(The Economic Collapse Blog)—More than 18 million students are enrolled at over 5,800 colleges and universities in the United States. On average, it costs more than $100,000 to attend a college or a university in the U.S. for four years. It has been estimated that a college eduction is now over 400 percent more expensive than it was 40 years ago. But even though our institutions of higher learning are sucking so much money out of our young people, it never seems to be enough, and so they are constantly begging for more money from the federal government. If you can believe it, the U.S. government has been providing more than 170 billion dollars a year to postsecondary education programs. Much of this funding comes in the form of research grants, student aid, and government contracts. But what are we getting for all of this money? The truth is that we are getting an entire generation that has had their heads filled with leftist propaganda.
We tell our kids over and over again that a “higher education” is the key to getting a good job and living the American Dream. They have been told not to worry about how much it costs and that there is plenty of financial aid (mostly made up of loans) available. Now our economy is facing the biggest student loan debt bubble in the history of the world, and when our new college graduates enter the “real world” they are finding out that the good jobs they were promised are very few and far between.
The system relies on the fact that most of us are going to believe that a college education is the key to a good future and that there is plenty of “financial aid” out there for everyone that wants to go to college.
Unfortunately, high school students are never told that not even bankruptcy can get you out of student loan debt. It will stay with you forever until you finally pay it off.
Today, each new crop of optimistic college graduates quickly discovers that there are simply not nearly enough jobs for all of them. Thousands upon thousands of them end up waiting tables or stocking the shelves at retail stores. Many of them end up deeply bitter as they find themselves barely able to survive and yet saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that nobody ever warned them about.
Sadly, the quality of the education that most of these college students is receiving is a complete and total joke.
Take it from someone that has graduated from a couple of very highly respected institutions. I have an undergraduate degree, a law degree and another degree on top of that, so I know what I am talking about. Higher education in America has become so dumbed-down that the family dog could literally pass most college courses.
It is an absolute joke. The vast majority of college students in America spend two to four hours a day in the classroom and maybe an hour or two outside the classroom studying. The remainder of the time, these “students” are out drinking beer, partying, chasing after sex partners, going to sporting events, playing video games, hanging out with friends, chatting on Facebook or getting into trouble. It has been said that college is the most fun that most people will ever have in their entire lives, and that is no exaggeration. It is basically one huge party.
Of the little “education” that actually does go on, much of it is so saturated with leftist propaganda that it makes the whole process virtually worthless. Most parents would be absolutely shocked if they could actually see the kind of indoctrination that goes on inside U.S. college classrooms today.
A college education can be worth it for those in fields that are highly technical or highly specialized, but for nearly everyone else it is just one giant money-making scam.
Oh, but you parents please keep breaking your backs to put money into the college funds of your children so that they can be spoon-fed leftist propaganda all day and party like wild animals all night for four years.
It really is a huge scam. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes.
But if you will not believe me, perhaps you will believe some cold, hard statistics. The following are 14 shocking facts about the student loan debt bubble and the great college education scam…
- One out of every four Americans under the age of 40 has outstanding student loan debt.
- Americans now owe 1.773 trillion dollars on their student loans, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
- The average federal student loan debt balance has now risen to $38,375.
- 4.86 percent of all federal student loan dollars were in default as of the fourth quarter of 2024.
- A typical high school student spends about 30 hours in the classroom each week, but a typical college student spends between 12 and 16 hours in the classroom each week.
- One study found that 35 percent of U.S. college students spend 5 hours or less studying outside of the classroom each week.
- That same study found that 50 percent of U.S. college students have never taken a class that required them to write more than 20 pages, and 32 percent of U.S. college students have never taken a class that required them to read more than 40 pages in a week.
- Only 49 percent of full-time college students receive a bachelor’s degree within four years.
- In May 2024, the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree recipients between the ages of 20 to 29 was over 12 percent.
- The median starting salary for a college graduate is approximately $52,000 a year.
- The average starting salary for an electrician is approximately $54,000 a year.
- Today, a whopping 42.7 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt.
- Just 29 percent of all young college graduates in the U.S. that have outstanding student loans say that they are living comfortably.
- #Nearly a third of all college graduates end up moving back home with their parents once their educations have been completed.
What in the world has happened to our system of higher education?
At this stage, it is a complete and utter disaster. Much of the “real learning” that is taking place on college campuses actually occurs in graduate programs. Sadly, many of these graduate programs are now dominated by foreigners.
In fact, it has been estimated that about half of all the graduate science students enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States are now foreigners. Something is very, very wrong.
But should we be surprised that the quality of education at our colleges and universities has gone down so much when the quality of education at every level leading up to college has also been declining?
In some areas of the country, large numbers of students that can barely read are being allowed to graduate from high school.
A population that does not read is much easier for the elite to control. According to a survey that was conducted in 2023, 46 percent of Americans had not even read a single book within the past year.
If you want to be an educated person, get in the habit of reading books. If you don’t know where to get started, I would recommend checking out my latest offering.
Our society spends more on education than any other society in the history of the world has. But our population is certainly not getting any smarter.
Our system of higher education is all about making as much money as possible, and countless lives are being wrecked in the process.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
