Why shouldn't you go to college?

You don't need another babysitter.

The recent political spectrum has driven politicians to push for free college education. Candidates such as Bernie Sanders made a big splash in the presidential race claiming that everyone deserved a free college education. There are three problems with this scenario: if everyone has a college education, the value of that degree drops dramatically (to almost zero) as applied to the workforce; rising enrollment includes rising costs; we are studying areas which would yield greater outcomes if studied on your own (while you’re a part of the work force). These combinations create a social environment where students are on their own for the first time in their lives, must navigate complex social situations of people with vastly different cultures, and in many cases these students have no idea what alternate utility their choice to attend college could have on their lives. They find themselves in a second nanny state where they believe they’re finally on their own to make their own decisions but now demand faculty and staff attend to their every need.

I have an arts degree in Instrumental Music Performance. As far as marketability is concerned, this is one of the worse diplomas you could find yourself with - especially if you took on massive debt to achieve it (which many of my classmates did). The market value of this degree is that I can teach and be recycled back into the academic environment. No potential employer cares that I have a music performance degree - they want to know that I can perform. I learned plenty in college, some of it was useful but most of it was not. In fact, after leaving college I spent three years in Las Vegas where I learned more about my craft from other performers and trial and error than I ever learned in college. Since performance was my desired career path, I would have been much better off working and performing at night (which is what I did in Las Vegas), to network with other performers and not have to waste my time with all the fluff curriculum that colleges make you take today.

The most frequent argument I hear in response to this is that “We need students to value education intrinsically.” One problem we have in academia is this notion that knowledge for knowledge’s sake is good: it isn’t. It’s masturbation. If you are not gathering knowledge to better yourself through new skills, higher understanding of the environment you live in, or to be more competitive you are wasting your time.

We cannot value things intrinsically as a means of self satisfaction - just like hedonism it’s only satisfying temporarily. The real value in education comes from how you can use it. People value knowledge differently for different reasons and this is the problem with one size fits all education from the ground up. We should not be punishing our children for having preferences. We need to allow them to have the satisfaction of failure that leads to success. College is an enormous net to forstal failure; without failure there can be no success.

The units/credits required for graduating have increased over time due to budgetary and political competition within the ivory tower. Departments receive their budget based on the number of students enrolled: this is why math departments do so well. They have a giant lecture hall that they stuff 230 students into that every student on campus has to be a part of. This helps generate a tremendous amount of money for the department to go towards their much smaller graduate program. Every other department is vying for a piece of this pie as they lobby administration to add one of their classes onto the general education requirements. There isn’t any reason that an civil engineering major should have to take a basic instrumental music class unless he does so voluntarily but college degree requirements have inflated so much that it has become nearly impossible to complete the required course work in four years. This leads to more student debt spending which feeds the narrative that the state should pay for college.

Students in secondary education today see four possible options upon leaving high school: Join the military, follow the trade path of a parent, follow a college path towards a desired trade, or go to college because they don’t know what else to do. The bulk of our student population is falling into this last category because it is the only thing we talk about in high school. The fact that colleges accept Undeclared majors is a sign of what a clown show it has become. These are supposed to be bastions of learning for motivated individuals who are dedicated to their subject matter - instead they have become attention seeking factions vying for the minds of lost youth desperate for the money and political power that comes from getting warm bodies into chairs. Colleges have stopped giving students a product that they want - they offer a series of hoops that they can jump through to receive a diploma that society claims that they need.

This extension of adolescence is not caused by college but merely the result of it. Our daycare-nation has provided children with a perspective that they are a burden on their parents. That children are not worth having because doing so would limit their own life’s potential. That along with a decrease in real opportunities for secondary education students to take has allowed children to delay any sort of responsibility, of failure, that would result in growth into adulthood and eventually to success.

The Long-Tail of the Electric Sheep: the Social Media Divide.

I am off of Facebook.

I am off of Twitter.

I am off of Google+

I am off of Instagram.

Socially I am 100% off of these platforms - professionally, however, I use them to promote my brand and reach an audience that, until recently, I would never have been able to reach.

We see a preponderance of evidence that excessive time spent on social media can be a contributing factor of depression, and not just because you’re seeing all the depressing news in your feed that feeds on your inner self-loathing - It’s neurological.

That beep or buzz we get when we receive a text or notification from the magical device that lives in our pockets has trained us to have a positive emotional response to it. That response triggers dopamine in the brain - the hormone that makes us feel good. That “Good feeling” is completely artificial so when it leaves us we feel hollow and unfulfilled. Our technology has trained us in the same way that Pavlov trained his dog.

Your phone buzzes because someone responded or ‘liked’ you and that triggers an emotional response. That response is gone almost instantly and so we are left chasing the proverbial dragon down the long tail of the internet: posting more, interacting more, liking more, in the hopes that your internet community will reciprocate.

All the while retreating from the real world into the brilliant blue glow of our cell phone.

I had an interacting with an attendant at the gas station two days ago. They recently upgraded their credit card reader to include a chip reader for the newer cards. As I was working my way through the transaction I became frustrated that there were so many confirmations I needed to watch for on this new screen that I didn’t even have a second to look up and say hello to the human being that was standing in front of me. Finally I stopped, much I’m sure to the chagrin of the customers waiting behind me.

“Have you ever noticed the more advanced the technology gets, the less we have time to communicate with each other?” I asked.

She looked at me, a bit confused at first until I explained.

“I just spent a good thirty seconds in front of you with maybe glancing eye contact before I stood and stared at the machine that takes my money. We’re so worried about efficient transactions that the both of us barely took the time to acknowledge each other’s humanity.”

She laughed in astonishment, “Yeah, you’re right! I talk to so few of my customers now.”

Social media is doing the same thing.

There’s something called the “Long Tail.” This was originally coined by Amazon as a description of its algorithm: the computer code it uses to recommend new products to you. This theory basically describes the individual nature of human beings - that you may enjoy something that is popular but, based on your other likes and purchases it takes you down a road you may have never explored before but ultimately results in a product that is much more in tune with your actual likes and preferences.

In 2013, Facebook changed the way it displays posts from Most Recent to Top Stories: effectively changing its algorithm to from listing things chronologically to listing them based on personal interest. This change is great for business because it allows Facebook to promote posts that businesses pay for while burying posts that are not. It’s not specifically a bad practice, it was a business model decision.

Take into account now that this algorithm also shows you posts from our friends and people you follow based on the things you like and the links you post and soon you’ll find that the majority of people you interact with on Facebook share similar political beliefs and the few dissenters you see are easily dismissed as fringe elements. All the while retreating from dissenting opinion in real life. Retreating from family for having “backwards views,” retreating from social engagements in fear of someone saying “something wrong.” Soon we find that everyone who disagrees with us is Literally Hitler (please use the California, Valley Girl voice when saying that last part).

This experience at the gas station taught me a lot about perspective and I’ve been watching it a lot this week. I see my students more engaged with the fantasy on their phones, of the fake lives they and their friends lead, than the reality of the friends around them. They’ve just learned that people disagree online so why bring that into the real world.

So it becomes that the things we should be talking about face to face, our most intimate, personal, nuanced topics are discussed in 140 character tweets and conversation in reality, among the people we really care about and talk to on a daily basis is relegated to petty, nonsense, small talk about the weather or television.

Let me pause here a minute and stand up and say: I am guilty.

I am guilty of perpetuating this nonsense. I have done this with impunity all the while not even  watching as my real social circle shrank and collapsed into oblivion.

So now I’m off of it. My friends know if they want to get a hold of me they need to call or text me directly. If my fans or followers contact me it’s usually through my website or through email. The reality is that the people you know - you don’t know online.

Flash back to social media and we can see that these poor millennials who have lived their entire lives on social media are having an utter melt-down because now they have been exposed to a position that they’ve either never seen before or never taken seriously. And so they retreat into the long tail of their social media where they live in a dream world: the long tail of the electric sheep. They are isolated from their friends as, even when they’re standing side by side, they look only into the hypnotic light of their phone. They’re isolated from people they may otherwise find common ground with online if they hadn’t been trained in the art of knee-jerk reactions the victim Olympics.

They feel like their entire world is falling down around them and the reasoning is words.

We have spent four years utterly encapsulated in the long tail of our social media algorithms. When confronted with reality words feel like actions. And when words feel like actions it is taken upon the self of the offended to respond with actions.

So we see AntiFa. We see wave after wave hate crime hoaxes. We see people who truly believe that they are second class citizens because their media echo chamber has convinced them of their victimhood. We have a generation of people utterly alone and without empathy. If all you can see is your own victimhood you will NEVER empathize with another human being.

The conversation cannot continue on line because the lines have been drawn and tempers will continue to flare - talking with loved ones, friends and family, in the real world is the only way to bring conflict back to reasonable discussion. I am grateful to my wife who proposed the idea of getting off of social media so we could focus on our lives together and though we at the core have the same values, those are expressed through different lenses. If we can all get off the internet for a moment and talk to those around us we could put a chill on this social arms race.

The next time you see a post on social media that 'triggers' you - don't make a comment, make a phone call. Reconnect with why you're friends in the first place.