This letter to the editor was submitted to the Wall Street Journal, which this morning ran two separate but tangentially related news stories: one about millennials bemoaning the mountains of student loans they buried themselves under to pursue ultimately useless graduate degrees from “prestigious” universities; and the other about the sentencing of convicted extortionist and once ubiquitous media star Michael Avenatti. It was copied to several tone-deaf university leaders and professors, including Columbia president Lee Bollinger and filmmaking professor Katherine Dieckmann, quoted in the first story trying to justify the unjustifiable costs of their graduate programs.
To the Editor:
One can’t help compare the gullibility of whiny 20- and 30-somethings who somehow thought it was a good idea to go $300,000 into debt for a master’s degree in filmmaking to the blindly partisan “journalists” who somehow thought it was a good idea to lionize for nearly two years the self-dealing Trump-antagonist, con-man and now convict Michael Avenatti (“Top Master’s Degrees Fail to Pay Off,” front page, and “Avenatti Is Sentenced to 2 ½ Years for Extortion Attempt Against Nike,” A3, July 9).
Another thing these easily suckered dopes have in common is they think they should be free to lead a radical “reimagining” of our 245-year-old nation in their woke if infantile image.
In any case, the next time some millennial or middle-aged hipster from NPR or CNN tries to tell Americans how they should think, speak or act, just remind them of their quarter-million dollar master’s degrees, subsequent dog-walking and retail-clerk careers, and Mikey “The Shyster” Avenatti.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.
Editor’s note: Had the dog-walking, shelf-stocking film graduates done their homework before assuming soul-crushing, life-altering debt, they’d have learned that film industry legends Louis B. Mayer dropped out of school at age 12, John Huston at 15, and Billy Wilder never attended college. The lesson being that, if you have true talent and passion, a graduate degree won’t make much difference. And if leftist Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were really committed to reducing or ending student debt, they’d urge the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Education and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to investigate the master’s-mill rackets being run by the likes of Columbia, Northwestern and other institutions of higher scamming.