But I'll be forever grateful some of "all that baggage you can also pick up in college" DID have a chance to settle in and take root. In fact, it's played a major role in building my world view, as well as that of many of my working class contemporaries, and its backed up with lots of scholarly footnotes, too! 8) But alas, that was all before the university became a business, and the degree a saleable commodity to be bid for.

College was the third time in my life I was exposed to the idea that not everything they taught you at home and public school, or on the job, was on the level. The second was when I started reading science fiction. SF taught me that there were alien cultures and alternate social universes that deserved exploration, some as a promise of better things, some as a warning of potential horrors, and some as just parodies of our contemporary social myths. And some were even contradictory, which taught me that opposed ideologies can sound perfectly plausible when artfully presented. Even more important, I learned sometimes they may each have some merit, or share fatal flaws, even if they do superficially contradict one other.

My first exposure to adult and conventional societal hypocrisy was MAD Magazine, for which I will forever be thankful. My parents were absolutely right, "no good will ever come of you reading that trash."

I personally find the idea of a university degree as some kind of charm school rite-of-passage for the corporate world distasteful and elitist. I see no reason why a degree in French gives you a boost in competition for a job as a City Planner. Too bad that nowadays an
Honorable Discharge cannot play that role instead. After I got out, my Service got my foot in a couple of doors that might otherwise have been shut to me.

The passing of industrial apprenticeships is much to be lamented. My cousin Rudy, who has just retired from the Nuke plant at Turkey Point, tells me the company used to work together with the unions to provide structured apprenticeship programs that ensured a constant pool of expert techs and institutional memory to maintain the power plant and reactor. My other cousin, Red Robert, also proudly reminisces about the trade apprenticeship he participated in, then later helped administer when he became a union official.

However, over the last few decades, the boy blunder MBA's constant greed to squeeze the last nickel of profits out of the operation led to the dismantling of these programs on the grounds that they were no longer "cost-effective".

In the short run, this was true, there was always a pool of retired, un- or under-employed pipefitters, machinists, electricians, insulators, etc ready to come in as temps and do a repair or prep for an inspection for a big cash premium (with no benefits, of course). As he put it, "every time the reactors went down for maintenance, they blew on this big horn and these old guys in overalls with long beards and toolboxes would come out of Appalachia to answer the call."

But those old guys are starting to die off, or have drifted into other fields, or are retired, and they are getting harder and harder to find. They have to pay more and more for them, or bring in foreigners from overseas, and of course, there are no longer any "cost-effective training programs" replenishing the supply.

My cousin gets calls from the plant all the time, begging him to come back and conduct training courses, they offer good pay, but no benefits, or job security. He knows he can afford to wait until they get desperate and give him everything he wants.

Its supply and demand. They need him more than he needs them.