The recent arrests of Hollywood parents paying for their kids to get into good colleges highlights what is wrong with higher education these days. We make a college education a bigger deal than it deserves.
We continue to encourage our kids to go to awful colleges and load up on stifling student loan debt, resulting in unfulfilled dreams, when many of these kids need to just get a job or learn a trade.
Access to higher education is important for those who truly want to attend, but we send way too many kids away to college who are unsuited and unprepared for it. They party, and come back indoctrinated, not educated. Many become angry, entitled and virtually unemployable.
Talk to some of these “college kids.” Half think Shariah law is a daytime TV show hosted by a no-nonsense African-American lady judge.
A recent study by Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that only 36 percent of Americans cannot pass a basic citizenship test (74 percent of those 65 and older could, while only 19 percent of 45 and younger could). Educators note that this is the worst score on the citizenship test since 1916, when this country was founded.
That’s the problem. Kids are getting pie-in-the-sky advice and, judging by obesity rates, they are also eating the pie.
Students should prepare for a job, not taking five trips to the Trail of Tears monument. Let them attend more Take Your Children to Work days — unless their parents work in the adult movie business. That’d just be awkward.
John Mulany is right about the misinformation we get as kids. Growing up, I really thought from watching cartoons that quicksand was going to be a bigger problem than it turned out to be. I was not prepared for real-life problems, such as relatives who want to borrow money.
The damage comes by parents pandering to the “9th place trophy kids” who are led to believe: “Just be yourself, great things will happen.” “Just be yourself” is probably the worst advice can give most of these knucklehead kids.
