But tell me how a college professor, who has lived his life in an educational cloister, can be fitted to teach advertising or practical business. Those things belong to a school of real business. They are learned nowhere else.1
– Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising
In this article, I will pick on college professors because most of them are smug, pompous windbags that have never worked a real job. Their answer for curing all of society’s ills is usually “other people’s money,” in the form of Marxism, higher taxes, and larger government. I first heard this thought experiment suggested by Aaron Clarey: if you’re a college student, ask every professor you meet what jobs they held before they became an educator. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that most, if not all, never had a real job. People like to make fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and rightfully so), but at least she was a bartender, not a trust-fund baby or a professor. Most of these professors paid a lot of dues and kissed a lot of college-board butts to become full-time professors. Before they became adjuncts, associates, or even tenured professors, they probably were bartenders and baristas and worked retail to feed themselves while getting multiple useless degrees. But again, how many service-industry workers (other than me) do you know that have the answers? Exactly!
Again, I’m not knocking the service industry. I think everyone should do their time taking orders from people dumber than them. Think of it as forced conscription; rather than handling grenades and AR-15s, you must explain to people why their gluten “sensitivity” could be triggered by cross-contamination because the kitchen only has one fryer. It’s also a great line of work for the slackers, particularly between “Joe jobs” and part-time work. However, most people teaching and indoctrinating our youth have never left the education ecosystem. How can they presume to understand how the real world works? Spoilers: they don’t. Their Marxist musings are utopic fantasy and “how things should be.”
Meanwhile, in the real world, their pie-in-the-sky dreams are just mental masturbation. Imagine paying thousands of dollars to be taught by someone who has never worked a hard day’s labor. Yet, that’s what most college students are doing. As I wrote in Herd Immunity, Societal Deprogramming, most college degrees have one career path: grad school, more loans, becoming professors, and teaching the next generation of college students how to get useless degrees and become professors. In the Post-COVID society, College has devolved into a self-replicating echo chamber.
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What useless degree would be complete without useless prerequisite classes? I understand mandating that students take composition, logic, and political science classes. But some of the courses offered at college in the 21st Century could be learned in one 10-minute YouTube video, not a $600/credit hour semester. So instead, students are forced to take useless classes that have no bearing on their future employment every semester. While doing a quick Google search, I came across a few useless classes/degrees being offered at colleges worldwide:
- David Beckham Studies – Staffordshire University, UK
- Parapsychology – Various
- Ufology (Doctorate coursework) – Melbourne University
- The Phallus – Occidental College
- Queer Musicology – UCLA
- Star Trek – Georgetown University
- Golf Management – University of Birmingham/Florida Gulf Coast University2
It would be easy to mock people with art history, philosophy, and other useless liberal arts and fine arts degrees. Still, I studied history and psychology in school, so I can’t judge. I’m gonna do it anyway, though, because that’s what you signed up for!
Also, I hate to bring up politics, but it does bear mentioning. Things were bad when I was in college, and they’ve only gotten worse. Suppose you’re a conservative, libertarian, or apolitical such as I am. In that case, you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars of someone else’s money for the opportunity to be told your worldview is incorrect. If you’re a white man, you’re paying for the opportunity to be guilted into hating your skin color and phallus. What a privilege! I could stay home and get that kind of brainwashing by watching the news or the latest Marvel show on Disney+. More on that in a different article…
Not only will you be forced to take useless classes taught by leftist professors without real-world knowledge, but you also get to pay for the opportunity. I’m gonna repeat this until it sinks in—you’re PAYING for the PRIVILEGE to be propagandized! It’s getting so bad now that gender studies classes are mandated as part of the general studies credits. If you refuse to take them, they can deny you graduation, meaning all that time spent in school will have been wasted. All because you have a different political ideology or refuse to placate white or penile guilt. Sadly, most college professors are only professors because of what they can bring to the university (research grants-read: money) and not intelligence, ability, or acumen. I’ve seen how stressed my friends and sister were working through their advanced degrees. I decided to quit while I was only $17,000 behind! Of course, the better decision would’ve been to stop after high school, but I digress.
Lest you think I’m making mountains out of molehills regarding college being a political echo chamber, here’s a short list of liberal indoctrination/social justice efforts that have happened on college campuses since I left college and the education industry in 2012:
- Students demanding professors be fired for questioning/not using gender pronouns.3
- Colleges requiring “safe spaces” on campus only fuel intolerant students.4
- College students urging their schools to “disinvite” scheduled speakers due to their inability to tolerate dissenting viewpoints.5
- College students rioting when they don’t get their way.6
- Colleges claiming they are “ending racism” or launching “Anti-racism” initiatives by mandating bias training.7
This isn’t rational discourse or free speech. This is a group of petulant children teaching another group of petulant children to act like entitled crybabies and destroy private property when they don’t get their way. As someone who is apolitical and has zero desire to be preached to, I wouldn’t attend these courses if you paid me, let alone give someone else money.
There is some minute hope on college campuses for alternative thought. College employees formed the “Academic Freedom Alliance,” a group whose aim is to defend free speech among educators.8 As I stated many times, anyone afraid of dissenting thoughts shouldn’t be an educator. You’ll never grow if you can’t handle differing opinions. This type of intellectual challenge and debate should be embraced on college campuses. You don’t have to agree with your professors, colleagues, and fellow students, but trying to get someone fired or silenced for having a different political or religious belief shows a weakness of character.
This article came out at the perfect time. Perhaps there is hope for universities yet?
If you don’t want to be a corporate drone, college is a waste of time. As a white male, expect to be told that you are the enemy in college and then again at your corporate job. Also, expect to work twice as hard, only to be passed up for promotions because of your coworkers’ skin color or genitals. Scott Adams discusses this in his book How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big:
My banking career ended when my boss called me into her office and informed me that the order had come down to stop promoting white males. The press had noticed that senior management was composed almost entirely of white males, and the company need to work harder to achieve something called diversity. No one knew how many years that might take, so I put my resume together and sent it to some of the other big companies in the area…9
If you thought paying for gender studies classes was stupid, get ready to be forced to attend mandatory “corporate diversity and inclusion meetings” to, once again, be told to be less white! I’m lucky because I got to experience this in the service industry and corporate jobs. Expect to be forced to sit in mandatory corporate diversity lectures during work. Another meeting that could’ve been an unread email. If you love being pandered to because of your race or gender, you’ll fit in well in college, as it trains you for more of the same in corporate America. If you’re like me and you’d rather give yourself a fishing-wire vasectomy than be told you have “privilege” for things you can’t control, I’d skip college and figure out how to create skills through other avenues.
One last college myth that needs a double-tap to the brain stem: if you don’t go to college, you can’t have “The College Experience.” Let’s put this one to bed. You don’t need a degree in philosophy and six figures in student loan debt to get drunk, do drugs and bang college girls every weekend. You can do that without a college degree. Plenty of stand-up comedians and actors were doing this before the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the #MeToo movement began. A young man in his late teens and 20s can move to a college town, learn how to talk to people, and still go to all the parties and meet college girls around town. Plus, if you make friends with college-aged guys, you’ll be invited to colleges and parties in different cities and states. Part of “The College Experience” is traveling and meeting other people. When you travel, they don’t ask you for a copy of your transcripts. I don’t know if you know this, but college girls do things like buy groceries, buy coffee, get their nails done, go to stores, and hang out in college towns. People will want to hang out with you if you’re fun. You can have all the fun (and more) if you skip the heavy tuition bill, the social indoctrination, and the 8:00 a.m. calculus course you were never going to attend. Even if the TA is a sexy Asian foreign exchange student, you can meet her in the real world anyway.
If I marketed Herd Immunity correctly, it’s misanthropes and slackers reading this (and a few nosey female coworkers who shall remain nameless). Why the hell do you want to go to parties with people you don’t know and don’t like? Misanthropes don’t enjoy large gatherings, remember? Instead, you can use better strategies, such as meet-up groups to meet college-aged peers. Seth Jared Hymes echoes my sentiments in his book, urging readers that you don’t need $100,000 in student loan debt to make friends:
Some of the dumbest reasons people go to college have nothing to do with jobs or fields of study. You might have heard that college helps with “Socialization.” As if the millions of high schoolers across the country are feral mountain dwellers who have been raised by wolves…
But essentially we are telling our young people, “You need to go into debt for the rest of your lives so you can make friends.
And that’s just stupid.
This is part of the “College Experience” that so many parents romanticize.10
Instead, Hymes urges young people to meet friends holistically through shared hobbies and experiences:
My best friend and business partner Adam and I were roommates for 5 years. I wanted to live in Redondo Beach. I found an ad on Craigslist, moved in, and it turned out we just clicked and both love movies. I’ve found other friends through random interactions and business connections on the internet–Facebook and Instagram.
When Karen C. went to London, she met tons of awesome people her age via Instagram. She didn’t need a degree or “The College Experience” to be social.
People meet at jobs, or through groups with similar interests. My friend Atham is a spelunker–he does cave diving and meets people there. Adam met lifelong friends in an acting class he took in Los Angeles. My friend Kathy and I met because we were both part of an online marketing course.
Students in my Digital Marketing Course meet all the time and have created their own communities and friendships.11
You don’t need school to socialize or to meet people your age, so stop worrying about “The College Experience.” If you do what I advise you to do in Herd Immunity, by the time you are in your mid-to-late twenties, you’ll have the free time to enjoy the fairer sex—including college girls. Let everyone else suffer through Identity Politics 101 and Calculus II. For now, build your skillset to maximize your return on investment in learning and education, which is the goal of learning skills in the first place.
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1 Claude C. Hopkins. 1966. My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising. New York: McGraw Hill, 10.
2 Watt, Katherine. 2008. “Top 10 Useless College Degrees & Classes.” Top Tenz. November 16, 2008. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.toptenz.net/to-10-useless-college-classes-degrees.php
3 McBride, Jason. 2017. “The Pronoun Warrior.” Toronto Life. January 25, 2017. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-battle-gender-neutral-pronouns
4 UChicago Institute of Politics. 2017. “CLIP: Van Jones on Safe Spaces on College Campuses,” February 24, 2017. Accessed May 27, 2021. YouTube. Video, 4:41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zms3EqGbFOk&feature=emb_title
5 Lukianoff, Greg. 2014. “Disinvitation Season, Free Speech, and Unlearning Liberty.” Huffington Post (blog). March 10, 2014. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disinvitation-season- free_b_4936295
6 Iorio, Paul. 2017. “Berkeley’s Milo Riot, Seen From Ground Zero.” Huffington Post (blog). February 2, 2017. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/berkeleys-milo-riot-seen-from-ground- zero_b_5893846ae4b091e06a2b35a6
7 Jimenez, Monica. 2021. “Tufts Anti-Racism Initiative Moves Forward.” TuftsNow. February 17, 2021. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://now.tufts.edu/articles/tufts-anti-racism-initiative-moves-forward
8 Fox and Friends. 2021. “’Academic Freedom Alliance’ Forms to Defend Free Speech Among Educators.” Fox News. March 10, 2021. Accessed September 27, 2021. Video, 3:29. https://video.foxnews.com/v/6238527123001#sp=show-clips
9 Adams, Scott. 2013. How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. New York: Penguin Business, 42.
10 Hymes, Seth Jared. 2013. Skip College for Success: A Liberation and Empowerment Guide for Young Adults to Grow, Not Owe. Illinois: Independent, 322.
11 Ibid., 323.