> Since you kept it relatively civil, I won't
I applaud your restraint!
> . . . higher education is retrograde . . . not to create yet another barrier
The individual being discussed in this essay is far from unique. The question is whether many poor people aren't being saddled with even more debt for very little payoff; debt that the education lobby has made it very difficult to escape. Poor people studying in subjects for which there is likely to be a good return on the investment ought to still be able to get loans. But you won't see as many poor womens' studies majors. And you won't see as many poor kids woefully underprepared for college going in the first place to throw five or ten thousand dollars and two years of earning potential in the garbage when they have to drop out.
I think the takeaway is that sometimes it is good to limit peoples' ability to get credit if it's not going to be used for a productive purpose that's likely to result in it being paid back. But since you can't discharge the debt through bankruptcy, the banks have no incentive to help make this determination. I don't mean that there should be government mandated limits, by the way; I just want the government to stop giving people nooses to hang themselves with.
The other factor is that if we stop propping up the market, colleges will likely be forced to stop charging so much money, especially the private ones. Or they will do something like what Stanford has done and adopt a graduated pay scale to maintain that desirable trait of diversity.
> Picking a subject out of the sky
If you'll read the article you'll note that the person in question was a women's studies major. It's hardly picked out of the sky. But even if it was, what does it matter if I picked an example out of the constellation of disciplines whose study do not deserve financial support? I could have picked religious studies too but I had forgotten that part of her degree's name.
> What if evolution had to abide arbitrary rules
Might as well call gravity, by which evolution does have to abide, "arbitrary." The rule that makes Women's Studies retarded is that it's not a productive or useful course of education. To wit:
1. Essentially no one except a government subsidized education facility and a few rare counseling jobs will pay you more at the margin for having a degree in Women's Studies because it is useless and nobody wants to pay for that.
2. Women's Studies is not, in most cases, very important in determining how effective a feminist you will become.
So if no one will pay for it and it offers little broader societal benefit that we might want to subsidize, what is it for? The entire field, like academic literary criticism, is masturbatory. That is why it is stupid and study in it should not be subsidized. Especially for poor people who cannot use it to climb out of their difficult situation.
