As someone with a professional degree from the Ivy League, and therefore as someone with a vested interest in maintaining the mystique and prestige of higher education: Educational institutions are parasites on American youth and we should not subsidize them.

If you want an education in the modern world, it's free and RIDICULOUSLY convenient -- just log on to Coursera, Udacity, or edX and learn any subject to your heart's content in your local coffee shop, from the finest instructors in the world. You're free to pursue any field of study at whatever pace you choose at no cost.

Kids should NOT be encouraged to take out no-default loans upwards of $200k to get a certificate in art history. (I say this as someone who borrowed a ton of money for a worthless humanities undergraduate degree and a slightly less useless professional degree.) If you want to read poetry, join a book club. There's no reason why society should subsidize the pursuit of degrees that don't qualify the holder for any particular job and don't provide any particular return on investment.

But because an undergraduate degree has become the new high school diploma, any kid who doesn't get one has almost no chance of landing a professional job. So all students with potential are locked up with academic busywork until at least age 21. This isn't too bad for the future doctors and engineers, whom we want certified in biology or physics... but there's no point for most people to get degrees in business or the humanities. Why do we care if our poets or salesmen have Irish Studies certificates?

By now, entire generations have given up their youths in exchange for significant debt and pointless certificates, rather than starting new businesses, writing new books, or creating new industries. And this debt impacts lower socio-economic classes the hardest, despite idiotic rhetoric that the only thing holding us poors back from billionaire status is a Cornell class in gender studies. We have the least capacity to absorb such a heavy cost. And since we're often ill-prepared for STEM courses (and through affirmative action we're placed in competition against students with higher aptitudes and more academic cultures), many of us pursue pointless-but-easy degrees that give us no professional skills to pay back such huge debts.

We should subsidize higher education for fields with high ROI, and immediately cease subsidies and loans for all other academic pursuits. In practice, this means doctors and scientists can and should go to college for free; poets can join a book club or pay out of pocket. (No, rich people won't have an inherent advantage now that they alone can afford Irish Studies certificates.) This frees up the youngest, most innovative segment of our population to join the work force; ends the debt slavery that most Millenials will suffer through our old age; and disentangles profit-seeking institutions from actual education.

Let young adults discover, innovate, and contribute to the world. Higher education is little more than a long party interrupted by pointless busywork and a long debt hangover. I have no intention of sending my kids to college (if I can eventually afford to have kids) unless it's absolutely required for their professional careers. And by then, I hope society at large will recognize most undergraduate and masters degrees as the participation medals they are.