The reason you don't want to go to college

The Old Bat
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MEXICO
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ASYLUM
The Great American Novel

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The reason you don't want to go to college

So it's your last year of highschool. Everybody's sending out applications to all sorts of colleges. Should you ?

No, you should not. Why not ? The answer's somewhere in the painful trek between starvation and student loan consolidation. Hey, They even rhyme. Try it with me. Student loan consolidation is a way to protract starvation. Yay. Sing along, we'll get back to this shortly.

So tell me, would you buy bottled sewage at the low low price of 20,000 (yes, that's right. Twenty thousand) dollars per year ? You must buy a year at a time, and you must DRINK IT ! But if you keep drinking it for four whole years, you get a special badge of the exclusive Sewage Drinking Club. People will be so impressed with your ability to eat shit, they will give you a better job.

Bad analogy, eh ? Fine, let's go through the main points. There's a dual claim made for college education, a strange mix of ideal and practical. On the one hand, they "open the gate of knowledge" and whatnot. On the other, they "improve your chances in the job marketplace". Every time somebody observes that they don't really do jack for your knowledge, some administrative weasel chips in, "But we ALSO improve your employment prospects". Every time somebody notices that they don't do jack for your prospects, some self important "professor" has a half hour speech about the wonderful world of knowledge prepared.

The dual claim does not stand on either leg. All the knowledge is already perfectly available, for free. Or for the cost of a bus ticket to a good library. Or for the cost of a yearly subscription to an online library. All the knowledge in the world is perfectly available for something like twenty dollars a year.

That's it. Reasonably clean water comes out of the tap, for the effort of turning it on and for the cost of a twenty now and again.

There's no point in even considering the "improve your employment prospects" angle. What prospects ? It's so obvious by now, even the college salesmen dropped it from the pitch, they try their best to hint at it, but really, it's almost as if the FTC disallowed the claim.

So why sewage ? Well, sewage is made out of mostly water, and some shit. College classes are made out of mostly water (as found in the library) and some shit in a suit.

They can't learn it for you, and it's already written down. Why do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for "textbooks" when the same stuff is freely available, and why would you want to pay some self important schmuck to tell you what he understood from reading the textbook ? Are you a brain short?

Well if you short like that, what exactly do you want to do in college anyway ? Social studies ? O, right, party. All the sex and booze, right, right, yea.

It's not free, dummy. Sure, the girls don't charge, and the boys don't charge either. But the college charges. Do you know how much ?

Pile up all the tuition, housing, forced purchases and whatnot. If it comes under 50k altogether you're lucky. Now add to that the fact that you're wasting your time. If you put 4 years into getting a job and actually improving your skills, you'd be a few promotions up, and earned what, a conservative 2k x 12 months x 4 years = 96k. O wait, this is money you OWN. It accrues interest. About 9 or 10k in the interval. Unless you are a competent investor and double it. Or whatever.

So at the absolute minimum, with a cheap-ish college vs an so-so job, you are talking 150k. Instead of owing 50k, you could be owning 100. That's 150k. That's more money than you've ever seen together, isn't it.

They said it's a big decision, and it is. It's a decision on whether you want to have 100,000 dollars or rather owe somebody 50,000 dollars. They say "Take the money and run". They are right.

Because if you don't, what happens is this : Every year, you lose $7500 in interest alone. Money you could have had, but you don't. On top of that, the principal, which, over the course of your remaining life (say 50 years), would be another 3k a year. You need 10k a year just to break even.

Now sit over there and tell me a college diploma will give you 4 years back, somehow, magically, years that you pissed away on campus while other people made contacts in the real world, got promotions and learned their trade. Not only that, but it will somehow, magically, add 10k to your yearly income.

While you do that, let me introduce my good friend, Mr. college loan consolidation. You will be meeting him soon, loan consolidation is very popular with college graduates. The reason is simple : going to college earns you so much money in the long run, and puts you in such an bountiful financial position that you're positively crawling with debt. Foreclosure follows happy foreclosure, eviction follows blissful eviction and default cheerfully looms.

So you go for a college loan consolidation, which basically means, you lump everything you owe in one large tumor, and carry it for five to ten to twenty five more years than you originally thought you will. The loan consolidation rates aren't all that terribly bad either, there exist at least two loan sharks in New York that charge more.

And hey, why not, everybody does it these days. Student loan consolidation is the new cool.

12 people are so cool it's chilling.
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this page was made using a bent spoon. anything else is for failures