Dave Smith

This is one of my favorite @ComicDaveSmith clips in a long time, and it's something we should absolutely be talking about more: Academia is a Ponzi scheme and a gov't welfare program that primarily serves to start kids' adult lives off in debt. "If Thomas Sowell's or FA Hayek's economics were followed, all of academia is put out of business. So, shocking that academia hasn't valued them as being really intelligent thinkers. It's directly against their incentives." "Academia is entirely a government program. It's completely artificial. There's no market demand for it...Student loans is a government program....Pick an 18 year-old and walk into a bank and say, 'I want a $200,000 loan,' but for a business, for a house...you'll get laughed out of the bank." "It's unbelievable there's not one college professor who feels a moral obligation on day one to go, 'Hey, I'm teaching you environmental studies, and they're charging you 200 grand for this degree; you should really think about whether this is worth it.'" "College is a multi-trillion dollar program. Where did we take that from? Who did we take that from? What else might we have had if we hadn't done this?" "You've got your kids all going into debt on essentially a welfare program, but who gets the welfare? Not even the kids. The kids just get the debt." On a personal note, I spent six years in higher education. I got a Masters in Computer Science (CS) from one of the best CS schools in the country. It did not take long once I got out into the real world to see how much more impressive programmers are just in the games industry than in academia. All of CS is just chasing private industry and trying to teach their students what those people accomplished. • Unix and C++ were invented at Bell Labs • Java was invented at Sun Microsystems • The GUI was developed at Xerox and put into mass production by Apple • Every single tier 1 ISP that laid the cables to make the internet as you know it possible are private sector businesses I was even studying AI in grad school, and of course the AI breakthrough came out of the private sector when academia was busy fiddling around with dead-end tech demos that would never pass the Turing Test. College is an outdated model from time when that was where you went to find all the books. Government student loan programs need to be ended NOW, and if you're someone who takes part in the hiring process at your company, do what I did and encourage your company to remove college degrees as a prerequisite for applying. This madness must stop. It's turning all of our kids into socialists because they blame the failures of this system on capitalism because that's what their Marxist college professors who've never worked in the real world told them to blame it on.