College is Dumb

I have ranted about this before, but it deserves revisiting. I was talking with my friend the other day about what college means. I think a lot of people my age have parents who treated the college degree as some kind of success-measurement-threshold in launching their kids into the world ("well, at least they're educated, I did my job"). I think by now most people understand this as a socialization and class status exercise, because the bachelor's degree draws a line between the lower classes and the slightly less lower classes. Having a bachelor's degree, my friend said, is a just handy vetting qualification to weed out the people who didn't have judgment enough to figure out they should smoke someplace besides the boys' bathroom in high school. Having a college degree indicates all kinds of things to employers that we can't really say are the actual qualifications for a job: college degree = probably has enough sense to lay low and do his/her misbehavior out of sight, and participate in a scheme of expectations involving respect for hierarchy and maybe a little independent decision making. "Values"-wise it also probably indicates that someone comes from a non-threatening, bourgeois, SAT-prep-course-attending kind of household that most bosses (the ultimate bourgeois) can relate to. It's just a class indicator. I mean, my job requires a college degree. I load and unload a truck. Bachelor's degree required.

Yoga instruction, however, requires no college degree. You can teach yoga after a month of training for anywhere from three to seven thousand dollars. So there's that. There's a class thing involved in yoga-doing, but that's another story. Maybe later.