This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.
College is a scam.
Colleges don’t sell education, but an upper class lifestyle for four years. Like most things in the fiat economy, they bring consumption forward through loans like that car that you can get with no money down or the Jack LaLane Power Juicer you can get for four easy payments of $49.99. Instead of earning money first and then getting what you paid for, college offers four years of hedonistic indulgence which you then have to pay off. What was once an investment has been debased to a consumer good.
At best, colleges offer the exciting prospect of becoming a cog in a corporate machine. They teach rent-seeking skills like political posturing, acceptable narrative regurgitation and if you go to business school, Machiavellian backstabbing. For those lucky enough to climb the status ladder, their hope is to be a Cantillionaire, suckling at the teat of the central bank. They’re auditioning to be celebrity hanger-ons with less glamor.
The Lie Of College
There’s a polite fiction at play that college is a way to find yourself, to mature and to become a productive citizen. Yet all evidence is that the enterprise is a status game, where people who aren’t upper class fake it ’till they make it. These are the people college serves the least and like most fiat institutions, exploits the poor and middle class for the profit of the…
