James Altucher: College is a scam — so let’s make money off it

[marmar]

College is a scam — so let’s make money off it
Commentary: Debt creates generation of indentured servants

By James Altucher


NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — We can’t deny it anymore: College is a scam and a bubble — and the reasons why appear below. But I’ll be the first to admit it’s going to take years for that bubble to burst. And while college tuitions are still skyrocketing and student-loan debt is creating a generation of indentured servants, we might as well benefit from it.

Many stocks will continue to go up from the multidecade college bubble, even as it eventually bursts.

The Washington Post Co. , which owns Stanley Kaplan, gets all of its earnings from the education side of its business, while Blackboard is the firepower underneath online course management. Google has all the knowledge in the world at your fingertips and also is trying to get into the online course management game. And Apple’s increasing MacBook Air sales are due to colleges buying them for their labs. Then there’d probably be a basket of the cheaper online education schools like Apollo Group, etc.

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People tell me, “There’s a huge income gap between people with a college degree and people without a college degree.” To that I say, “Did you take Statistics 101 in college?” That spurious statistic is making the rounds but fails the basic test of an accurate statistic. It has selection bias. It also ignores cause versus correlation. That’s Chapter 1 of the Statistics 101 textbook. A true test would be to take 2,000 people and separate them into two groups of 1,000. Group A is not allowed to go to college. Group B goes to college. Twenty years later, let’s see how they are doing. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/college-is-a-scam-lets-make-some-money-off-it-2011-05-26?link=mw_home_kiosk