One: To get a good broad general Western Civ. Education—not necessarily to gain any particular career skills
In the good old days going to college was not just about going there to get a career. Parents hoped that going to college would broaden their emerging child's sense of history and depth of understanding the development of all of Western Civilization (and to learn how to express oneself well orally and in writing). Today that is a total joke. Western Civilization courses have systematically and aggressively been replaced with multiculturalism studies in all universities across the nation, both Christian and non-Christian. Today’s students will learn radical homosexual agendas (Harvard's catalog lists over 20 of them) and radical feminist agendas and will learn (far from a melting pot mentality) virulent angry ways to hold onto one's mini-culture, while despising the culture at large. Students are not taught how to think, but what to believe. The impetus of higher education is to indoctrinate students in multiculturalism and liberal leftist socialist brainwashing. Capitalism is ruthlessly debunked, as is a Judeo Christian faith. 85% of college-aged children from Christian homes will emerge from college with those values, at your expense. Would you pay someone to come into your living room to do the same? Because it is behind stately brick and mortar and we don't see it in our own bedrooms and living rooms, do we somehow believe it is not happening?
Two: To land a career
Attending one- or two-year trade schools, where the studies are focused only upon the career preparation, yes. Online specific career training, tutoring and apprenticing, yes. Taking a course or two from a specific instructor, yes. Attending trade conventions, workshops and symposiums, yes. But let's not be pretending to go to a four year liberal arts college or university to gain a career, when fully two of those years are spent on socialist indoctrination, and there is a drastically shrinking job market pool available any more to professionals, once one does graduate. Clearly, entrepreneurialism may be the only train left to ride—and it doesn't necessitate driving through moral corruption to get to a decent salary.
Three: To land a spouse
Spouses are historically and optimally found in church fellowships, in and around Christian conventions, and among family and friends who hold the same values, not in secular God-bashing universities. To one's surprise if we list the people we know and where they actually found their spouses, even historically, we'll find that many were found outside of college and post-college. Upon closer scrutiny, it is eye-opening to note what the reality has been in this area, as compared to what the perception has been.
Four: To position oneself to earn more money than someone who didn’t graduate from…
Fully 50% of college students are now currently either unemployed or underemployed. Far from gaining more money, the college four years robbed them even of those wage-earning years. Multiply a $25,000 a year salary times four and one can see that one lost $100,000—gone—zip, zilch—it’s not there to build upon once the student graduated (assuming that they made it that far). Not only do today’s graduates not have those earnings, they also are straddled with lifetime debt loads of insane amounts, more than house-mortgages—with nothing concrete to show for it. These are debts that our forefathers never had to contend with. These debt loads are burying graduates in deep depression (unless they are in denial of it). Students are dismayed to find that they have become indentured slaves for the rest of their lives in exchange for this unbridled and heretofore unexamined romp through college. If they had set pencil to paper, they would have seen that they would have been financially ahead NOT to go to college.
What is especially sad is that colleges have become the place of unbridled immorality and infinite license. The experimentation into deviant experiences at college would never happen in one's own home—or even one's neighbor's home in a larger society which is flanked by young and old. The neighborhood wouldn't allow a large group sexual orgy in the house next door or an all night drunken brawl at ear-splitting decibels. The immoralities available at college are activities that are not even experienced under the normal constraints of a moderate society.
We allow our young people to go into these places as a culture because all the deviance happens out of our own purview, behind brick and mortar, somewhere else—it does not invade our personal adult space. If we were personally forced to watch it, to live among it, to hear it, to be inconvenienced by it night after night, to endure the behaviors of roommates who have strange personalities and obnoxious habits—persons we never met before and never would have asked to share our bedroom—we, ourselves couldn't stand it—there would be complaints the first night about what all the guys are doing in the girl's bedrooms (yes, even on Christian campuses). The truth is that we don't want to watch or know what goes on there. We toss our emerging adults into it and in effect we say, see ya on the other side—I'm not walkin' in there with ya; sink or swim.
Nowhere else in all of society would these same dynamics present themselves in real life. Who would ever rent an apartment with someone one has never met before, in all of the rest of one's life? Or be forced to listen to someone else's parties, or breathe their marijuana fumes? Where else in all of life are these dynamics duplicated or forced upon a person? No, the moral restraints of a larger society would squelch a fair bit of it.
Look at what happens to a college boy, as a case in point. Once he’s done with college and living on his own, his current landlord would not allow him to have a girl as a regular visitor in his room, let alone to stay there for four years. His mother would not have allowed it in her own home, no matter how old he was getting to be. His grandmother wouldn't have allowed him to move into her place with any possibility of immorality emerging. It is not countenanced anywhere but college. And that’s where he did it. College became a dark hole, a hidden chapter, an escape from reality and its fallout, a place outside any meaningful civil surveillance from anyone, even surveillance from the necessities of a disciplined necessary capitalism via a boss at work; many college students have no jobs.
At college there are no boundaries, not even the boundary of academics, as freshman by the thousands party and flunk out. No problem; we are really not concerned as a culture about what goes on there in the soul of a student. As long as the college collects the tuition and continues to capture more enrollments, the beast marches on. College is where Bill Ayers got his start in blowing up government buildings, virtually in hiding from society, under the guise of obtaining a higher education. The college experience fosters group deviance; it fosters experimentation. As a culture, we have convinced ourselves that this is a necessary chapter, a rite of passage for our emerging youth. But some have had enough, and are not willing to sacrifice yet another generation on this altar of a perverted education. Some are doing a double-take, and as a consequence are surviving and are thriving without the corruption. We are often born into assumptions, and until they get bad enough, they remain unexamined.
Pro-college Christian families are making sacrifices of the finances and of the soul under the guise of pursuing an education for the mind. As a consequence, while a student is in pursuit of a degree in geology he or she is working as a resident assistant, policing drunken brawls in a dorm. Or, a student is enduring his or her roommate's illicit sex. What is the connection here? Why does the pursuit of academics require the slavery of the whole person, down to his or her social life, and even requirements as to what building he or she must sleep in? Huh? Clearly, the college is after the whole person by requiring freshman to live in the dorm. Whatever for? Why the requirement? To protect them? From what? From morality? From living with a family off campus? Is a ghetto, a herd of young, inexperienced peers preferable to a farmhouse on the edge of town? What is really the agenda here?
For further reading on this topic, especially for godly gals, read Chucking College.
