Kathleen McCaffrey ponders liberal myth and Organize Wall Street peeves, one and the same, from Legal Insurrection [1]:
I also think that a lot of people in favor of OWS are mourning the death of a dream. I can sympathize with that. A lot of the rhetoric I heard while growing up in the 1990s was akin to this: if you get good grades, go to a decent college, and don’t screw up, you can live comfortably. I think that, for a lot of folks who did just this, the past three years have been particularly difficult for them. It has been more of a struggle than they anticipated. Wall Street is their chosen scape goat, but I really doubt it’s the source of the difficulty a lot of 20-somethings have come across. That’s a post for another day, I suppose.
It not a dream, but rather a myth. Liberal mythology is that you can pay good money to attend a esteemed brick and mortar college, and somehow, as if by osmosis, get a well paid college level position which will allow you to both repay your college loans and live on easy street.
It is not so. Employers will only hire and retain people who can increase the value of their companies assets. This will necessarily involve both thinking and communicating clearly. If you can not do both, you will not be retained in any college level position. Modern colleges simply do not emphasis math and communication skills. Small wonder their graduates do not get hired.
Eric Adds: Full on agreement.
And have you ever noticed, David, that nobody ever questions “big education” ?
The issue of course is that despite what the government and schools are going to tell you, four years of gender studies remedial basket weaving and Al Gore approved environmental studies do not a six figure salary make.
That such an amount is necessary to pay off the loans needed to pay off the government schools and the unions attached to them, and despite the extremely low reality quotient of what is being taught, strikes me not as an indictment on the banks who actually did provide the service they contacted for, but an indictment on the government schools the unions and the leftist mentalities that inhabit each.
To put a somewhat finer edge on this; leftist ideology does not teach reality, because it is not reality. We have an educational crisis in this country heretofore unseen. That is largely because colleges and universities have become little more than leftist indoctrination centers. Leftist policy fails every time it’s tried. Why should we be surprised when schools teaching such nonsense as reality fail their students so horrendously?