Got Millenials? Democrats Should Address the Student Loan Crisis Immediately

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157. Depends on what you study

I'm a liberal-studies major myself who actually feels guilty about taking other people's tax dollars to read Aristotle. The old "Good Will Hunting" quote about spending X thousands of dollars for an education I could have gotten for $2 in overdue library fees comes to mind.

What we really need to do is decouple employment from the sheepskin factor. We've made it such that people basically have to get that worthless piece of paper to even be considered for a job, even if that job is McDonald's. You get ahead of the guy who only has a GED or an associate degree. That isn't right, because how well you can interpret themes in Richard III says absolutely nothing about how well you can operate a Fryolator or do Excel pivot tables. That's stuff you learn on your own as a hobby. But no, you have to get a degree in something in order to be considered, and then you find out that you got the wrong degree for the job market and now can't do anything else but bag groceries at Aldi or deliver pizzas for Domino's. Meanwhile, the CS majors and the "lowly" trades-people are laughing at your pseudo-intellectual "prowess" as they give you a shit tip for bringing pepperoni to the door of their kickass house. Then you go home and read Sorrows of Young Werther as an instruction manual in your rat-infested Section 8 prison cell.

We need to 1) divert monies from useless classics degrees and the like into trades programs and 2) get rid of the idiotic sheepskin standard that shuts out anyone who didn't waste 4 years of their life pursuing worthless gen-ed material. Bring back on-the-job training and merit promotions that have nothing to do with "education." At this point I don't give a shit about being an interesting conversationalist with a "broad-based education." Why should I, if the only people I'm going to be talking to are people in the unemployment line who also don't give a shit about Shakespeare and are just worried about where their next meal is coming from?