College Scam

John Stossel is usually right on-target and I agree completely with him that college in the United States is a huge scam. As Stossel argues, the statistic that people who go to college make much more than those who don't is total bunk. He writes the "statistic misleads because many successful college kids would have been successful whether they went to college or not" because the pool of college-bound kids are "are the kids who already tend to be more intelligent, harder-working and more persistent." I have often had the same thought. Personally, I make my living with skills I mostly taught myself. I don't use what I learned in college and graduate school. I program computers even though I didn't major is computer science. I did take a number of programming courses at a local community college and at the USDA Graduate School in DC, which offers moderately priced courses in specific subjects to adults. Acquiring skills on the job and through courses at vocational schools and community colleges makes so much more sense then spending a fortune at a four year university.

Inauguration Day

President Obama's speech sounded pretty good but there wasn't anything very memorable about it. I can't think of any phrase from it that will be remembered. The only screw-up of the day was the actual oath which Chief Justice Roberts garbled, which threw off Obama. Two graduates of the Harvard Law school who served on its Law Review and they can't get the presidential oath of office right. Oh well.