There is a shady syndicate in the United States that has perfected the art of stealing from taxpayers; they’re so good that they manage to siphon off hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
But this is no traditional criminal outfit. There’s no ski masks, no getaway cars, no briefcases full of cash.
I’m actually talking about universities— and the incredible scam they play year after year. In fact these guys are so clever that they have enriched themselves beyond belief without violating a single law.
The cornerstone of this theft is the fact that most students borrow money from the federal government in order to pay university tuition. So right off the bat, it’s clear that universities’ main source of cash flow is actually the US taxpayer.
Now, undergraduate students are limited in how much they can borrow from Uncle Sam; currently this amount is ‘only’ $57,500.
But graduate and post-graduate students can legally borrow much more— well into six-figures… or in some cases unlimited amounts of money. And the government is there every step of the way to stump up taxpayer money in the name of higher education.
Since graduate students are able to borrow more taxpayer money, universities obviously charge more for those programs.
These graduate programs make so much money for universities, in fact, that administrators have a huge financial incentive to bring in as many graduate students as possible. I’ll come back to this point.
One thing that’s been really interesting is how universities have been at the forefront of the woke agenda.
Several years ago they moved away from actual, you know, education, and instead began fanning the flames of leftist radical ideology. Universities claimed the moral high ground and insisted that everyone should emulate their righteousness and purity.
They were, after all, the ‘experts’. And the rest of us intellectual peasants should bend the knee to their infinite wisdom.
Yet plenty of people did listen. Through years of the universities’ tireless virtue signaling and efforts to silence dissent, they managed to convince countless students to pursue careers in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion… or some other such woke nonsense.
It turns out that these universities had a massive financial incentive to do so.
You see, you can’t simply conjure new math, science, and engineering degrees out of thin air. Math is real. Science is real. And brand new fields in these “STEM” subjects— which would require new graduate degree programs— only come about through hard work and innovation.
Degrees in AI or data science, for example, didn’t used to exist. Now they do. But it took a lot of very smart people a lot of time and a lot of sweat to create those industries… and hence the need for degrees.
But worthless wokey degrees, on the other hand, can be invented on a whim. University administrators could literally use a random word generator and build a Masters’ program around it. And if it sounds woke enough, they have a built-in market willing to pay for the degree.
Given how lucrative graduate degrees are to universities, administrators have been conjuring these Masters programs at a record pace.
That’s why there’s been an explosion in ridiculous Masters Degree programs over the past decade, such as Tufts University’s Masters (ironic word choice) in “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership”. Or the University of Albany’s “Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” degree. Or UMass Boston’s “Educational Leadership for Social Justice” program.
Many of these worthless graduate programs easily cost north of $100,000. But the students don’t care, because the US taxpayer is fronting the money.
And, hey, when it turns out that a Masters degree in Systemic Racism doesn’t qualify someone to serve fries at Burger King, there’s always going to be some Leftist politician ready to cancel student debt.
In short, the universities helped create the demand by stirring the woke pot. They then invented the supply by creating worthless degrees for holy justice warriors to pursue.
Then they jacked up the price of these graduate programs to $100,000+, had their students borrow all the tuition money from taxpayers, and then funneled money to political candidates who promise to cancel the student debt.
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the other scams they pull— like the fact that most universities don’t pay tax despite their absurd tuition profits.
Or that the tax rate on investment income from their gigantic endowment funds maxes out at 1.4%!!!
Or that universities get to borrow money by issuing cheap, low-yield, TAX-FREE bonds to investors, just like state and local governments.
Pretty crazy when you think about it: universities have managed to scam taxpayers out of hundreds of billion of dollars, all to crank out justice warriors who hate the very country that has so generously given them these benefits.
This isn’t education. It’s grift. It’s indoctrination. And you’re paying for it.
