Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for April 23, 2011

The pl8o tweet is hilarious. The rest is just a sad comment.

Was this done on purpose? I could only see the bottom half of “Tom” and an advertisement for…oh, I guess it IS part of the joke.

I don’t get it. What is he trying to say? Sometimes these comics are just too subtle.

I wasn’t sure 4-Profit University was for me until I saw that girl learning to read upside down text (College for Dummies)! This totally fits in with my plan to become a Vampire Bat–subtract me in!

The for profit colleges are a joke. We used one of the big name for profit colleges at the last place I worked. Employees could sign up for courses and could even work on getting degrees from the college and our employer paid the tuition and books. Most of the people who went were average or below average workers but they all passed and many got A’s. Of course, they didn’t really learn anything. I got first hand accounts that showed teachers “helping” students with their tests and offering “extra credit” for little or no effort so that the number of passing students could be maintained. If the student did not get at least a C then they had to reimburse our employer for the tuition and books. And if too many students got grades below C then our employer would have terminated the contract with the for profit college. And the workers who graduated continued to be average or below average workers and none of them pursued jobs in their so-called new fields of expertise. Recently, Congress has threatened to cut Federal aid to these for profit colleges and the colleges have responded with a major advertising campaign showing how important they are to students getting new skills and jobs. Were you fooled by this advertising campaign? I would seriously question the skills of anybody who gets training or a degree from a for profit college. The cartoon does a great job describing the situation.

Unfortunately this is for real…. currently law students graduate with 100K debt, and can’t find jobs. Even TOP TIER law schools. It is a type of PONZI scheme. Have a friend who clerked at the supreme court after graduation, and is now working in a restaurant! Law students are SUING their schools for misrepresentation of the job market for lawyers…. And I’m afraid medical schools are in the same racket. The math: each student admitted generates ~ $ 100,000 each to the school, from tuition, grants, and loans, etc. WHETHER THEY GRADUATE OR NOT. If you are the school, the pressure to take on another 100 students will bring in $10 MILLION dollars over 3-4 years, whether you teach them anything or not…..

My sister-in-law took a computer course with government aid that taught her about punch cards and tape drives. A nice scam to take government money.

This works for any college or university these days, not just the for-profit ones. Universities these days are run by bean counters who try to maximize hand-outs and tuition fees. Profs have very little say.

I should add that this is the result of the wrong incentive schemes by the governments(s). They encourage maximum enrollment at the expense of quality and actual learning. Elitism has become a curse word.

Cheri nailed it.

Face it folks: Universities are liberal hotbeds full of liberal nonsense — including the admin department. The “profit motive” rules. Learning is a life long pursuit. But you can do that without colleges. They’ve become “Big Business”. Bondage and slavery? That defines college “graduates”! How many college degrees did Leonardo Da Vinci have? Oscar Wilde? Beethoven? Bach?

Zero.

I wish I didn’t get it either. Unfortunately, I’m sitting under a worthless diploma from one of those schools. The monthly payments turned out to be 3x what I was told when I signed up.

This is a great cartoon and right on the money (so to speak). Education is always rampant with swindles, because people desire to improve their lot, and someone is ready to promise that all can be done with less & for less. Sinclair Lewis parodied this in Babbitt 89 years ago, and it was not new then.

Part of the problem is that education is truly difficult to measure. It is somewhat ineffable, so, therefore, easy prey to frauds & scams. It is similar to quack medicine & swampwater medications. Most diseases get better on their own, so recognizing quack medicine can be difficult.

Smoky’s narrative is too often the case, and no one should enroll in any “school” that does not promise a full-time faculty on the location, standards that mean true attrition, and an accreditation from a legitimate accrediting institution. (This wipes out these for-profit “schools” and many little & big Bible “colleges” as well.)

Unlike Smoky’s useful remark, Hugh’s remark simply promotes more pity for him and sympathy for anyone who must read or listen to him (family, friends, spouse, &al.) Only a handful of the nation’s best schools are at all liberal in general political leaning and they are simply because most educated people & more intelligent people lean toward the liberal.

Look around you: Those most likely to be well-read and to have studied a subject thoughtfully at a respected university or college are most likely to lean leftward in their politics. Those who receive their information simply from the commercial dregs of the electronic media, who cannot open a literate magazine, and who either didn’t attend any college or attended one of dubious standards are more likely to lean rightward.

By the way, the text message was very clever.

[Fixed the mistake, Hugh. Thanks. You are lucky that no one bothered to proof your first remark: “Face it folks”, “a life long pursuit”, “the admin department”, “Bondage and slavery? That defines…”? Pretty weak grammar, man.]

(Oh, and lastly, Oscar Wilde spent eight years in college: four at Trinity, four at Oxford.)

Subprime education is like a subprime mortgage, the scammers don’t care if you keep the house or graduate or learn anything, you’re just a pawn in their money-leveraging game. Diploma mills & con men have been around for a long time, and buying friends in government to protect you has a long history too - that doesn’t make it right.

Briancrook said: “…. they are simply because most educated people & more intelligent people are lean toward the liberal.”

Yo Brian! Go to college so your communication skills can improve! Dude! What kind of grammar is THAT!

Where are the bad puns today?