jeffinwa

I have been plagued with reoccurring dreams of being in high school over the years which have morphed into dreams of being back in college. Like many who suffer the School Dream I always find that I have one year to go. I am late and/or I have missed a crucial class that might have expedited my graduation. My classes, though dutifully attended by others, are a miserable farce of unnecessary, impractical subjects, yet I must still master these pointless fields in order to matriculate to the next phase of life.

I went to musical college back in the early 1990s. My father paid for it. In hindsight, if I had a brain in my head at the time, I would have walked away from college and saved him tons of money. One of my brothers wisely opted to do two years of community college and then went on to become a waiter, bartender, and eventually a manager of restaurants. He did far better than I did and did not cost my parents a small fortune. To my credit, I do use the skills I got in college as a music arranger and teacher. Not a day goes by that I do not employ at least one aspect of the musicianship my dad paid for in money and I paid for in fourteen hour weekend instrumentation and orchestration homework marathons. Nowadays, nearly all of my incredible music theory skills could be gained with self-motivation and a few free apps such as Earpeggio, Music Tutor, and Ella. The internet is a magnificent learning tool. Those who are good at being their own instructors should exploit this boon while it lasts.

An expensive diversion

We have known for a long time now that college is not necessary. It is estimated that 91% of jobs in the United States do not legally require a college degree, including most jobs in the field of medicine. In my own case, I teach music lessons at a music lesson studio where most of my fellow teachers do not have degrees in music. When I was a member in my local music teachers’ association, some of the presidents of various chapters lacked a music degree. One teacher I worked with extensively for years on various chapter projects had a college degree in textiles. Another completed her masters in English literature.

Teenagers are targeted while still in high school so they will blind themselves to options outside college and its accompanying grifts. Even in my day, college was what you did to extend your adolescence a few more years in hopes of avoiding the crushing, dream-squelching responsibilities of adulthood. College has not been necessary for anything besides the avoidance of being a grown up for a long, long time.

Men go to college in order to get laid and women go in order to get married. The whole higher learning rationale is a fig leaf. I remember making the rounds at parties in my first months at college despite being a consummate nerd who had not been invited to a single party my entire high school career. These events revolved around casual hookups that were the sexual equivalent of Costco sample day. Serial monogamists quickly paired off with The One who inevitably became The Wife or The Husband. Others played the field for the whole time or as long as they were able.

Aside from serving as a sexual sandbox, it was abundantly clear that learning played a distant, second fiddle to the real reason for being in college: extending childhood a few more years, but with the addition of plenty of hot sex. In order to participate, you either needed wealthy parents or huge, predatory loans. In either case, the fantasy and lie we all bought was that we would all be stepping into good jobs that would provide the middle class comforts our parents completely took for granted. All it took was graduation.

Little did we know that the upper middle Bathroom Class had already ascended that ladder and pulled it up after itself when I was starting out in my adult life. It is much worse now. The youth of today have to be literal millionaires if they want to afford a basic suburban house, two kids, and a couple of yearly vacations to Disney or the lake. College is a racket and a grift that hoodwinks the gullible into entire lifetimes of undischargeable debt. Often a person who takes on college debt will sign a contract for a fixed interest rate that later mysteriously changes into variable, ballooning the amount owed and cancelling whatever they paid in, guaranteeing they will be Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill for the rest of this incarnation. It hardly matters that changing the terms of a loan after it is made is a clear breach of contract law — predatory college loan sharks count on the fact that hiring a lawyer and suing the loan company for breach of contract is expensive, especially for those who did the honorable thing and kept their end paid up. They know that those who are already loan slaves will not have the resources to sue them. Besides, by the time the loan slave sues, the original loan company is most likely out of business, its assets hidden and offshored and its profits spent and re-spent by whatever umbrella stand-obsessed trophy wife of a CEO got her finely-manicured hands on it.

They proved him wrong about their ability to engage in civil discourse

The recent assassination of Charlie Kirk was the apex of a sordid pyramid built on the ample wrath produced by half a century of college grift. Whether you are Team Psyop or Team Life Happens, it is clear that Charlie was wrong about the ability of college students to engage in civil discourse. Charlie was an optimist who refused to believe the college students today are midwits or worse who are only ten lost brain cells away (that is one mRNA vaccine or one estradiol shot) from throwing their feces like chimpanzees and hanging themselves in the closet. Don’t let their specialized knowledge fool you: acing standardized tests is not a hallmark of knowledge. They are booksmart coomers who worship video games. Their entire worlds revolve around masturbation of various forms, whether it is literal circle jerks or the mental masturbation of their beloved games where they can be pornime heroes who cannot die. Charlie espoused the genteel values of an era of thinkers. He did not realize he was trying to reason with demon-possessed compulsive masturbators who were so incredibly stupid, they were en route to castrating themselves and thus ending any possibility of normal genital sensation. Nobody involved or adjacent to the trans scene could ever be accused of being overly logical. How smart can anyone be if they don’t understand the difference between male and female? These kids, despite robust health and perfect GPAs, proved time and time again they would rather descend into internet Romper Rooms of cosplay, games, and memes than to assume the dreaded manliness of a clean living space and ownership of intellectual mistakes. To call them scum would be an insult to smegma.

Charlie Kirk’s college events attracted an all-too-common breed of post-intellectual, Infantifa, Looney Troon male who thought that knocking off all the pieces on the chessboard was the same as winning the game. Charlie himself was a college dropout, having taken the harder road of teaching himself how to run a successful business. He was no fan of college despite his efforts to visit them on the debate circuit. He threw his pearls before swine in hopes of reaching the few who were still human in the pig farm.

College makes babies, not literally

Just as a woman reaches her peak fertility, Planned Parenthood swoops in and convinces her to abort a healthy fetus so she can play Fertility Hit or Miss down the road in her thirties and forties. Planned Parenthoods are usually found near college campuses, including the ones that are semi-rural. Those who successfully conceive in their thirties and forties of course risk a baby with horrible defects and disabilities — the better to strip mine the woman and her family of wealth, my dear! College makes abortions. The babies are not conceived. They are adult men and women, trapped in a temporary Neverland that is a LARP of those who can actually afford tuition plus living and commuting expenses of twelve to forty thousand dollars per year. The inevitable piper behind the song is a taskmaster who issues useless degrees in exchange for lifetime indentured slavery in the gig economy, struggling and scraping and living with Mom and Dad until everybody dies and still not being able to afford the family home. Nobody signs up for loan sharks who call, email, sue, and show up at your door, doxxing you to anyone willing to listen or care, and garnishing your wages until you are nothing but the ashes of your former college-educated, pauper self. You wanted to extend childhood for four or five years max and you ended up living with your parents until death did you part.

There is no education here

Though a PhD used to command a modicum of respect, nowadays, the highly educated idiot with a doctorate is more of what you are likely to see as the result of extended college education. Any random upper middle class neighborhood is full of PhD’d “experts” who cannot figure out how to use a lawnmower, cook a nourishing meal, or understand that their electric car is inefficiently powered by coal and other fossil fuels because a great deal of electricity comes from coal. No, Dr. Levenbaum, energy is not generated by the outlets in your home by magic or from wires that come in near the roof; it often originates from a mix of mostly fossil fuels, a bit of hydropower, sometimes nuclear, and sometimes a wind farm or two, but mostly fossil fuels. I once thought about taping signs on some of Naperville’s electric car charging stations that said “Naperville gets 80% of its electricity from coal” but I figured it was not worth wasting the paper or the time. I’m not Charlie Kirk; I don’t have faith in people to be smart or make smart decisions.

Part of the reason there are so many highly degreed fools populating posh suburbs and urban corridors is the dismal state of primary and secondary education. Public school is little more than state funded babysitting these days, offering almost no knowledge of use in exchange for copious property taxes and occupying the bodies of the young for four fifths of the year. For instance, ask your local “gifted” high school senior how to grow salad greens or how to do the simplest 1040 form taxes — chances are they will not know and if they do, they will not have learned either of those things in school. No, the brightest of the bright will have spent fourteen years memorizing trivia. Kids with no chance of ever becoming world leaders will know every detail about the predations of the United Nations, as if that will help them in their futures as Starbucks baristas and Ubereats drivers. Any math that would teach them to get a leg up in life such as how credit cards and mortgages work will be eschewed for total immersion in drawing parabolas and pumping numbers into the Pythagorean theorem. Instead of learning to make a tasty meal from foraged and cheap ingredients, they will munch on Frito Lay products from a vending machine after an in-one-ear-out-the-other spiel on the geography of Machu Picchu.

They will be distracted, amused, and disconnected until they are obedient, comfortably numb automatons who (like Professor Levenbaum) essentially think food comes from the grocery store and electricity from the wires in the sky. Their primary goal in life will be getting enough money to win the game that nobody will admit to playing… when they are not playing actual video games. By getting money, I do not mean earning it. Winning the game of the rat race will entail collecting enough goodies until others take care of all your needs and wants. This outcome will be emotionally divorced from whatever and whoever it exploited to get there.

To become highly educated is to be one of the lucky ones who could afford kicking the can down the road. One of my husband’s highly educated relatives made a lifelong career of amassing degrees while running away from debt. He spent his early manhood in jail for fraud, having been caught for thinking he was the smartest in the room. He fought the law and the law won. Once he got out, he engaged in more legal forms of fraud by going back to school… forever. The loophole he used was that of the Perpetual Student. He was allowed to delay paying his debts as long as he was technically still in school, so he stayed in school until he died. He actually got himself a job as a community college professor despite being semi-retarded. Throughout his adult life, he did not know the difference between you’re and your or there, their, and they’re. His ego was so huge, he did not feel it was important to know these things, even as a college professor in charge of grading papers.

College degrees are merits of extreme specification. They are badges that say to the world “I am very, very good at an impractical, niche skill that almost nobody can use.” My degree in Music Theory is a good example of the above. The world would survive if nobody in it was able to notate sheet music. It is only my ability to combine aural mastery with notation that makes me a rare bridge between the sheet music people and the play by ear people. Music is a bizarre language that I happen to be able to read, write, and speak, but to think it is a practical skill the world needs would be a mistake.

At least my niche skill uplifts the mind and spirit. Compare the plight of someone with a degree in Economics or Gender Studies. To study either one is to waste one’s time and money and potentially the most productive years of one’s life. Even doctors are not immune to the overspecification racket. Instead of graduating with a degree that enables them to heal local populations, doctors are shoehorned into specialties and rabbit hole niches with no way towards the light. A dentist will send you to an ear, nose, and throat specialist if you have chronic mouth infections, and the ear, nose, and throat guy will probably return you to sender because he won’t have a damn clue on how to heal you either. Or maybe he will give you some addictive pain pills. A heart surgeon cannot deliver a baby. Psychiatrists know absolutely nothing about gut health and its relationship to mood and the brain. Your IBS could be ruining your life and your psychiatrist will take a blind shot in the dark by prescribing antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. Ask Jordan Peterson how that worked out for him.

We still live in an era where most have not woken up to the real cost of college, despite the landscape being littered with bankrupt ex-collegiates and an economy falling apart at the seams because of educational grift. In future essays, I will be discussing some ideas I have for those who would walk away from the college system and some ways we might heal the damage that has been inflicted by college culture. I hope you will stay tuned.

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Ogham Readings on Saturdays

The High Cost of College

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

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September 2025

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