Wasted: is college worth the time & money? Part 4

    By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc./LMMiami.com

• In the future, we will all be autodidacts.
• Self-taught doctors, surgeons, lawyers.
• It is called Postmodernism and it will not go away.
• Universities will become something akin to driver’s license offices: in the sense that they do NOT teach you to operate a vehicle nor do they ask you how you learned, they just make sure that you know how.
• Scientific research & development might remain as a part of the college equation but at this pace campus life will lose that prestige too.
• See: college campuses have become nurseries for brittle post-adolescents with existential tedium.
• What’s the point of sending our increasingly sheltered and immature children to an even more sheltered place where they will basically spend four years of their lives intoxicating themselves with alcohol, drugs and delivery pizza while racking up enormous amounts of debt in the form of student loans and maxed out credit cards?
• What will they learn other than assorted sexual positions and how to nurse a hangover?
• Mind you, I still believe college is necessary.
• Only not in its current form.
• The learning tools we have at our disposal today will render college obsolete faster than you say student loan.
• Granted, college as we knew it used to challenges one’s inertia, procrastination, beliefs and prejudices.
• Without college, we’d all be locked up in a self-perpetuating echo chamber of confirmation bias.
• A 20 year-old needs to confront grown-ups who force him or her to learn things read books they would’ve never chosen by their own initiative.
• Problem is, college today has become a sandbox for spoiled “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors” (aka SJW) pitching hissy fits about everything around them: from reasonably just causes such as climate change to unbelievable banalities like “cultural appropriation”.
• In this context, the kids who REALLY want to study, get a degree and get on with their lives find themselves surrounded by, and even hostages of, pointless social “activism” and rowdy hordes of political correctness disciplinarians.
• The proverbial thought police.
• Of course, these are just manifestations of a serious reluctance to grow up, as Jordan Peterson, the latest star of right wing lecture circuit would say.
• But we’ll leave this topic for a future column.
• For us Hispanics the current crisis of higher education is, pardon the cliché, both a threat and an opportunity.
• After years and years of struggling to increase the rate of Hispanic college admission and the percentage of Hispanic faculty the paradigm is shifting.
• On the other hand, the new “autodidact” environment will open up many avenues and level the field for minorities &/or lower income folks who want to thrive.
• If we Hispanics can stay away from the siren song of whiny activism, pointless social justice warring, victimization and snowflakism, AND if we manage to overcome our perennial allergy to careers in the fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) the future of our kids looks brighter than ever.

*Part 1: https://hispanicad.comagency/business/wasted-college-education-worth-time-money-part-1
Part 2: https://hispanicad.comagency/business/wasted-college-education-worth-time-money-part-2
Part 3: https://hispanicad.com/agency/business/wasted-college-worth-time-money-part-3