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There's a time and a place for everything, and that's college. But once those four years are up, it's time for you to get a life. Though their brains were probably pickled in LSD, we're inclined to agree with Pink Ployd's sentiment that "We don't need no education." Only nowadays Roger Waters and the boys have it backward. It's not "them kids” who need to be left alone by teachers. It's the teachers who need some time away from the kids.

You know who you are. You're the twenty- and thirty-somethings who refuse to grow up and get a job. You're the research assistants, TAs, philosophy master's candidates and other lifelong academics who hide behind syllabi and term papers, hoping real life won't notice you. You're the aged book-slinging zombies mindlessly shuffling through the ivy-strewn graveyards of your glory days. Or worse yet. you're the guy who flunked real life and decided to go back to school. To all you professional Peter Pans out there: We're calling your bullshit. You're officially on notice.

First, let's be clear that the venom being spewed here today isn't directed at everyone over the age of 21 who's currently in school. We’re not going to say it’s a waste of time and money to study to become a doctor: that would be preposterous. Emergency rooms will always be understaffed and network television will always need youg medical professionals around whom to base prime-time dramas. Plus census figure show that advanced degrees in medecine, engineering, computers, law, and business translate into higher earnings.

That’s not to say those last two years haven’t earned our scorn. What’s law school, after all, but the great American fallback? You want to know why a million bad jokes start with there being too many lawyers in the world? Because when a college senior puddings his pants at the prospect of entering the real world, law school is an easy out – a three year stay of execution from commitment, responsibility, and accountability. And don’t give us that “I love the law” shit. If you loved the law, that wouldn’t be a stack of dog-eared sex magazines next to your toilet: it’d be Sam Waterston’s autobiography teetering on a pile of John Grisham paperbacks.

Ah, college The young are our future. From the looks of it, we’re doomed. They were the best years of your life—if only you could remember them. But if you were anything like these young scholars, you probably wouldn’t want to. 1980 In January, panicked over a failing grade, Charles Wesley Brown, Jr., walked into the office of an Edward Waters College philosophy professor and shot the man once in the chest, killing him. Brown, it turns out, was dumber than his GPA indicated: He wasn’t even registered in the class. 1987 In the fall, two Winnebagos full of randy Princeton students took off on a tour of Southern women’s colleges. Having left their Kierkegaard at home, the bored Ivy Leaguers turned to playing drinking games, eventually chugging beer out of each other’s shoes. Their trip soured when they came down with nasty cases of trench mouth. 1990 In November, Princeton student B.J. Miller, after drinking enough that it seemed like a good idea, climbed atop a train and touched the car’s 11,000-volt power line. Imagine his shock when he required the amputation of both legs and his left arm. He sued the university, the train company, and everyone who had served him alcohol that night. The education that cost him an arm and two legs cost the defendants $5.7 million in out-of-court settlements. 1993 On a Saturday night in January, Cornell senior Terrence Quinn disappeared. He turned up two days later in the chimney of the Psi Upsilon house. Apparently Quinn tried to sneak in and got stuck, eventually suffocating. He went undetected until the brothers tried to light a fire. 1993 In April, a Penn State woman decided to blow off studying, offering a fellow student $1,200 in stereo equipment to take her exam. The student failed the exam, and then refused to refund the stereo. Furious, the woman went to the police, claiming she had been cheated—not realizing that purchasing academic work, even shitty academic work, is illegal. 1994 A love-struck student at Vassar College decided he wanted to impress his crush, so he lowered himself on a rope outside her window. As he began to serenade her, his rappelling equipment snapped and he fell four floors, breaking both of his legs. 1995 Another Vassar student slipped a date-rape drug into a girl’s drink at the campus bar. Apparently too horny to think straight, he then drank from the glass he had spiked. In a bit of karmic justice, the girl took him back to her room and sodomized him with a strap-on. After consulting an attorney, the male student chivalrously decided not to press charges.

Then there's the MBA - a horseshit degree if there ever was one, invented by businessmen solely interested in surrounding themselves with "their kind," i.e., those privileged enough to piss away 30 large per year learning Excel and PowerPoint. The only reason anyone would need an MBA is because more and more business jobs are requiring them, which is today's equivalent of "No Irish Need Apply." Only this time it's economic discrimination: Such a requirement has less to do with finding the most qualified go-getter for the job and more with making sure the new hire won't look out of place lipping cigars, quaffing brandy, and swapping Skull and Bones stories with the rest of the gang.

But at least a law degree or MBA can make you rich. The shit we're kicking up today is aimed squarely at the sad lot who stretch a higher education beyond four years in order to study something like dance, poetry, art, or the most worthless of pursuits: English.

Money for nothing. "You really have to look at the math when you're doing this," says Liz Pulliam Weston, author of Deal With Your Debt. "What is the payoff going to be down the road? On average, for liberal arts and social sciences, it doesn't pay off to get that master's - especially when you have to borrow money to get it." To reach this conclusion, Weston broke out the abacus and examined the average salaries for specific degrees according to U.S. Census Bureau records. Using the same kind of "present value" calculations that lotteries perform when a toothless hillbilly opts to take the money and run instead of in annual installments, she came up with lump-sum dollar amounts that represent what different degrees are worth in future earnings. On average, a master's in business or engineering is worth in excess of 300 grand more than a bachelor's in either field.

For liberal arts and social sciences, however, a master's is actually worth less than a bachelor's when you take into account what you spend to get it. "The Census Bureau's figures show that someone with a liberal arts master's degree earned just $5 a month more than someone with a bachelor's in the same field," Weston says. "Getting the degree costs you more than you will earn back with it." Sucker.

But it's not just the waste of money that boils our balls. It's that suddenly it's OK for people to tread water in a pool of perpetual adolescence. When did avoiding adulthood become a career ambition?

Long ago, work was an exclusively agrarian affair. From dusk until dawn, your ancestors toiled away on the fields, growing food for the family. Then came the industrial revolution. Your people put down their pitchforks and pulled up stakes for the cobblestone pastures of the city, only to sweat in limb-mangling factories for the privilege of living on top of each other in dingy tenements. Then the information age arrived. Your fathers left the factories and planted their asses in cubicles. They invented the ulcer and began working in hundreds of fields: media, business, insurance, and so on. What's the point of all this?

Your ancestors would kick your monogrammed backpackwearing ass, and those who came before you blazed an endless number of career paths, yet still you've stalled at the starting line.

What makes you think you need all this finishing school, anyway? Is it that you hope to learn something? That's what experience is for, my friend. After freshman year of college, you've got all the fundamentals you need to go out there and grab the world by the taint. By then you've hopefully got your driver's license and you understand the basics of English, literature, mathematics, history, geography, and science. You've spent at least two semesters on your own out of Mom and Dad's nest and held a summer job that kicked your ass. You've smoked your first joint, gotten so drunk that your stomach's contents made a public appearance, and you've had your first lay. You're ready. Everything else you need to know will be taught on the job, or by life.

Don't believe us? Ask yourself who you're trying to learn from: a professor who's so prolific in his field that he hasn't held a job outside of the classroom since the '70s. A shitty boss and a horrible breakup will teach you more about life in a month than your professor.

The sad thing is, in a few years you're going to wake up and realize that you've wasted your life. You will also realize that everyone around you has already come to this conclusion. You think Dad brags to the neighbors about his son, the 30-year-old man-boy? And unless you trawl the stacks at Barnes & Noble for women, they aren't impressed that you can quote Chaucer.

Then there are potential employers. All the thesis statements in the world can't make up for that gaping hole on your resume where your neatly bulleted work experience should be. It tells an employer that you have no balls, no direction, and no place in his organization. That or the person reading your resume has far less schooling than you and thinks you're overqualified or a threat to his own position. You're officially unhirable. So here's our call to action: Grow a sac. Graduate and get a goddamn job. Do it before it's too late. There's still time to die with more dignity than The Sopranos did.

Tom Conlon. No More Education / Higher Learning. . September 2007 / November 1999.

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