Universities are dying.

They have long ceased being the best way to gain knowledge.

More recently, the degrees they confer have ceased being the best way to signal employability; the only exception being jobs that legally require them. (Such jobs are increasingly stodgy, unattractive, bureaucratic, backwards, and subservient to tyrannical governments).

The final leg universities stand on is the mythology of social status. That’s it. That’s what gives them what waning power they have.

I can’t count the number of parents I’ve talked with who recognize that college is one of the worst places to learn and degrees are one of the weakest ways to try to get hired, but who still needlessly bite the bullet and send their kid anyway.

Often, they shackle themselves or their children to tens of thousands in debt along the way. They despise the infantilizing policies on campus and bitter ideas in the classroom. They see the waste, corruption, stupidity, warped worldview, and bad habits cultivated and rewarded by the system.

But they still send their kids.

Why?

Because they value the decaying social status indicator of a degree. They want a shortcut to communicate to the world that they are good parents and their kids are better than most.

Even when they know the college experience is not good for their kids, many go through with it because they panic. They don’t know how to face other parents who ask what their kids are doing. They don’t know how to deal with the social expectation among the masses that college is somehow respectable.

I can think of few things less respectable than unthinkingly going into debt to spend half a decade drinking and begrudgingly completing meaningless assignments for professors detached from the world all so you can emerge with a piece of paper that does nothing to help you start a career and mindsets that make success harder.

This doesn’t mean it’s not possible for the college experience to be good or valuable or any of those things. The point is, almost no one seriously analyzes it. Almost no one sets out specific goals, examines the various ways to achieve them, and compares college to the relevant alternatives. Because only college confers the social praise of the self-appointed “important people”.

The priests of our cultural religion teach that you are not important without a degree. It’s the equivalent of a blue checkmark on Twitter. A self-serious symbol that turns out to be a better indicator of who is a fool or apologist for tyrants than who’s a serious person.

As easy as it is to see the foolishness of university degrees as a status symbol from a distance, the spell the priests have cast over the past half century remains powerful. Even for those who should know better.

A college degree does not make you serious, important, or special in any way. It only proves that you were willing to follow the crowd. A dangerous prospect, especially lately.

https://fee.org/articles/the-last-leg-un...-is-collapsing/

I have a nephew in Austin who chose to not attend college and became an entrepreneur without the degree. He is only 38 and his businesses are likely worth over $40 million now and growing.