Back in 2010, I wrote that college was the most successful scam in the world.
At the time, that might have sounded a little extreme, like something you’d say when you’re frustrated and then walk back later. To be fair, that would describe most of my old articles.
But here we are over a decade later, and if anything, it feels like I undersold it.
Crypto may have come along and grabbed headlines as the new flashy scam of the moment, but college never went anywhere. It’s still sitting there, quietly running the same racket it’s been running for decades, just with higher prices and more people sucked into it.
The model is actually pretty damn simple when you strip away all the prestige and marketing. They’ve convinced millions of people that they have to go, that there’s no other real path to success, and that if they don’t get a degree, they’re basically screwed. Then they get them to sign up for massive loans at 18 years old, before they have any real understanding of long-term finances, interest, or what kind of job they’ll even want in four years. After that, they’re sent out into the world with a piece of paper, a pile of debt, and the hope it somehow works out. That sounds less like education and more like a business model.
College loans are one of the biggest and most predatory rackets in modern history.
These aren’t small, manageable debts. These are humongous financial burdens handed to people who were legally adults for about five minutes. Interest stacks up, payments barely touch the principal, and people end up paying back far more than they borrowed over decades. You can defer them, you can try to refinance, but the reality is a lot of people are just stuck with them. I wasn’t a fan of Joe Biden, but one of the few things he tried to push that actually made sense was student loan forgiveness, and even that got dragged through the mud and stripped down to the point where it barely made a dent. That should tell you how protected this system really is.
Let’s ask the obvious question here: what are you actually getting in return for all this debt? Because it used to be that a college degree meant something. It set you apart and opened doors. Now it barely moves the needle for a huge portion of the workforce. We spent decades telling everyone that college was the only path to success, so everyone went, and now a bachelor’s degree is basically the new high school diploma. It doesn’t make you stand out anymore. It just means you’re not immediately filtered out.
At the same time, the price of getting that now-required “illustrious” credential keeps climbing. Tuition alone is enough to make you stop and go, “Are you serious?” but it doesn’t end there. You’ve also got the books, the fees, the housing, and the meal plans. It’s an avalanche of bullshit. They’ve got all these extra costs stacked on top, it’s almost like they’re playing a game with us. Are they trying to see how far they can push it before people snap? You’re getting fucked from every direction, and somehow this is all accepted as normal. You’re not paying for an education so much as you’re getting shaken down in a very polite, institutional way.
And while you’re paying all that money, what are you actually experiencing in the classroom? Ideally, you’d be getting practical knowledge from people who know their field, and sometimes you do. But a lot of times, you’re sitting there listening to a professor who thinks their class is a platform for their personal political views.
To be clear, this isn’t just one side doing it. It’s both. Left, right, doesn’t matter. During my brief stint in community college, I had a self-professed “ultra-conservative” political science professor who gave me Fs on papers because he felt my views were too left-leaning. My English professor was a staunch liberal feminist who often derailed class to complain about George W. Bush. A lecture about Dubya. In a fucking English class.
I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you’re on. If I’m paying thousands of dollars for a class, I don’t want your campaign speech. Teach the material. That’s literally the job.
Even if you manage to avoid all that bullshit and actually take your education seriously, there’s still no guarantee it’s going to pay off. You can study your ass off, get good grades, do everything you’re supposed to do, and then graduate into a job market where a huge portion of hiring still comes down to who you know. Things like family connections, social circles, and referrals. You can put in years of effort and still lose out to someone whose dad knows the hiring manager. So what exactly were you paying for all that time?
I once applied for a mailroom job. It wasn’t anything glamorous, just sorting mail in an office for about twelve dollars an hour. I was willing to do anything to get out of my miserable supermarket deli job.
They told me I needed a college degree.
Think about that for a second. A degree. For sorting mail. Are you serious? At that point it’s no longer about qualifications, it’s just companies using degrees as a lazy filter because they can get away with it, and because the system has convinced everyone that this is normal.
It gets even more ridiculous when you start looking at higher-level postings. You’ll see jobs asking for master’s degrees and offering fifteen dollars an hour. In what world does that make sense? Who is that job even for? You’re asking someone to invest six years of their life and take on massive debt just to make barely above minimum wage. Even Aldi pays their employees more. That’s beyond insulting, it’s delusional.
Then you hit the oversaturation problem. Unless you went into a very specific, high-demand field, you’re now competing with a massive pool of people who all have the same degree, same credentials, and same expectations. You paid a fortune to stand in a very long, crowded line.
And let’s kill another myth while we’re at it, because I see people make this assumption way too much.
Having a degree does NOT mean you’re smart.
Some of the dumbest, most clueless people I’ve ever met had degrees hanging on their walls.
I worked in medical manufacturing for years. Some of the specialists, the ones who saw the patients, were great. But a lot of them had zero awareness, no common sense, and no ability to function outside of what they memorized. They were idiots. Book smart doesn’t mean capable, and it definitely doesn’t mean competent.
For a while, trade school was a valid alternative to traditional higher education. It was cheaper, faster, more practical, and it led directly to jobs that were in demand. You’d learn a valuable skill and go to work, while skipping the debt spiral. That worked for a bit. But then, just like everything else, it started getting flooded. More people pushed into it, prices started creeping up, and now even that path is getting more competitive and more expensive than it used to be.
This happens every single time. We find a path that works, we push everyone into it, we inflate the cost, we dilute the value, and before long, it turns into the same bloated system it was supposed to replace.
Look, if you’re going into something specialized like medicine, engineering, or certain sciences, then yeah, college makes sense. You need that higher education and specialized training. But for a huge percentage of people, college isn’t really about education anymore. It’s just the default option. It’s the thing you’re expected to do without ever stopping to ask if it actually makes sense for you.
Go into debt pursuing a degree, then hope it pays off. And when it doesn’t, somehow it’s your fault for picking the wrong major, or not networking enough, or not trying hard enough.
At some point we have to stop pretending this is just a few bad outcomes here and there. This is exactly how the whole thing is designed to operate.
The system isn’t broken, it’s a predatory racket.
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