Many people have commented that Bill Maher is making a lot more sense these days. While he has not exactly jumped on the Trump bandwagon, he is distancing himself further and further from the liberal left. And the results are surprisingly refreshing.
A good example is this clip in which he posits that college has become an outright scam. Watch it all the way through.
Do I agree with Maher on this? Yeah, pretty much.
College’s most overlooked sin
Beyond the out-of-control costs and the fact colleges have become indoctrination factories for a particular point of view, there is another sin higher education commits that is often overlooked. That is, it perpetuates the segregation of students by age.
By the early 1900s, schools in the USA had adopted an assembly line model for education. Unlike the one-room schoolhouses of the past, modern schools practiced segregation. Not by race, but by age. For the first twelve years, students interact solely with kids their own age. College just perpetuates this by another four to six years or more. Students suffer as a result.
Some of us were lucky
I was fortunate in that I had to work all the way through school in order to pay the bills. There were several advantages to this, not the least of which was that I never had any student loan debt.
The biggest advantage of all was the fact I got to interact with adults from a diverse range of ages, backgrounds and points of view on a daily basis. In contrast, my classmates seemed to be living on another planet — one which did little to prepare them for the real world.
In the four decades since I left school, the situation has become worse.
We can do better
According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), fewer than half of full-time college students work while in school. It is a number that has been dropping steadily over the past two decades.
This robs students of important real-world experience and leaves them ill-prepared to deal with life after graduation. In a more ideal world, the college experience would be marked by a gradual transition from full-time school and part-time work to full-time work and part-time school.
University professors like to talk about the importance of diversity, yet the college experience hardly reflects this. To succeed, students need exposure to a greater range of ages, cultures and points of view. Immersion in the workforce can do this.
We also need to be making greater use of eLearning. This provides one of the best ways to control the spiraling costs of a degree. Among the few upsides of COVID was the fact it showed us how little we really need expensive campuses.
The biggest change of all
Perhaps the biggest change we need to make is killing this notion that college is the only path to success. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs never graduated college. Neither did my son, yet his skills as a welder guarantee him lifetime employability and a solid income.
I will be addressing this topic in greater length in future articles. In the meantime, I agree with Maher. We don’t need to be making college free. We need to be making it less necessary.