In some ways, this fixation on college is a cargo cult.

For those who don't know what a cargo cult is, after world war ii, there were a lot of indigenous tribes that saw the Americans come in with their airplanes and the great riches that they brought with them and they assumed that because the Americans were building these bases that the bases themselves brought prosperity. They went out of their way using Stone age technology to build surprisingly accurate replicas of American military bases, hoping that by replicating them they could reproduce the wealth that they saw within them. These were called cargo cults.

In a similar way, some people look at people who graduated from college and say "look, they went to college! If we go to college we will be successful too!"

Absolutely, going to colleges part of a lifetime strategy that can work, but as we are seeing with the growing College population that is basically unemployable, getting a university education is not an automatic ticket to the good life.

If you just mindlessly go to university, all you're going to do is run up a massive debt. Going to University needs to be part of a broader plan that is going to include at some point getting a job.

This cargo cult mentality is actually really dangerous because suddenly you've taken a whole bunch of people who don't know what they're doing, and you push them into becoming highly indebted, you push them into using years of their most productive years pursuing useless degrees, and all the time you're sitting there telling them that they're going to get out of University and they're going to go off and become a CEO. When they don't go off to become ceos, they get very upset. Justifiably so really, they did exactly what they were told to do, and the reward for doing exactly what they were told to do including taking out a lifetime worth of debt wasn't there.

No wonder there are generations of kids resenting their parents, and wanting to tear down society.