By now, everyone here should know that I hate Rick Santorum. But I gotta say that he's right on this one.
A college education is something my parents had to get in socialist Poland if they ever wanted to get anywhere in life. That's simply because not having a college education meant working on the docks, in the factories, or underground in the coal mines. There weren't any real opportunities. That is how all stagnant societies are: they are bureaucratized and thus require artificial and token certificates and licenses in order to advance and climb the socioeconomic ladder.
America used to be different. America used to be the land of opportunity. You didn't have to have a college education or even any formal schooling. You had the opportunity to network, to start on the bottom rung of society, save your money, and work up the ladder. Your children had the same opportunity, so over time your family had the possibility of traveling from the very bottom to the very top. Case in point: people like John D. Rockefeller and (later) Arthur Jones. This still exists in some corners of America, as evidenced by successful college drop-outs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but this is rapidly fading.
But America has lost that vitality, youthfulness, and opportunity. Overregulation, overtaxation, and overspending has thrown our economy back to the feudal ages, when you needed a permit from the government to run any business, you needed a government license to get any good-paying job, and all of the fruits of your labor were automatically assumed to be owned by someone other than yourself. Along with a decaying, expanding government in its death-throes, our culture has decayed. Now everyone must go to college to get a degree, even if that degree is a piece-of-shit English degree that won't serve you later in life. Barely anyone will hire you to do any worthwhile job if you don't have some degree, even if it is not related to the work to be done.
If we peeled back the government controls and restrictions, if we peeled back the welfare state, then everyone would not have to go to college. We'd return to a true opportunity society where one rises based on their merits, not on some artificial bureaucratic processes involving government licenses and permits.
Of course, the problem with Rick Santorum's remarks is that he does not plan on making any meaningful changes that would return America to a true opportunity society, and not a modern bureaucratized feudalism.
And two more things that I don't know how to fit into this post:
1. College schooling (not education) is a bubble driven by artificially low interest rates and government subsidies and restrictions. It'll collapse soon.
2. The Founding Fathers and most great intellectuals throughout history were self-educated. They did not need formal bureaucratic processes and government licenses to make the great breakthroughs that they made.
