Smart Decisions and Worthless Degrees

Kathy Shaidle aka FiveFeetOfFury writing at PJMedia.

..“I didn’t.”

That’s my answer when someone asks me where I went to college. Thirty years after I made that fateful decision, the words still stick in my throat sometimes.

Why didn’t I — a naturally bright, unnaturally well-read kid in my high school’s “advanced” stream — go to university (as we call “college” up here in Canada) and get a BA?

For one thing, it was the Reagan era. Every night on the news (not to mention talk shows and comedy programs), we were assured that Ronald Reagan was about to start World War 3. Roll your eyes if you like, but plenty of people older and supposedly smarter than I purported to believe that.

Next: Never mind that wailing Zuni doll from Trilogy of Terror, or any of the other scary stuff readers share at Kindertrauma.com. What horrified me on TV when I was a kid? The Paper Chase (1973). The middlebrow saga of a guy’s struggle to get through law school — hell, his struggle to get from one end of his vast Ivy League campus to the next without being late for his next class and getting insulted by John Houseman at his withering best (or is that worst?) — genuinely terrified me.......