College is a Waste of Time, Money, and Lots of Sperm

The following is the exact text of my article as it appears today in the Observer, the student newspaper for Saint Joseph’s College of Rensselaer, Indiana. Only the first and last picture and caption have been added for the purposes of the online version. The issue containing the article hits newsstands around 11 a.m. I fully expect to be expelled by noon:

Congratulations, freshmen, for making the worst decision of your young lives. By choosing to attend college, you have delayed by four years exciting career opportunities like hoboism and living in your parents’ basement. Discussing the literary merits of This Boy’s Life seems uninspired in comparison to stimulating pursuits like recycling aluminum cans and dead pigeons in exchange for nickels and spending the majority of your adult life rent-free in your mom and dad’s subterranean fortress of virginity. A four-year degree does not necessarily exclude you from these career paths – in fact, majoring in philosophy practically guarantees them – but taking the academic high road puts you at a disadvantage when competing with your non-college-bound high school classmates, who didn’t waste six figures and eight semesters exploring controversial issues like the struggle between individual rights and national security or the moral dilemma of how much to charge when selling poisoned turnips to the blind. Enlightenment thinking does little to make up for missed vocational opportunities, but at least you know that deadly roots go for $2.60 a pound when being sold to the visually impaired.

Selling poisoned turnips to the blind has helped eliminate unwanted elements of society, but it hasn’t been nearly as effective as selling pressurized napalm canisters to hyperactive children. (Photo courtesy of http://theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/11/30/blind_narrowweb__300x411,0.jpg)

Incoming freshmen are not entirely at fault for their foolish pursuit of higher education. Colleges and universities across the country use numerous recruiting tools to ensnare unsuspecting high school seniors, the most effective of which are misleading statistical data and naval ballistics deployed against passing minivans and SUVs. Half of all students on campus were stranded here when their preferred method of transportation was torpedoed along I-65. Those students who escape the wrath of inland submarines instead fall victim to the number-based claims of various universities, such as “99.99 percent of graduates attain jobs in their field of study” and “less than two percent of all student transfers are directly related to giant spiders.” These statistics hide the fact that the field of study for a business major covers every conceivable method of employment, including welfare queen and bridge-dwelling troll. The numbers are also conspicuously silent on the percentage of students who flee for reasons pertaining to mid-sized spiders, a class of arachnids no larger than an average elk. Even if you believe the numbers provided by most universities, you can’t help but wonder about the one guy who didn’t get a job corresponding to his field of study. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to major in artistic expression through goat placenta with a minor in accounting.

The $100,000 most students blow on tuition could be better spent in countless other ways, like paying half of the RIAA fine for pirating one song. If you’d like to get more for your money than the first thirty seconds of “Backstreet’s Back,” you could pursue the more pragmatic alternative of buying two hummers and then setting them on fire. While expensive, this approach exhausts your college fund quickly and frees up the next four years for use in the workforce. College is basically a job that pays negative $25,000 a year, which is why it makes exponentially more sense to drop out of school and get a job gutting feral pigs for eighteen cents an hour. After four years, you’ll break even rather than being in debt, and you’ll have useful skills applicable in convergent industries, like the recently merged fields of fish gutting and telecommunications. The first cell phone powered by carp entrails is only a few years away. Many institutions of higher learning claim those who fall victim to their educational schemes will get better jobs with higher pay, but these are the same institutions that allow students to major in social work. That’s like offering a degree in being poor.

Even the most diehard of educational zealots must recognize that they’re paying excessive amounts of money for instruction by the sort of people you wouldn’t let into your house without the intervention of delousing powder and possibly a fire hose. Most professors are either burned-out hippies or hippies still in the process of burning out, although the political alignment of faculty members has little to do with overt bias but much to do with the fact that most conservatives are already in the workforce gutting feral pigs. By definition, a professor is someone who isn’t smart enough to graduate, although the politically correct terminology is “ongoing education” in the same sense that bed-wetting is “creative urine distribution.” These professors will encourage you to cultivate your own opinions, much like cigarette smoke encourages you to cultivate lung cancer. You won’t recognize the ill effects of this false sense of intellectual security until you find yourself chained to a tree, proclaiming that all world currencies should be abolished in favor of a barter system centered around corn chips. To avoid such scenarios, never trust anyone who graduated college before the invention of the Internet. Instead, pursue your own path to academic enlightenment. Reading books and discussing other viewpoints may be the traditional way to expand your horizons, but you could widen your perspective just as much by sniffing paint fumes and watching Wheel of Fortune.

The era of free love began with the hippie van. It ended with the hippie concentration camp. (Photo courtesy of http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b202/xsweetrevengex/hippieVan.jpg)

College does provide a few advantages in terms of human interaction, but any benefits derived from the presence of other students are quickly undone by negative virtues like sharing personal possessions and using fire extinguishers as battering rams. If that kid didn’t want you to smash through his dorm room door and left femur, he should have asked before he took one of your tissues. The main reason to drop out of college and enter the workforce is that college girls dig creepy townie guys who smell like “success,” which is a polite way of saying “the pig gutting factory.” It’s hard to resist a man whose only ambitions in life include exacting revenge on the weatherman and not bathing. Somebody has to hold the meteorologist responsible when he misses the dew point by half a degree. Upon leaving college, be sure to keep your university-related website accounts active since poor personal hygiene and senseless murder can’t do all the work for you when it comes to seducing educated women. There are two approaches townies use when hitting on college girls, and one is more effective than the other. Wrong: “Did you enjoy your summer vacation?” Right: “I often look at your Facebook picture while dry humping a pillow.” Note the subtle difference between the two approaches. The first one is phrased in the form of a question.

When college girls think of townies, “sexy” is the first word that comes to mind. The second word is “convicted-sex-offender.” Women think in hyphens. (Photo courtesy of http://www.marcosmoreno.org/forums/images/redneck_tosser.jpg)

The few lessons that can be gleaned from four years of college can be taught in less than a paragraph at half the cost of a full degree. First and foremost, never hesitate to fear those different from yourself. Anyone ignorant enough to disagree with you is most likely diseased and possibly armed. Never engage in open discussion when a preemptive strike will do. Second, never be afraid to contradict yourself. You’re not a hypocrite; you’re just exploring both sides of the issue. It might not seem like you can be pro-life and pro-choice at the same time, but anything is possible if you yell loud enough and advocate sending all babies to live on a reservation in space. Third, never use your real name. Professors can’t fail you if they don’t know who you are. This lesson can be applied in the real world to get out of everything from jury duty to marriage licenses. Finally, drop out of college. Anyone who exceeds a sixth-grade education is just showing off. By the time you learn your multiplication tables, you’re already too educated to function in civil society. Keep these lessons in mind, and you’ll be the most educated man at the pig gutting factory. You owe me $50,000.

To read more of my articles, visit http://explodingunicorn.blogspot.com. To file a complaint, please punch a stranger under the assumption that it’s me.