To Produce or to Criticize: That is the $50,000 Question

Jeff Carter, independent speculator, has an observation and a revelation on student debt and fluffy college degrees:

"Students didn’t make major choices that would teach them how to be productive. Instead, many of them gravitated to soft majors. Soft majors might make good debaters, but they don’t make good engineers and mathematicians. The future economy will be driven by engineers and scientists that can create. There is room for some critical thinkers that can sell, but I find many of the soft major kids don’t like that either. They congregate into jobs provided by NGO’s or government. That’s non productive.

The government subsidies, and the other forces have obscured real world market forces that would have driven different choices by students. Ironically, in a world where businesses can borrow for practically nothing, students are looking at borrowing at 6.8%. Only in government …

We are rapidly reaching a breaking point. How efficient is it to borrow money to pay $50,000 plus per year for a degree in something like Women’s Studies, or other soft major? Where do we engage people with this skillset to accomplish something productive in the macro economy that brings us the next leap forward? Instead of training creators, we are creating critics. It seems to me that criticism is the only skill the soft major people have."