doctorate.

“Originally it was just for Ph.D.’s in Womens Studies, Queer Studies, Black Studies, Gender Studies, Social Justice Studies, Liberation Studies, and Environmental Justice Studies,” explained university president C. Babbington Gesundheit, Ph.D. “If you were going for a doctorate in Engineering or something like that, it was presumed you would need a brain, somewhere along the line.

“However, we have gotten rid of all those White Privilege degree programs, and now all of our students study only those liberating subjects what can learn them how to be interllecturals,” said Dr. Gesundheit.

George interviewed Dr. Medea Harmsworth, Ph. D. in Gender Studies, who has been without a brain for a full dozen years. “I never miss it,” she says. “In fact, I don’t even remember ever having had a brain.”

George also interviewed a graduate student, Tulip Pimplemeyer, who is working on his Ph.D. in Social Justice and says he’s looking forward to sporting a completely empty cranium. “I can, like, y’know, store stuff up there, once they take out my brain,” he said. “I am gonna ask them to cut off my whatsit while they’re at it, so I can transition into a woman.”

The U.S. Justice Dept., George discovered, has turned down “numerous” requests to intervene.

“There is no constitutional right to have a brain,” his report concludes. And, winking slyly at the camera, adds, “In fact, I had mine taken out years and years ago!”

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