Chief Chaos (although I do largely agree with him) needs to remember that the constitution hasn't always been what it's cracked up to be. Let's not forget that it originally contained numerous protections of slavery, to say nothing about women's voting rights until the second decade of the 20th century.

There's a larger issue at hand here, and I hope that I can shift the debate away from vilification of Martin Gibson, or anyone else above.

Why is it assumed that college is correct for everyone. The world needs plummbers, so to speak (who are likely to FAR outearn many college graduates, even at the masters and PhD levels). The fact that in this country, everyone is expected to go to college has so diluted the process that a BA is roughly the equivalent of a high school diploma, an MA is the new bachelors degree, and a PhD means that you might have some inkling of what's going on in your field.

There are plenty of people in college for personal growth, which is great, but there are also plenty there who are just doing it because they're tracked into it. Some of these are rich kids partying on daddy's money for four years, but others go to great financial effort to struggle through, for no real benefit, personal growth or otherwise.

Most of the northern European social democracies have varying levels of education, trade school, industrial, professional, and managerial education--in other words, JOB TRAINING, that actually do offer some assurance that one's education will correspond with one's job.

The World War II generation rightly considered a college education a way to get ahead. It's not like that anymore because just about everybody does it.

The trick now is to demystify higher education. There are plenty of people who don't belong in college. They shouldn't take up the space and resourses that someone who really wants to be there, regardless of income level, could be utilizing. I'm not saying that folks should become slackers, just that they should take the training that will give them the job they really want, and if they don't know what they want, working before deciding serves both them and the serious studnets in college far, far better. If college not for them, there's really no shame in other occupations, which leads me to my final point.

America has always been a classed society, because someone needs to do the manual labor. To suggest that the millions of non-college educated workers are somehow being deprived smacks of classism itself. It's the same kind of haughty superiority of a college education that created the attitude that has so glutted the system with people who shouldn't really be there. Even if every manual laborer in America earned a college degree, someone would still need to do that kind of work, even if it meant increased immigration. That manual labor still has plenty of value, and shouldn't be slighted just because the laborer didn't have the opportunity to go to college. Maybe his or her children will, thus continuing the patterns of immigrant generational betterment occuring in this country since its inception.

So, I ask again, why is it assumed that college is right for everyone?