We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

You don't get coursework for a doctoral. That's not how that works. You write a research paper and have peers review it.

What the hell is writing this crap? It's not somebody going through a doctoral program in teaching that's for sure...

we just used to subsidize it more. When we were kids the government paid 70% of tuition, most of it was money given directly to the colleges who passed that money on to you and me via lower cost tuition.

In the early 2000s Bush Jr and the Republican party slashed those subsidies, which is why the cost shot up. It's got nothing to do with administrative costs or fancy dorms (the dorms literally are paid for by rent paid by students, I know, I put my kid in one of the prison style dorms in college because the nice ones were too pricey).

As usual we're all being lied to.

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These are canaries in the coal mine for the collapsing economy. There's a ton of money in Wall Street chasing meme stocks and trying to extract value without offering it. But they can only survive while the economy at large does and can absorb their losses.

When the broader economy collapses various ponzi schemes go with it. Usually we prosecute the crooks and clean things up a bit, but I don't think anyone is expecting that this cycle.

A six-figure income today is enough to rent a decent apartment and maintain a okayish car.

I can tell you're an old man because you say six figure income when six figures isn't a lot of money.

I saw a joke that has really stuck with me, it's a wonderful Life is a timeless movie because it has the the line "do you know how long it takes a man to save $5,000"

Basically we have been screwing over the kids and they're feeling it. Pretty soon they're going to take away old people healthcare and social security. If only out of spite

Yeah you can read the studies but basically jobs that don't involve a college degree require that you build up over time to a higher income and when you lose those jobs you're starting over because without that degree employers do not value your experience.

Furthermore college educated employees tend to be more productive because they are not doing the work of one person but instead building out systems that due to work of multiple people. In the cases where they are doing individual work it's typically very high skilled specialized work which limits the number of people who can do it and competitive forces kick in keeping their wages high and keeping them employed longer.

Basically think of it like this. In the old days you didn't need any school you just worked the fields. Then we started to automate farming and improve that so we started to have to educate people up to about third or fourth grades so they can work factories which were much more efficient and productive. Then we started to automate those jobs so we started to require high School level education in order to maintain the kind of productivity we demand from workers. Now we've automated most of the jobs involving a high school education so that if you want to earn a living you need a college education.

Basically we demand increased productivity from workers every year and the only way to get that is with more education for more advanced workers.

The monarchy was restored and the only reason it eventually fell is that the merchant class overtook monarchies as the ruling elite.

We basically traded one set of Masters for another.

Violent revolutions don't really work because people who are good at violence don't usually give up power and will set themselves up with power following the violence.

I'm not sure what the solution is but it's not going to be a revolution. I don't think we actually have a solution and I think we are eventually going to trigger world war III and hand the launch codes to religious lunatics but assuming we don't do that it's going to be slow steady progress through education.

Studies still clearly show that you will earn more money and have a more stable career regardless of the major you pick.

Everything is going to shit so there are no guarantees like there was for the boomers. Nobody is going to build you a house with government money like they did for the boomers.

But if we are talking about probabilities you should still go to school.

A whole bunch of very rich assholes want you to think that you don't have any use for an education because they are tired of paying for it and because they don't want you to learn critical thinking skills. That's why you get at least two stories a week attacking education in your feed.

Keep in mind those wealthy elites think you're too stupid to figure that out. It's up to you whether you want to prove them right or not.

I don't do anything that sophisticated and I have to admit even I noticed the performance difference between OpenOffice calc and Excel...

I suspect that is because Microsoft is withholding software libraries and techniques from the open Office team which would very much be in antitrust violation but we don't enforce those laws so that's kind of a moot point.

I cannot imagine what it would be like using OpenOffice for one of those really really huge spreadsheets that are basically poorly implemented databases. And I know we all just want to say don't do that but it fills a need that a lot of businesses have.

As it's actively killed its competitors. Antitrust violations are a bitch.

Want better software? Vote for politicians who will enforce antitrust law.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee can say Merry Christmas now so I guess Windows 11 was worth the trade.

At least they are installing renewables as fast as they can.

With the fact that arrests have dropped from 44,000 per year to about 11,000 per year because so many federal law enforcement agents have been taken off other beats and put on immigration enforcement....

Seriously look it up. If we had a functional media it would be much bigger news. Most of the Democrats sucks so hard in messaging...

What if, and I'm just spitballing here, the news media barely covered this and certainly didn't cover the corruption angle at all because the news media is now completely owned by billionaires like something like literally 90% of the news media is owned by billionaires.

So almost nobody hears about this and then the news cycle eats the attention of anyone who does and we all just move on and forget about it. Does that work for you?

In project 2025 they call it shock and awe. Everything is a distraction from the previous terrible thing Trump did and everything Trump does next is a distraction from whatever he's doing at the time. Meanwhile the economy is continuously collapsing due to mismanagement so you're too busy trying to keep your head above water to care about anything else.

Then you mix in a little voter suppression and the fact that a billionaire Trump sycophant just bought the company that controls all of our voting machines and maybe do a few hundred billion dollars of propaganda right before the election and Bob's your uncle Trump gets a third term or at least JD Vance gets his term.

Then we had 25% unemployment, world war III takes off and goes nuclear and we Fermi paradox ourselves. I don't think the billionaires are planning on that last one but I don't think they are thinking any of this through either. They're just too busy trying to set themselves up as feudal Kings.

This is conservative/right wing agitprop clickbait bullshit of the absolute lowest quality.

no, social media is not creating debt laden people low wages and monopolies raising prices is.

Fuck what a particularly nasty piece of clickbait. But you got me I clicked it and I commented so you win I guess.

When the species of super intelligent raccoons or beavers take over from us after we drive ourselves to Extinction through sheer stupidity I wonder what they will think of this crap.