Josh First's Blog

Best colleges are the ones you never heard of

The best colleges are the ones you have probably never heard of, including community colleges. The supposedly “elite” Ivy League schools are actually the very worst, because unless you study hard science, a student there is not getting educated, but stupider.

This is a subject of discussion because “higher education” (especially the biggest name schools) a) is proving itself to be a useless enterprise that rarely provides students with useful, valuable skills, abilities, or knowledge, b) is collapsing under the weight of its own political indoctrination, c) abandoned merit and critical thinking decades ago for pet political narratives with no practical application in a student’s life or career, and d) is unfathomably corrupt, a violation of the entire founding idea of the academy, which was supposed to be a place of truth, honest debate, and accountability.

Colleges are the very last place on this planet where you are likely to encounter the free speech or freedom of assocation rights needed for the academy to attain its purported goals. More likely, today’s college students experience a Stalinesque gulag lacking only those Siberian snows in its icy rigidity and mortal danger to the brain, soul, and, if you are white, Asian, or Jewish, to your body.

Colleges are now where American kids go to die intellectually, and where they are carefully trained to remain in perpetual spoiled childhood status. These ever-child beings have been created by colleges for the sole purpose of being ever-present street activists, loud cannon fodder for the political Left’s non-stop war against a constitutional America, capitalism, meritocracy, equal opportunity, societal order etc.

No thought was given by college administrators to how exactly these perpetually angry spoiled little brats were going to eventually support themselves through gainful employment. No one, not even the Ford Foundation and its fellow underwriters of chaos and destruction, has any use for a confused and angry 22-year-old who cannot think itself out of a wet paper bag. So imagine the actual work places available to “woke” college grads: Mean adults who expect 9 to 5 productivity from the college grads they are paying.

These two things, college grads and productive work places, do not belong together. To wit:

Unfortunately, in my line of work I must occasionally employ attorneys skilled at litigation. And in this process, I have learned over and over that the best litigation attorneys are the ones from the no-name schools. Third-tier law schools that no one ever heard of now produce, in my experience, the hungriest, most assertive, most zealously-represent-the-interests-of-your-client kind of lawyers out of all. These small schools have the least amount of time for woke DEI crap, and their mostly blue collar students have the least amount of interest or money to spend on that crap.

So, for most of those young Americans contemplating post-high school education, may I recommend the following:

• Tech degrees in surveying (big shortage of young surveyors), medical equipment, welding, diesel engine mechanics, and machinery operation from schools like Penn Tech in Williamsport, PA.
• Directly applicable degrees in finance, marketing, math, science, economics from community colleges (like Harrisburg Area Community College, or HACC) and small regional no-name colleges that never got into DEI, much less just got out of it like so many schools are now doing.
• Assiduously avoid any kind of “degrees” in environmental anything, history, English, French, German, women’s studies, gender or race studies. These 100% subjective and micron-deep fields are completely useless, are based on various theories of cultural Marxism, have zero practical application in the real world where the work must get done every day for whatever the particular business is to succeed, they will rot your brain and fill your head with toxic poison of no interest to anyone trying to make a living and feed themselves on this planet, and they will saddle you and your parents with huge student debt that bought you nothing but a diploma worth less than the piece of paper it is printed on.

For those high school grads who want to make money, buy a house, have nice things, raise a family, may I suggest starting a small business or two in a garage, and see where that takes you. No college experience anywhere is a substitute for your own hard work and enterprising spirit. America has a million untested markets available, each one just waiting for some young person to test it and see what the prospective buyers want to spend in it.

This is one area the college experience will not prepare you for, and in fact will dumb you down: Free markets.