Why Go to College?

The more I think about college, the less important it seems. I did take a lot of various intro classes, and engaged in standard late-night discussions that are supposedly the essence of a modern liberal education, but really most of my learning happened outside my college experience. That is, I learned most of my math, statistics, history and computer knowledge before or after college, and interpersonal skills outside of the structured social functions of my fraternity (AEPi--Sigma Chapter). Sure, I picked up some things in college, but think about it--it was probably the time in my life when I had the most leisure time, because I wasn't learning as much as other periods in my life.

Now that college can easily cost $40k/year, it's reasonable to really look at the benefits more skeptically, as no one presumes that merely being a college grad entitles one to success.

I suggest you go to Academic Earth and see some of their courses. I think what can be taught--physics, math, etc--is taught well, but hardly worth $40k/year. These subjects are straitforward enough to allow a cheaper option that gives you the same result. And for the things that really can't be taught--who knows the right answer?--such as history, political science, and philosophy, it seems like top shelf professors are caricatures of leftist-PC propoganda.

Listening to Yale historians talk about the Civil War and Reconstruction or European History or UCLA professor talk about African American studies, you would get the impression that human civilization has been a sequence of disasters, one horrible injustice following another.

The Kling and Schultz book From Poverty to Prosperity, is much needed here. If a Martian looked at the change in society from 1500 to 2000, I think the growth in wealth, liberty, and art, would be the singular effect. For a young person at a top school today, you will have to learn that on your own time, or in an economic history course (many colleges don't have these, unfortunately). Rather, like the Marxist critique of capitalism, you will learn about all the injustice and inefficiency, and then naively assume that some utopian alternative is eminently feasible if we could only get the cabal of oppressors to stop manipulating the system.