College is the path to upward mobility jk. I like to believe I’m responsible for my own life, and I’m proud of what I’ve built. Through childhood, my parents existed somewhere between the working and the middle class. They provided me with stability, love, and encouragement, the only unfair advantages in this world beyond my incredibly good looks I’m willing to own. From that base of stability, love, and encouragement I built my life. Still, luck has also played a role in my success, or providence perhaps — God, I believe, but you can call it what you will — and no single act of God more greatly benefited my life than being rejected from Columbia University’s film program, which I naively applied to at age 21 as a person with big dreams who wasn’t rich. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported graduates of Columbia’s film program had the highest median debt, at $181,000 dollars, compared with earnings, at less than $30,000 dollars, of any master’s program in the country. With no way to manage the interest let alone the principal, most Columbia film graduates with no family wealth will be financially crippled through what should be their most productive professional years, and probably for the rest of their lives. The third act of La La Land this is not, and Columbia’s program is not unique. Colleges around the country, and especially graduate schools, are destroying the lives of young people. Product both of a pyramid-scheming academic class and bi-partisan commitment from the United States government, the problem is genuinely systemic.

My suggestion is we burn this system to the ground.

I grew up in the middle of No One Cares, New Jersey with a lot of huge goals and no idea how to achieve them, a beginning not at all unique among Americans raised beyond the tiny world of legitimate class advantage that exists in this country — the world of men like Anand Giridharadas, for example, who is presently consumed by the greatest injustice of our time: a few idealistic billionaires aiding the ongoing miracle of human spaceflight. Anand is a man who manages the guilt he feels for his extremely rare unfair advantages by projecting a sense of these advantages onto the very concept of success in this country, a dangerous fallacy I wrote about last year in Gilded Rage (jump down to part two for a primer on the grift). But back in reality, for the rest of us not gifted with a well-connected family of incredible wealth that can hand us our dreams on a gilded platter, there is the youthful question of how to become our future selves, the critical first step to becoming. A beautiful and important question to be sure, it is also a vulnerability easily exploited by scam artists selling snake oil. For whatever you want to become, we’re led to believe, there’s a degree. But no one in any position of power or success believes this is actually true. It is just a lie.