I arrived at Ohio State as an undergraduate student in the early 1980s carrying an agreement I had never signed but nevertheless felt compelled to honor. My parents had written the terms in a language every working-class and middle-class household of that era spoke fluently:
Go to college. Choose something respectable. Graduate. Find a career, settle into it, and stay until retirement rewards you with a pension, a pat on the back, and the proverbial gold watch.
I chose sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences because it allowed me to read widely and think critically about how people organize themselves into families, tribes, markets, and states.
I do not regret my studies at Ohio State. What disappoints me is how long it took me to recognize that the institution placing those books in my hands was also, quietly and continuously, teaching me to confuse grades with understanding and a diploma with competence.
That confusion has a name: schooling. In 1971, Ivan Illich warned that it teaches students “to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.”
I was that student. Most of us were.
The four-year degree is not inherently a racket, nor is it useless. It remains essential for certain professions and valuable for many students. The racket begins when government-backed financing, accreditation privileges, and employer credentialism turn one educational option into a compulsory cultural permission slip.
The Bargain My Parents Made on My Behalf
My parents were not wrong to want me to earn a diploma and become gainfully employed. Even as highly educated professionals themselves, they had witnessed enough instability to understand that a young person left adrift can quickly get caught in a riptide of job uncertainty.
But the bargain they struck on my behalf, the same one nearly every family of their generation struck, rested on an assumption that has quietly ceased to be true: that four years inside lecture halls offered the only reliable bridge between adolescence and a livable adult life.
According to Indeed Hiring Lab, only 19 percent of job postings on Indeed in the United States now require a bachelor’s degree. It is important to note that job-posting language also does not necessarily predict who employers will ultimately hire.
Meanwhile, the first rung of the ladder that a degree was supposed to guarantee, the entry-level job, is disappearing fastest for young people entering occupations affected by artificial intelligence.
Employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in highly AI-exposed occupations was 19 percent below where it would have been had it kept pace with their peers in less-exposed occupations. Researchers refer to this as a descriptive pattern, not proof that AI caused the decline. Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Is a Four-Year Degree Still Worth It?
Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and later created the Thiel Fellowship through the Thiel Foundation to pay talented young people to pursue their ambitions outside college, has said what most university administrators will not say aloud.
He describes higher education as “a zero-sum tournament masquerading as general insurance.” He compares the modern university to the Catholic Church of five hundred years ago, complete with “a priestly class of professors that doesn’t do very much work,” while students plunge into debt “buying indulgences” in pursuit of “the secular salvation that a diploma represents.”
A fund established by former Thiel Fellowship partners extends that metaphor. Calling itself part of a “New Reformation,” the 1517 Fund argues that universities “sell pieces of paper” while telling students “they can’t be taken seriously without them.”
I know these words will infuriate some people who have built careers, identities, and entire family mythologies around the sanctity of the university.
Good. They should.
Because any institution that has convinced an entire civilization that a piece of paper is a prerequisite for being taken seriously deserves precisely the kind of irreverence Martin Luther brought to a church selling forgiveness by the pound.
Meanwhile, Thiel Fellows helped build Ethereum, Figma, and companies worth tens of billions of dollars without first collecting college diplomas.
The Diploma as a Modern Indulgence
None of this means that college is worthless or that every degree is a racket, for it is clear that some professions demand extensive formal preparation. Obviously, we would prefer that our surgeon have studied anatomy in medical school rather than through a weekend YouTube marathon. Engineering, scientific research, law, medicine, and other specialized fields often require laboratories, supervised practice, expert instruction, and credentials tied to genuine competence.
College can also offer something more difficult to measure, which is intellectual community, lifelong friendships, professional networks, and a protected period in which young people encounter ideas they might never discover on their own. For students who choose that experience deliberately, understand its cost, and need it for the work they intend to pursue, a degree may remain an excellent investment.
The self-government argument isn’t intended to throw shade on those who attend college. It is simply suggesting that no single educational pathway should enjoy state-supported status as the default entrance fee to adulthood. Education becomes coercive when one model is treated not as a choice, but as the price of being considered employable, respectable, or fully formed.
What Confucius Actually Taught About Learning
Confucius drew precisely the distinction American higher education has spent a century erasing. “In ancient times, men learned with a view to their own improvement,” he said. “Nowadays, men learn with a view to the approbation of others.”
He was describing the incentive structure I encountered in my social theory and philosophy courses during the 1980s. He also brings light to today’s graduation ritual, where families often applaud a credential rather than the cultivated mind it is supposed to represent.
Confucius did not romanticize poverty or idleness. He himself held office and wanted his students to lead productive lives. But he refused to make career advancement the purpose of learning. When “Zi Zhang was learning with a view to official emolument,” Confucius redirected him toward substance over salary. “The object of the superior man is truth,” he taught. “Food is not his object.”
Mencius sharpened the point by distinguishing “the nobility of Heaven,” meaning character, virtue, and wisdom, from “the nobility of man,” meaning titles, rank, and credentials. The ancients acquired the second as a byproduct of cultivating the first.
“The men of the present day,” he warned, “cultivate their nobility of Heaven in order to seek for the nobility of man, and when they have obtained that, they throw away the other. Their delusion is extreme.”
Think about every parent, guidance counselor, and admissions brochure steering an 18-year-old toward “the degree that gets you the job.” Mencius diagnosed that delusion twenty-three centuries before U.S. News & World Report began ranking colleges by graduates’ starting salaries.
Imagining Higher Education Without the State
Let me push the narrative I’m presenting to its natural conclusion, one that should make traditional educators genuinely angry: What if government simply left higher education alone?
No federal loan guarantees enabling institutions to inflate tuition because they know students can always borrow more. No accreditation cartel deciding which schools will be treated as legitimate and which will not. No tax subsidies propping up a system that has more than doubled in prices in the 21st century, with a compound annual (tuition) growth rate (CAGR) hovering at around 4.04%.
Murray Rothbard asked the only question that matters here decades before anyone was debating student debt forgiveness. “The key issue in the entire discussion,” he wrote, “is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child?”
Robert LeFevre answered that question with an actual school rather than another theory. He opened the Freedom School in the Colorado Rockies on the belief that “if you can educate men to control themselves, the social whole will take care of itself,” as he explained in Rampart Journal.
Imagine an educational marketplace built on that premise rather than federal financing. Employers certify competence through demonstrated work instead of outsourcing that judgment to university admissions offices. Mentors and master craftspeople replace lecture halls, just as they already do in the trades. Families invest what they choose, in the education they choose, answerable to no bureaucracy beyond the consequences of their own judgment.
Lysander Spooner demonstrated the power of this kind of reform in 1835, when he launched a well-aimed argument against a Massachusetts law protecting credentialed lawyers from competition. Within a year, the legislature repealed it, according to Georgetown Law.
Sometimes dismantling a cartel begins with nothing more dangerous than exposing it.
Is the Exit Already Underway?
This is not merely imaginative. It is already happening, quietly, at scale.
By way of example, American homeschooling has grown to roughly 3.4 million students, about 6.3 percent of the school-age population, expanding at nearly three times its pre-pandemic pace (NHERI; Reason).
Public schools spend an average of $17,619 per public-school pupil for fiscal year 2024 (U.S. Census Bureau).
Registered apprenticeships have grown 114 percent over the past decade, and electricians with nothing more than a high school diploma and an apprenticeship now earn a median $62,350 a year (Community College Daily; BLS).
Each of these numbers represents a family that decided, without waiting for permission from Washington, that self-sovereignty over a child’s education is not a slogan. It is a household budget line.
Wu Wei and the Return to the Sovereign Self
Taoism has a name for what happens when we stop struggling against the nature of things and allow life to follow its natural course. It is called wu wei: action without force.
For the past century, American higher education has tried to force a river to flow in one direction. It has dammed 18-year-olds into a single channel and persuaded generations of families to call that dam a bridge.
Confucius urged us to learn for our own improvement. Mencius taught us to cultivate the nobility that no institution can bestow and no market crash can take away. The Tao asks us to stop expecting a system built on external validation to produce internally sovereign human beings.
Is the four-year degree still an investment, or has it become a state-supported permission slip? If you were advising an 18-year-old today, would you recommend college, an apprenticeship, entrepreneurship, or another path entirely?
In an age that demands independent thought, true education may begin the moment you realize that you are free to chart your own course toward educational sovereignty.
