AM4 is considering his options:
Reading your columns and blogs as a high school student has definitely opened up my eyes to thinking and true reason, and not the atheistic and immoral “thinking” that everyone else around me uses. So, I find myself, a senior and wondering, what would you recommend that a student should look for in a college? I’m a Christian and I’m interested in history or economics, since both fields appeal to me. I just want to go to college and learn and be educated and rise above the muck that seems to be post-Vietnam Western Society.
AM4 must first understand that one does not go to college to learn or be educated, much less rise above the post-modern muck. Indeed, it is where one goes to immerse oneself in it. The modern university provides three things:
1. A four-year immersion in left-wing, secularist propaganda.
2. Preparation for the post-graduate studies of professional technocrats. (optional)
3. The Ticket.
The Ticket is one’s pass into the white collar salaried ranks. The value of one’s ticket depends upon the brand name, of course, but that’s all it provides. In fact, the average non-technocratic graduate of Harvard is probably less well-educated than the average home-schooled junior from a traditional liberal arts perspective.
The Ticket aside, experience and connections trump degrees. So, I recommend arranging for the acquisition of a discount brand-name ticket – something like the Harvard extensions or some other big name equivalent – combined with pursuing internships in the field of your interest. Economics or history, one can study on one’s own to greater effect than gets at university… yesterday I picked up a forty-page paper entitled “Condottieri and City-State” that I wrote my senior year in college and was embarrassed by its callowness. Having a friend hold you accountable to finishing your readings in Gibbon or Mises or Schumpeter will substitute for a professor very nicely indeed and it will cost substantially less.
The reality is that once you get that first job, no one will ever ask where you went to school again, and unless you happen to be one of those insufferable losers whose life will be forever defined by acceptance to a school with a reputation, you won’t think twice about it either. In the real world, success is defined by either results or political machinations, not expensive pieces of paper.