Comic Strips

Now there are way too many people with degrees competing for the few remaining jobs

That's honestly not the future I see going forward. The future I see is one where colleges begin to close en mass, foreign students stop coming to the US for high quality education, and educated professionals leave the country for lower cost of living and better amenities abroad.

Education, as an institution, becomes a series of high end social clubs on the high end and a bunch of debt-trap MLMs on the low end. Increasingly little is actually taught at any of these schools, and the only real purpose of the campuses is to organize upper-middle class failkids into the various regionalized ideological cults.

Meanwhile, the demand for real labor continues to decline with the falling birthrate and the enormous volume of legacy infrastructure that continues to need support. Efforts to extract labor by force, rather than by promise of higher quality of life, only result in deteriorating work quality. We become even more addicted to imports as our position as global financial hegemony melts away. And eventually, we go into the same kind of debt crisis that plagued Germany after WW1 and Russia after the collapse of the USSR.

All the immigrants have been rounded up and trafficked to El Salvador, so, who is left to act as the scapegoat for the ruling elite?

You're never going to get "all the immigrants" because we're a nation of immigrants.

The War on Immigration has better parallels with the War on Drugs. Lots of moving goalposts. Lots of propaganda as a stand in for policy. Lots of big splashy media pieces on how we're "Losing" or "Winning" in dramatic fashion.

But the economic incentives don't change. Consumer behaviors don't really change. And mostly we create a giant Make Work system for thugs to harass people of color.

For many jobs it doesn't really matter what degree you have.
A degree can show that you are able to put in the work and have the skills its takes to earn a degree in the first place.

I got a BS in a STEM field and a BA in the humanities. I think I was substantially benefited by both.

Even when I teach STEM - being able to draw on knowledge of Greek history and philosophy makes my lessons on the Pythagorean theorem more effective. When I talk about chemical equilibrium, I talk about the impact of climate changes on communities. When I talk about Newton’s laws, I talk about Newton context in scientific publishing of the time and some of his weird ideas about alchemy.

I get it the sciences are better paying ( or they use to be) but the humanities have a roll in creating well rounded and thoughtful people.

Plenty of people who graduate with a humanities degree make money. Sales and Marketing make tons of money. Lawyers make money. Linguists make money. PR and other Communications make money. Art and Design make money. Anyone who works for a sufficiently wealthy (and not particularly thrifty) client can make a ton of money in the humanities.

Unfortunately, the humanities majors who make the most money are often leveraging their skills for nefarious ends. Not unlike STEM in that regard.

but the humanities have a roll in creating well rounded and thoughtful people.

Definitely. I would have love do arts and humanities. But to be blunt, it would be hard to get a well paying job if one graduated with humanities degree.

Liberal arts and humanities initially started to provide well-rounded education to the privileged back then, to prepare and groom them as potential future leaders who need to be broadly knowledgeable and make well-informed and wise decision. And unfortunately that's the key word there: privileged. Education was reserved for the privileged and those who could pay. However, from what I can see, as education became more available to the public, the arts and humanities education lost its goal. Education as a whole really became a way to indoctrinate and condition children and young people on how to be obedient workers in the current capitalist system. Doing homework and projects after school, is really training for young people to bring their work to home when they finally enter the workforce.

The GI Bill allowed soldiers that fought Hitler the opportunity to obtain the same level of education previously reserved for generations of the ruling class.

That was the first real instance of DEI in America, and the ruling class has been doing everything in their power to take back their exclusive club ever since by dividing and conquering.

I know people think Russia is trying to infiltrate the U.S. because the cold war never really ended, but I'm pretty sure we've been thinking about it backwards. I'm starting to believe that our elite knew they couldn't topple American democracy to regain power from within without making it too obvious, so they purchased/privatized post Soviet Russia so they wouldn't have to say the quiet parts out loud.

But it highlights a societal problem. How supply and demand is put above everything. How people who work hard and could improve society end up in a place like that because society thinks supporting them and their fields that don't bring immediate profit is cOmMuNiSm somehow (if u think that, well you're the prime example of why we need to encourage college education in humanities specifically)

People say that because going to college is becoming exponentially expensive. It gets meaningfully worse year over year

Education is great, learning is more then half of the joy of life. The education system in our country is absolutely broken. Both these things are true

You can still come out on top in a broken system. I did. I have no regrets, no debt. But as a whole, it's just getting worse all the time

Yeah college is only a waste if you don't have a game plan for what you're doing with it. People who say it was a waste either didn't plan, didn't realize they weren't interested in what they thought, or overpaid.