YOUNG PEOPLE WITH SKILLS AND DECENT-PAYING JOBS?:  This is the answer to the question posed by Rolling Stone’s Mike Konczal, who asks, “What’s left after higher education is dismantled?”  This answer is inconceivable to Konczal, who argues instead for more public funding of dysfunctional higher education:

[T]hese stories tell us what is likely to happen as the public university system weakens: nothing. No one will step in to fill this crucial role of providing quality, mass higher education. In the first case, resources will go to bidding wars over whose name will go on a fancy building – vanity projects perfect for this age of inequality that will do nothing to provide education. In the second case, resources are extracted out to shareholders and executives in imploding Ponzi schemes, leaving behind nothing but students with poor educations saddled up to their eyeballs in debt.

Mass higher education – starting with the land-grant schools in the Nineteenth Century, and continuing through the GI Bill and the mid-century expansion – has always been a public project. And we need to embrace it.

This is why the recent proposals to expand and solidify public free higher education are essential.

Exactly wrong. There’s nothing of particular “quality” at public universities–they are as full of progressive, dollar-driven non-education as anyplace else.  The fundamental problem is that there are far too many young people going to college in the first place. If they obtained skills that society actually needs–plumbing, electrician, HVAC, carpentry, mechanics–they would get good, decent-paying jobs very quickly, and they wouldn’t be saddled with debt and forced to work in unskilled jobs. Throwing more money at higher education is akin to giving heroin to an addict: it just enables their destructive behavior, and they’ll greedily take it.