Great news: fewer kids going to California universities

May 10, 2012

By John Seiler

Youngsters finally are figuring out that going $100,000 in debt to get a degree in poststructural-prepostmodern-quasistructuralist-semiFoucaulist-political-correctness with no chance of a job isn’t exactly the best way to start out in life.

A new study released today by the Public Policy Institute of California found, in the Contra Costa Times summary:

“From 2007 to 2010, the percentage of graduates attending University of California or California State University campuses fell by 20 percent….

“Fewer than 18 percent of California high school graduates ended up at a Cal State or UC campus in 2010, down from 22 percent in 2007. And 55 percent of the most highly prepared students enroll there, down from 67 percent.

“About one in 10 who reject admissions offers from the state universities choose not to go to college at all….”

College still can be a good deal if you’re pursuing a degree in a technical or scientific subject, such as chemistry or engineering. They still have standards. If you reject Newton’s physics as coming from the “sexist patriarchal oppressors,” the bridge you build will collapse, people will die and you might go to prison for negligence.

But the humanities departments are hopeless. With only a few exceptions, they’re suffused with cultural Marxism.

Murderous Marxism lives

It’s kind of funny, in a mortifying sort of way. Political and economic Marxism died with the Soviet Union 21 years ago after murdering more than 100 million people around world, from Lenin’s and Stalin’s Gulag to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to the killing fields of Cambodia.

Yet Marxism lives in American universities as a cultural excrescence.

So, kids, stay away from it. Start your lives right now. Don’t go to college and get into debt.

Are you intersted in Shakespeare? Then read him, attend local performances of the plays and watch videos of the plays, such as those the BBC produced three decades ago (available on Netflix and in libraries).

If you’re interested in a scientific or technical field, you’ll probably still have to go to college. The way to get through the P.C. college humanities courses mostly undamaged by the academic Stalinism is to take advanced placement tests. If you can’t do that, take courses at your local community college, where the tuition is much cheaper and you’re more likely to get a non-Maoist professor.

Read on your own. Read alternative Web sites like this one. Some of my favorites: LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. The Mises Institute has hundreds of free books online on libertarianism and free market economics. Use it.

Want to get into business? Then start one. There are copious books an free Web sites on how to do so. Most new businesses fail. Then start again. My suggestion: Don’t go into debt doing so. Business debt can be as bad as college debt.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college. Edison and Ford never went. You don’t need it.

Here’s a good Walter Williams article on how college is a waste for so many.

Another by Marc Slavo on why college is the biggest scam in U.S. history.

And here’s a YouTube of a smart girl saying “farewell to college.” She gives me hope in the rising generation.