The college admissions scam has hit front pages, sports pages, entertainment pages, business cable channels and even featured in a few episodes of the generally pro-higher education TV show “The Big Bang Theory.”
Let’s review what has made headlines. First, there is the ostensibly “shocking” revelation that Hollywood mavens of means have been involved in a bribery scheme that has infected not only the college admissions process but has touched the non-revenue sports sector of major universities as well. And by shocking, I really mean predictable, obvious and deliciously ironic.
Meanwhile, more ugly revelations have surfaced this week regarding the revenue sports side of college athletics, involving more bribery among coaches, agents of sneaker companies, and athletes’ families. This is nothing new of course, but it is relevant for two key reasons. First, it’s the intense interest in football and basketball that blinds a lot of otherwise conservative alumni and parents to the far left-wing perversion being pushed on college campuses. Second, it hides the fact that the reptilian academic side of big education more corrupt than the athletic side.
All this is before we get to the fact that economics graduates of prominent universities now favor socialism. Recent polls of young people – recent college students – indicate a strong preference to socialism, coupled with a profound ignorance about what socialism is and does. Among young people who think they favor socialism, only about one in three realize that Venezuela is a socialist nation with vast natural resources that is unraveling before our eyes.
Of course, the poster child for this is currently 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, but let’s not forget the Ivy League credentials of failed public servants such as Tim “Turbo Tax” Geithner, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick and even the secret socialist Barack Obama.
As a quick review, it was Harvard educated Timothy Geithner who was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Harvard educated Barack Obama. It was discovered soon after that Geither made mistakes on his taxes because he couldn’t understand Turbo-Tax.
You can’t make this up.
It gets worse. Harvard educated Raines and Gorelick were appointed by Harvard educated Bill Clinton to run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while Raines and Gorelick were giving each other multi-million-dollar salaries and bonuses, they enabled the malignant Fannie/Freddie monstrosity to take down the entire world economy. They literally got wealthy by ruining the wealth of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Only an Ivy League education can obtain such results.
And then when the college educated media blamed George W. Bush for this disaster, the Yale-educated Bush was not able to explain his way out of the mess, that led to the presidency of Harvard educated Barack Obama.
To bail out Obama from his disastrous economic policies, including Obamacare, the Ivy-educated Fed kept buying assets and easing interest rates, which somewhat hid the truth of this Ivy-inspired economy that was really floundering.
This list is long… “Poison Ivy” and other graduates of prominent institutions who have made stupendous economic mistakes. No wonder Warren Buffet left Wharton for Nebraska after two years – when he recognized that he was smarter than his professors.
Somewhere Mike Rowe must be having a good laugh, counting his millions while purveying the secret magic of “dirty jobs” and enlightening some members of the new generation with insightful and elegant commentaries.
Rush Limbaugh, who spent about an hour on a college campus before revolutionizing the entire news media template and literally saving (for decades) the previously dying AM radio industry, is self-taught on many issues, including many aspects of economics. He noted recently on his talk show that so many millennials get so far in debt to go to college that their earnings are swallowed up for 20 years due to college loan debt. They finally look up and realize that their peers who did not go to college often have a 20 to 25-year head start on accumulating assets.
It doesn’t take a college degree to understand that paradox. In fact, only college educated drones could miss it. While we’re on the topic, just how valuable is a degree in “transgender women’s pottery studies” compared to $300,0000 student loan debt? Perhaps even Tim Geithner can figure that one out.
The truth is that “big education” is a corrupt, massive racket that unfortunately enjoys widespread public support, not to mention seemingly unending public funding fueling self-styled superiority. How is it possible for this 800-pound gorilla to remain invisible for the most part in our national conversation?
In addition to the obsession with big time sports, it’s the social pressures that parents of millennials have put on their children to go to college or face a feared lifetime of failure. The prevailing attitude is that not only is college a necessity, but the “right college” is vital, thus creating a process of getting into the “right schools” from preschool through graduate level education. This creates ubiquitous opportunities for graft and subornation throughout a young person’s first 20-plus years of life.
This becomes a self-fulfilling economy that has no relationship to reality, especially in economics. The right schools lead to the “right jobs” and the “right connections” – yet so few manage to notice that the “right people” are wrong on almost everything count.
With a track record like this, a fair question is: which is the bigger scandal, the pay-to-be-admitted-into-college scam, or the higher educational complex itself?
It is clear that we need to hit the reset button on our entire understanding of what constitutes education.
One example of such a reset are programs is Economic Development Day, sponsored by Duvi Honig of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, in an effort to address current needs of millennials in an emerging marketplace and technological age that’s drastically different than any preceding era. More practical initiatives like this are needed far more than to protect the status quo of pretending that old ivy growing on old bricks in old universities can teach anyone anything.
C. Edmund Wright is a businessman and author of the book WTF and may be contacted by email at: cedmundwright@mac.com
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