The education scam

It is absolutely true - education is worthless unless it gets the student a job. There are any number of colleges, universities etc willing to train people in just about anything. It is by far the biggest scam industry going. Look at the local college prospectus. How many utterly worthless courses are on offer? Not just that but how many are offering courses in industries that are already oversupplied?

Take a degree in Theater, Arts and Drama or a degree in Photography. Just how many jobs are there going to be for graduates of those courses? Packing groceries in Publix is not a career yet that is all people with such degrees are worth in the workplace. Better to have taken the money blown on worthless degrees and spend it on something that's actually going to have future benefit. Taking a worthless course means debts that are never going to be repaid from the minimum wage job that they will attract.

How about computer courses? Hold up there - they sound good because everybody uses a computer. Well, yes most do use a computer. The Best Buy computer technicians are paid minimum wage to fix them. Bang goes any idea that being a self-employed computer technician is going to help anybody.

Generally, the best courses to study in college or university are the standard, traditional courses: Accounting, Science, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology & languages. Things like computer security, computer programming etc are all things that can be learned as short add-on courses after graduation.

Computer programming like photography, acting and videography are hobbies rather than anything serious. There are so many people doing them as hobbies that are really quite good at them that anybody trying to break in as a newcomer is fighting all the amateurs that do it at weekends. It's not worth the bother or the expense of taking a degree in such worthless subjects.

Perhaps the most worthless degree ever has to be one offered by the University of Southampton some twenty years ago. It was a degree in "Coronation Street". That, for those that aren't already laughing, was a British soap opera of the day. The other day somebody offered me a free course in computer networking and security with free gas to get there. I turned them down. The computer course had no guaranteed job at the end so it would most likely have been three months totally wasted with a qualification that nobody wanted. How many unemployed computer people are out there? Lots - that's how many. That's why the course was free. If it had been a needed subject, that course would have been at a premium price.

The moral of the story - if you're going to study, study something worthwhile - not subjects that are "in demand" or subjects that are trendy. The demand will be satisfied ages before the course will be finished. The trend will have gone. Be boring and study traditional subjects - they have far more use in the workplace.