Dear Youth: "For most of you, college is an expensive waste of time."

I wish this piece had been worded more skillfully, but I completely agree with the sentiment:

What Obama Should Have Told the Kids Today

"...the market will eventually figure out that the degree doesn’t mean what it used to. It will become less useful as a heuristic for intelligence and achievement. And college graduates will find themselves with an asset—a degree—whose value is dropping while their debt remains high.

It’s all a little reminiscent of the housing bubble."

In our present time, knowing a trade or honing a specific talent is going to be a great deal more important and lucrative than getting a specialized -- or god forbid, a generalized -- degree.

What opened my eyes up to this was that many years ago I looked into moving to Australia.  Long story short, they only wanted people with real skills: builders, carpenters, plumbers, auto-repair, etc. etc.  People who could fix and build things.

Other than doctors and maybe engineers, there was very little interest in the "higher-educated".  In fact, those are also professions that fix and build things.

Law, Finance, Political Science, Computer Programming, Graphic Design and such....those were all "skills" born of our particular Western-American cultural needs.  Apparently they don't export well.  And in a system that's in decline, they're not going to hold up very well either.