The graphic illustrating higher education’s bubble (linked to by George) reminded me of a fundamental fallacy of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Their sense of entitlement is nowhere more astounding than in the call for a student-loan “jubilee.” Even if you wracked up $80,000 in debt at an ivy league school majoring in music therapy, society (i.e., productive, tax paying citizens) owes these people a break.

Here comes the fallacy: The peddlers of the notion that everyone must go to college have said that a bachelor’s degree, in itself, is a ticket to a good job and secure future. That’s not the case. It’s the skills learned — or, more often, not learned — in college that make a graduate valuable or not valuable in the marketplace. The piece of paper known as a degree is supposed to represent those skills, but with the surplus of college graduates nowadays, and the relative ease of attaining a degree, that pool has been diluted. A four-year degree doesn’t mean today what it did several decades ago.

Lefty writers are complaining that Millennials were sold a bill of goods on the promise that a degree was a ticket to financial bliss. Maybe we were. But somewhere, common sense has to kick in and we need to apply our gray matter. Weighing the implications of your major area of study and career choice is a good place to begin. And not expecting the rest of us to pick up the slack for your choices is a good place to end.