Noam Chomsky: Modern universities designed to ‘deprive you of your freedom’

[SheilaT]

37. I have been telling people for nearly twenty years now

not to incur huge student debt.

In about 1977 or so I had a conversation with a woman who was bitterly regretting her student debt. She said that if she could do it over again she would not borrow anything until at least her junior year and would borrow far less than she did. The conversation was long enough ago that I'm not certain of the specifics, but I'm thinking she had about $3,000 in student loans. According to an on-line inflation calculator that would be nearly $12k today.

That conversation stayed with me. A few years later when I was thinking about quitting my job and going to school full time, I looked very carefully at what I might need to borrow, and I didn't quit the job.

I tell young people to start at the local junior college. The main drawback to this is that there's no real campus life, which sucks, but getting through school with minimal debt is more important. If you ask me, which not many people do.

I also tell young people that they should go ahead and major in what they love, or want to major in, but never lose sight of the fact that in the end they need to be able to earn a living.

My younger son called me up at the beginning of his sophomore year of college to tell me he'd decided to major in Psychology. "It's what college kids do when they don't know what they want to major in," he told me. Fine, I said, but choose a minor in some sort of business area. He did marketing. Wow, I thought, that's a powerful combination. And it was, I'm still convinced.

After college he went back to pizza delivery, which is what he did summers while in college. Sigh. He's still delivering pizza four years later. The important thing is that he's not asking me for money, because he knows I'd tell him to get a better job. But he's actually quite happy, because he has some control over his hours of work, and in his spare time he plays ultimate frisbee and does stand-up comedy. And he has no student debt. That's important.