You know how when you park in a pay-parking-lot and buy or eat something from one of the nearby sponsoring stores, you can get your ticket stamped and you don’t have to pay the parking fee?

That’s what a college degree is. That piece of paper with the fake gold seal just says you knew how to jump through the right hoops, not that you know how to do anything real. You’ll be an obedient employee. You won’t make waves. If you can learn the difference between the APA and the MLA style sheets, you can easily figure out which cheek of the boss’s derriere to kiss.

As for bad college teaching, the problem is that most teachers teach using the learning method which they used to get their degrees. If you ended up majoring in math, you were probably good at learning math. (Duh!) That doesn’t mean you’re good at teaching math. Math teachers, in other words, are good at teaching the kind of people who are good at learning math. All the other students are out of luck. Substitute “English,” “Chemistry,” “History” etc. for “Math” and you’ve got the modern university. No problem, though, because you’re only there to get your ticket stamped.

If this sounds too cynical, cheer up. Your college degree is not going to make you very wealthy anyway. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/review/2019/10/15/is-college-still-worth-it-the-new-calculus-of-falling-returns.pdf