If you are a Millennial or a Gen Z, things aren’t going all that well:

• Half of all recent college graduates are under employed or unemployed.
• As of 2016 the average student loan debt is $37,000.
• A record 25% of minimum wage jobs are held by college grads.
• Almost 40% of 18-34 year olds live with their parents or relatives—more than live with their spouses or partners.
• Tuition is up 200% in the last twenty years, and wages, if you can find a job, are flat.

The movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” came out in 1956 when I was fifteen. Emotionless, alien clones took over the brains of the citizens of a small town—not surprisingly this was in California. It scared the bejesus out of me.

I have some bad news. If you had seen the original version of the ending of the movie, as I did, you would know that the “body snatchers” are still here–they have just mutated.

Colin McGinn writing for “The Stone,” explains “brain snatching” memes:

“A meme spreads like a virus from one mind to another, duplicating itself, colonizing new minds. Once inside our heads, memes can vary from mild mental nuisance to dangerous ideology. In modern life, we are immersed in memes — jingles, catchphrases, fads, fashions, crazes, religions, ideologies, mannerisms and accents. They spread by imitation and natural credulity, exploiting the receptivity of the human mind to new information and influence, forged in childhood.

Memes are like computer viruses — they trade on the architecture of the system to insert themselves into the software. Once inside they can vary from mild mental nuisance to dangerous ideology. In some respects they work like a drug: They trigger reactions in our brains that take over our minds.”

Your brains have all been invaded with the “College-Mania” meme. I understand that it is hard to “get your arms around” this idea. Fish do not know that they are wet, or even that they live in water, until they are “out of it.”

I’ll describe another mania to help explain. If you take a college course in Economics, you will probably read the story of the first financial bubble—Tulip-Mania:

The tulip was brought to Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century from the Ottoman Empire. (Tulips had enjoyed a “royal” status in Turkey. They had become highly cultivated blooms, developed for the pleasure of the Sultan Suleiman I (1494-1566) and his entourage.) Tulips became THE status symbol of Holland’s upper classes as they competed for the rarest bulbs. This led to the first, and one of the most famous, financial market bubbles of all time.

In Holland in the early 1600’s speculation drove the value of tulip bulbs to extravagant heights. At the peak of the market the rarest tulip bulbs traded for as much as six times the average person’s annual salary.

By 1636 tulip bulbs were being traded on the stock exchanges of Dutch towns and cities, encouraging all members of society to speculate in the markets. Many people traded or sold possessions to participate in the tulip market mania. People mortgaged whatever they could to raise cash to trade tulip bulbs. In 1633, a farmhouse changed hands for three tulip bulbs. The market top came in the winter of 1636-37 when a single tulip bulb, left along with seventy other tulip bulbs as the only inheritance of seven orphans, sold for 5,200 guilders. Like any bubble, it all came to an end. Panic selling set in with prices dropping precipitously. Within two weeks tulip bulbs traded for 1% of what they had at the top–leaving many people in financial ruin.

Can you see the parallels? Excessive borrowing. Frenzied demand. Speculation. Financial ruin.

In his book, “Another Way To Win,” Dr. Kenneth Gray coined the term “one way to win.” He described the OWTW strategy as being widely followed in the US:

• Graduate from high school.
• Matriculate at a four-year college.
• Graduate with a degree in anything.
• Become employed in a professional job.

 

“One Way To Win” became such a widely accepted blueprint for achieving middle-class prosperity or better because it dependably worked in the past.

It worked for me fifty years ago. I graduated with a “nothing” degree and was employed by a well-known Fortune 100 company that is still a Fortune 100 company today. My career was “off and running.”

The problem is that OWTW doesn’t work anymore. Using national statistics Dr. Gray, explained the math of “one way to win.” The few people, mostly academics, who read his book were dumbfounded to learn that only 10% graduate college and get a well-paying job. (This corresponds with the Department of Labor data that shows only one in four who matriculate at a four-year college graduate and get a well-paying job.)

There are lots of reasons:

• When I graduated you could have described the situation as college grads are “as scarce as hen’s teeth.” Today college grads are “a dime a dozen.”
• In post-WW II America our economy was booming while the economies of many European and Asian countries were–only slowly–being rebuilt. Today post-Great Recession of 2008 we are slogging through the longest and slowest recovery since the Great Depression. In the last nine years we haven’t seen one year of 3% GDP growth.
• College used to be cheap. My tuition was $360–three week’s work at $3 per hour vs twenty-five week’s work at $10 per hour today. Today there is little or no return on investment for many degrees.
• Student loan debt is epidemic. Many students have graduated and gotten good jobs, but are financially crippled by student loan debt.
• The quality of the education has deteriorated. Only fifteen percent of prospective think college grads are prepared for the workforce.
• The world is just moving too damn fast—college curriculums can’t keep up. Google’s Ray Kurzweil is most commonly associated with the term, “Singularity.” I’m old-school. John von Neumann (1903-1957) was a rare genius who made major contributions to a vast range of fields such as set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. His definition of “Singularity” was, “the moment beyond which technological progress will become incomprehensively rapid and complicated.”

Now try to step “out of it”–the “College-Mania” meme. Colleges get paid whether or not you learn anything, graduate, get a job, or go broke in the process. Despite all “the messaging” you have been subjected to “going to college” is a speculation—with poor odds.

Part II is entitled, “How to Improve Your Odds in the College Lottery.”