College: An Expensive Four Years of Bitter Emasculation – and Why Many Men Should Still Go

There are a lot of men deciding not to go to college these days. That doesn’t mean that they are lazy or uninterested in academic pursuits, many men have some pretty logical reasons to not go to college. Some reasons are purely economic, meaning that men can’t, or don’t think they can afford college. Others hear about the state of liberal arts education in America and decide they don’t need to take required women’s studies classes for four years in order to be unemployable. Some men have read about the declining value of a bachelor’s degree in the marketplace and (smartly) decide their money and time might be better spent elsewhere. Many would argue that the modern college experience is simply to feminized to even appeal to most men. All of these are actually good reasons not to go to college.

The thing is, I’m not writing this article to convince future manly men to avoid higher education. I actually think that more men should go to college. What men shouldn’t do is look at the experience the same way their parents did. At some point in the 60’s or 70’s, some geniuses in Washington D.C. decided that everyone should go to college. Ever since then, statists have been subsidizing the living shit out of the “four-year-liberal-arts experience” through direct subsidies to colleges, student grants, or artificially cheap student loans. This has incentivized far too many people to take a four year vacation from life and collect thousands of dollars of debt for an experience they don’t actually value. All this dead weight has led to a great deal more mediocrity and liver damage than their ought to be at our “institutions of higher learning”. All of these factors have turned too many colleges into boring feminized re-education camps where the 1960’s will never die. Sounds horrible, right? Well, it’s not nearly as bad as you might think.

The most important thing men need to realize about college is that it is a product. College isn’t a universal rite of passage for people who want to be “middle class” (whatever the fuck that means), it’s something you spend your money on in hopes that the benefits will outweigh the costs. It is a very basic consumer transaction. College isn’t a service however, you don’t just pay your money and get educated in the same way you might pay $40 and get a handjob at the local Asian massage parlor. The value you get out of college has everything to do with (to abuse a cliche) what you put into it. Here’s the thing… for as much as you might read about shitty colleges, education bubbles, and education inflation, I still think there is a great deal of value to be squeezed out of an American college education.

This chart was stolen from The Economist

One thing that men don’t talk about often enough is the sheer variety of knowledge and expertise that is available to your average American university student. Sure, you can skate through most of your course work taking classes for retards and eating Hot Pockets, but you could also choose to challenge yourself. Put some work in! Instead of taking a generic class like “British Lit 102” for an English credit, take a 300 or 400 level class about Beowulf that requires a lot of writing… you’ll get a manlier education that way. Remember, a little hard work never made anyone (who wasn’t French) unhappy. For every waste-of-time “womyn’s studies” class there are dozens of good classes in history, literature, biology, math, geology, and music theory… all taught by knowledgeable people who actually know their subject and have an interest in educating you. If you do go to college, dig in, and follow you interests.

Once you find a few core interests, challenge yourself with the hardest and most demanding classes they will let you take on the subject. Don’t have a pre-req for a class you want to take? Sign up for it anyway and talk to the professor on the first day of class. If you come across as smart and motivated, you can usually bend the rules a little. It is all very expensive, but the value you can extract from the experience is only limited by the amount of work you are willing to put in.

People who complain constantly about nepotism are usually folks with no friends. It might seem wrong to talk about the “value” of friends in economic terms, but this is The Hall of Manly Excellence and we try not to wring our hands about putting prices on people. Trust me, friends have value. I’ve personally been through a fairly standard 4-year university experience, and I can say for a fact that the social aspects of college are a close second in importance and value to classwork and learning. A network of close college friends will filter out across the region, country, or world. The personal and potential economic value of that friend network is almost immeasurable. Getting a job out of college can be challenging but I can tell you one thing: You know that guy who showed up the very first day in the dorms being the nicest, most outgoing, hardest working, most generous guy on the floor and stayed that way for four years? That guy has a job.

One of the truly questionable things about your college diploma is it’s value in getting a decent job straight out of school. The first step to making yourself more marketable is to major in something other than Sociology. All joking aside, plenty of men don’t think enough about their future in the last year or two of school. You should not expect a decent job right away… those need to be earned. With that said, businesses do come begging to colleges for intelligent highly motivated cheap labor. An internship is a great opportunity to learn more about your chosen profession, but it’s also an amazing way to get a foot in the door with a quality organization.

Remember when I talked about the value of friends? Well, you don’t just make them in college. The goals of any internship should be to make friends, learn about your chosen industry, and most importantly… to work hard at making yourself indispensable to whatever unit or team you are a part of. If they can’t imagine things running well without you at the end of your internship… they will most likely hire you. Even if they don’t hire you, you’ll still have valuable experience, a better resume, and you will have established contacts and friends in your industry. Over time many of these friends will spread out across the industry to work for different companies and organizations just like your college friends… so stay in touch with them.

If you read too many articles about colleges from male-centered websites such as this one, you might think them all to be wretched hives of scum and villainy. You’d be right of course, but men don’t fix problems by avoiding them. The only way our communist/feminized schools will ever get fixed is if real men attend them, change them, and eventually teach at them. College isn’t for everyone, but even at today’s inflated prices there is still enough value to be wrought out of the experience to justify the price of admission… if you are the right sort of man. If you are the sort of guy who is interested in history, science, and the future, you probably should go to college. If you do have the means, it’s probably still a good idea to hold a job all four years, just to remind yourself that the experience isn’t free. You are, after all, buying a very expensive product. If you only want to drink some beer and get laid, don’t bother… it costs too much… pussy is cheap.

Author: Shatner

Shatner is a liberty loving nerd who lives in The Great Northwest. He is a bit of a pussy, but is also very excited to have ended a serious article with the line “pussy is cheap”.