“The housing house-of-cards was not the only ‘bubble in search of a pin’ in the modern-day USA. The intellectual bubble is also begging to be burst.” (May 8, 2009) Students have acquired an empty education—for example, a masters degree aimed at “working with nonprofit organizations”—so as to qualify for work in niche “specialties” which are very often spawned and sustained artificially by state-issued fiat money. “The second highest source of income [for nonprofits] is government grants or contracts.”

New York Post: “John Smith, 31, of Brooklyn, works part time at a Trader Joe’s because he hasn’t found work in his field for over a year, despite having a master’s degree. He has about $45,000 in student loan debt. His girlfriend, Meropi Peponides, 27, a graduate student at Columbia University, will have over $50,000 by the time she graduates. … Smith said he has sent out about 200 resumes in his search. He’s looking mainly for work with nonprofit organizations.”

“For the first time, Americans owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit-card bills, with a tally that could soon top $1 trillion — leaving millions of Americans with a crushing debt burden at a time when decent-paying jobs are scarce.”

MORE.

UPDATE (Oct. 24): THE MARKETING ENERGIZER BUNNY. As JP noted, one needs a formal education for a few highly skilled disciplines and professions. For the rest, the return to a classical, canon and core-curriculum oriented education—what used to be called traditionalist—is crucial in secondary school. Someone who can afford it ought to be encouraged to soak up the Western scientific, literary and philosophical canon as a first degree. But this elusive liberal arts, mind-growing education is rare and expensive.

Conservatives are no different from progressives in this matter. How often do you hear the mantra from Beck, “We need to teach kids how to think, not what to think.” Not you don’t! When you expose a child to the riches of the Western canon through top-down, teacher-focused teaching—his mind develops. Teach a youth of Socrates and his analytical method—and what do you think will happen over and above dendritic proliferation in the brain? Higher-order thinking. Ask a child to distill the central idea in a complex essay (which does not deal with diversity or other brain-deadening constructs). Don’t praise him when he gets it wrong. See how well PROCESS works for his thinking. The same holds with math, science, etc. This is what used to be called an education.

Back to fluffy bunny degrees. Marketing is another. The “marketing” types I’ve encountered know little and do NOTHING. They have various degrees and they write letters festooned with “enthusiasm,” “passion,” adoration for the product, Kumbaya, and the occasional obligatory requests for “feedback”—don’t waste your time; they’ll discard or have a panic attack if your recommendations entail pragmatic, result-oriented steps. That’s too much like work. A lunch meeting to discuss your “concerns” or “options”: now that’s the lingo and “action” they are comfortable with.

The marketing types I’ve encountered are incapable of planing and executing the most basic and logical of plans. In my case, they don’t know what an Alexa rank is, and so are positive that their site, ranked 16 millionth by Alexa is where your book sales originate. (Mine, of course, originate on ilanamercer.com, WND.COM and Amazon, and years of GRAFT.) They have no idea how to look at a client’s reach and product and match her with her target buyers. They are incapable of divining their client’s market and optimizing it. You’ve wasted scarce time and energy if you’ve written practical, logical, point-form suggestions for these types to follow.

Some “businessmen” derive masochistic pleasure from rotating these fluffy bunnies (as my husband calls the marketing persona), at considerable expense, one would imagine.

I believe that as an author who does most of the heavy lifting on these sites (which you all enjoy, and wish to support, I hope), I know more about marketing a book to a niche market than the marketing laggards I’ve encountered.

Alas, they draw the salaries. But economic reality is changing this last fact.

The one extremely bright person I have had the pleasure to work with on my last book project was a 20-year old home-schooled prodigy. No higher education. He learned superb programing skills through a mentoring program in his church. However, his intelligence, quick mind unpolluted by the public school, as well as an ability to think clearly and at a speed enabled him to branch out. Needless to say that such abilities and ethics are rare in our workforce. He was quickly poached for managing far bigger projects.

The latter programmer/developer was the only person I’ve worked with who was able to read an email (I number each task clearly. It’s the kind of methodical habit of mind one once acquired at school vicariously; at least I did), answer it, while addressing each of my points/concerns, and then promptly return a demo.

Frankly, well-structured, logical emails that enumerate tasks to be accomplished and problems to be solved have usually elicited a deathly silence in all other programmers/marketers with whom I’ve tried to engage. That’s scary!

Fortunately, and as I also learned in school, breathing is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. Were this not the case, the human energizer/fluffy bunny would already be extinct.