It's not like people are forced to take student loans.

[riderinthestorm]

130. So wrong. Dance, music, art, literature? None of those pay enough but are incredibly important to

a civil society even as the people who graduate with say, a classical music teaching degree will be helplessly mired in debt til they die. Journalism! A laugh a minute as journalists are paid a pittance but go into Egypt and try to report on the revolutions for those of us who breathlessly await them. PhD physics graduates labor for decades in academia and will never make enough to repay their debts but have changed the face of science with particle accelerators, applications on space travel and more. PhD conomists who have mastered the principles that started micro-lending like the Grameen bank - bankrupt but doing work they love and that has changed the face of entire cultures.

Your anti-intellectualism is breathtaking in its short sightedness and grotesque narrow focus. There are so many examples of professions that even you would stipulate are of "benefit" to society that don't pay enough to enable graduates to comfortably repay their student loans. Teachers believed their "specialized education" would and could be applied when they started their degrees in 2007 or 2008. In 2012, not so much. General practitioner MDs are not making enough to pay back their student loans even as there's a crisis shortage. Same with EMTs. Perhaps anyone wanting to go into front-line medicine should just take your advice and become an electrician cuz ya know, its less college loans (even as society is dying for affordable quality medical care). I could go on and on but what's the point?

The sweeping condemnation of anyone who doesn't work in a trade is despicable. In your world, only the professions and selected people you and others deem "worthy" would get to study. But if a person has the intellectual capacity and the curiousity, higher education simply doesn't work like that and everyone who is ready to take on the challenge of enriching our country, our best and brightest, should have the opportunity. Free.