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.

For most jobs in America a bachelor’s degree is not necessary. This is not only true of coding or construction or any of the trades we tend to focus on in this conversation, the sort of work where the only thing that really matters is tangible output. It’s also true of almost all of our highest paying jobs, including especially entrepreneurship, a point we seem to grasp, as we enshrine in our cultural mythology the stories of dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, yet reject in high school guidance offices across the country, where some of the most powerful middle managers alive insist to our nation’s teenagers that the only options that exist in this world are college or McDonalds. But it is especially true that a master’s degree in any of the liberal arts provides no meaningful path to wealth, including a degree in the sciences, where formal schooling is a necessary cost of entry to most important subfields but tends almost never to translate into meaningful earning (a separate enormous problem, and subject for another wire). Then, among master’s degrees there is a terrifying sublevel in our basement of “academic” horrors: the MFA, a master’s in fine arts, is a woodland witch’s Gingerbread House from Hell for optimistic, creative young people with no mentors to guide them away from the danger.

The promise of something like Columbia University’s film program is, if not explicitly concluding your degree with a big industry gig, a network of people who will help you achieve your goals. But in practice, degrees in the fine arts tend to look something like this:

And this:

And finally this:

The explosive Wall Street Journal piece on Columbia’s master’s degree in poverty touched on a separate graduate program for publishing out of New York University, which also echoes something strangely personal. I started my career in books. After I was mercifully — again, by the grace of God — rejected from Columbia, I briefly taught English abroad before I came home and landed an entry-level job at Penguin. The pay was around $30,000 dollars a year. After rent, meager weakly groceries consisting of frozen vegetables, eggs, and peanut butter, I could not even afford new sneakers. I was happy, but I was barely getting by, and it was under these financial conditions I first heard about the new trend in publishing programs out of elite universities. An advanced degree tacitly offering my job as its brass ring, a best-case scenario landing graduates work as an editorial assistant in an already stagnant, dying industry? It made no sense. Who could possibly afford to take on so much debt in exchange for even the best-case promise of so little? At the time, I didn’t believe the higher education system could be as bad as it seemed. I was still naively positive about the motivations of most people, and of the institution of college. I simply didn’t think it possible a system in place ostensibly to help young people could have existed for any other reason than to help young people. Then, I grew up.

Let’s look at the system in place.

Last year, in Bad Education, I traced our student debt crisis back to George Bush the Second’s “disastrous, Orwellian ‘Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act,’ which exempts student loans from discharge.” I should here further note the government’s push against discharging student loan debt in bankruptcy has been entirely bi-partisan, and began in 1976, which is to say we have admittedly been building this prison for a while, and there’s blame enough for everyone (especially everyone over the age of fifty). In any case, I offered a non-partisan solution in three parts:

1. Make all student loan debt assumed (to the current year only) 100% tax deductible, and retroactively to get the country on board.

1. Remove all present barriers to discharging student loan debt in bankruptcy.

1. Abolish the institution of Federal student loans.

My thinking here was this would put people with some conceivable means to pay their debt on a path to recovery, provide those with no means to pay their debt an acceptable exit, and force private lenders to actually assess the ability of any future students to pay back their debt. As the vast majority of Americans cannot presently afford college, colleges under the new system would be forced to slash the cost of tuition. The worst colleges, which provide very little value in terms of education, and practically no value, or even negative value, in terms of signaling and network, would be forced to close.

But wait, wouldn’t this mean less people would end up enrolling in a four-year degree program? Yes, thank God, and more on that in a moment.

I still think my above solution is mostly correct, but a few months ago the Wall Street Journal did a better job with the history of our student debt crisis. First, there was the shift from private to public lending. Then came the erosion of caps on lending. Now, public lending for a “public good” means everyone is included in our academic house of horrors, including everyone who can’t pay, and with the obvious consequence of removing caps on lending while removing a student’s ability to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy — which is to say an obviously inevitable skyrocketing cost of tuition, with no ceiling in sight — “everyone who can’t pay” includes just about everyone. Last year, I missed our most insurmountable obstacle. By the mid-2000s, also under Bush, we signed into existence the institution of Grad PLUS loans. Students could now go back to school for mostly-worthless advanced degrees to take on even more federal debt they had no meaningful hope of repaying, all in the hopes of securing a job to pay back a previous debt they had no meaningful hope of repaying. But the people responsible for the system were not actually interested in job prospects for the youth of the nation. The Journal reports:

“A key motive for letting graduate students borrow unlimited amounts was to use the projected profits from such lending to reduce federal deficits, said two congressional aides who helped draft the legislation.”

The government isn’t fixing this problem because the government is making money off of this problem. Our national student loan debt, now around 1.6 trillion dollars, is referred to as our loan “portfolio.” Student misery is a federal asset.

There are interesting alternatives to higher education. Startup accelerators like Y Combinator and education programs like the On Deck fellowship provide entrepreneurs with a network, for example, which is the only thing anyone ever needed from an MBA. Rather than crippling them for life with an insurmountable student debt, companies like Lambda school, a boot camp for coding, take a percentage of a graduate’s earnings for 24 months after placing them in an actually-valuable new career. Companies like On Deck and Lambda could theoretically scale to cover all manner of things outside of tech, from mechanical work and cosmetology to architecture and media. Here, On Deck is already experimenting. But it’s early days for all of these companies, which are still mostly focused on tech, and none of these programs will ever be able to address the pro-debt government system currently impacting 44.7 million Americans, or our highest-level problem: a culture that valorizes snake oil academics as beyond critique.

College degrees are not a moral good, college degrees are an extremely expensive consumer good. Many degrees, including the vast majority of masters degrees in the liberal arts, and every single MFA, are little more than four-year Prada bags. Best case, they introduce us to people who can help us achieve our goals, but in this regard most of them fail. Expensive degrees also provide a class signal people without class advantage can pay to stamp on resumes. But I for one would like to live in a world where the practice of stamping class signals on resumes is frowned upon, and as long as we’re acknowledging network is important surely we can think of better ways, for far less money, to introduce smart young people to other smart young people. There’s probably no future system the Prince Anand’s of the world won’t be able to game, but we should at least stop pretending our present system is healthy for anyone other than the Prince Anands of our world.

Our political system, and this entire system of debt, is shaped by our culture, and it’s long since time for a new cultural sensibility concerning higher education. Long story short: college is a scam. Adjust your conception of the world accordingly.

-SOLANA