Leave it to Jon Stewart to encourage America’s youth to skip college and avoid all the financial woes involved in getting a diploma.
The “Daily Show” host included a parody of the 1978 documentary “Scared Straight” on his show last week, featuring a recent college graduate who tries to scare some high school students “at risk of receiving a college education” out of enrolling in university upon graduation.
“I screwed my life up going to college – a private institution,” TJ, the college grad, told the high school students. “Did research. Didn’t think when I took loans out. I owe $170,000. That’s a lot of money!”
Stewart’s version of the documentary also included an interview with a career advisor who spoke of the declining benefits of a college degree, advising them instead to pursue more hands-on, career-oriented programs after high school. The advisor’s argument: that many students with college degrees end up doing jobs that they could have been done right out of high school anyway, like bartending, without acquiring the debt that comes with going to college.
“I thought there must be a degree in bartending,” the interviewer commented. “No, that’s called English literature,” the counselor responded.
Despite the other supposedly more attractive options out there, and the acknowledgement that “student loans are like herpes with compound interest,” the high school students all responded that they still planned to pursue a higher education degree.
You can watch the segment below.
