Rick Santorum: Obama "Snob" for Advocating College Education

Rick Santorum has a LAW DEGREE, for goodness sake!

A snob is defined as a: A person who seeks to be, or is, a member of the upper classes and looks down on lower classes, such as the middle class and the poor. More generally, an egotistical person who often thinks of people as inferior, particularly anyone not being within their clique or class.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snob

Rick Santorum is a moron.

I haven't yet seen anything that Santorum has commented on that hasn't revealed some combination of hatred, lies, and misunderstanding making up the bulk of his message. There is no job, and there is no one's life that can't be made at least a little better by having more knowledge. It might not be necessary, but it can help.

He feels the need to bad-mouth college professors because they deal with facts and critical thinking, and facts and the truth are Santorum's worst enemy.

His comments about college professors "indoctrinating" students seem to point towards suspecting that college professors are all collaborating to present one unified, government-specified, political message to students - my years in college showed me that nothing could be further from the truth: no two professors I had espoused the same views politically, and I was just exposed to a wide range of viewpoints. The only things that all the professors agreed upon were: dishonesty is bad, researching and learning facts and the truth are good, verify everything you can, and organization makes most things easier.

Obama never said everyone has to, or even should, go to college. What he said was that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college. College should just be for middle and upper class people. College, and all education, should be available for everyone who wants it. The constant anti-education, anti-science, anti-thinking drumbeat by the Republican party will ruin the future of this country.

"There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor. And trying to indoctrinate them."

Except for the "liberal college professor" comment, I agree.

We need a system that guides young folks towards their skill/interest level. Machinists are in short supply, attorneys are not.

If we send everyone to college we're not going to have fewer garbage men, welders, or carpenters, we're just going to have more costly sanitation engineers, metal artists, and constructional architects performing the same services...

@ James Smith, That's right, Republicans want dumber kids, dirty air, dirty water and to kill grandma.

It sure would be nice to hear the whole segment so we could grasp the full context other than a short clip obviously intended to make him look like "big evil Republican". Perhaps he is simply saying that you don't need a degree to be successful, that it is entirely within your grasp to be successful with out going into debt taking out student loans. I talked to an occupier and he said just that, "everyone tells you you need to go to college, so we take out these student loans, then we graduate and can't get a decent enough job to pay them back." That's the problem, we push school on kids who may not be cut out for it. College isn't for everyone, it is possible to be successful with out college, it is possible to be an entrepreneur with out college, it is possible to make $50k+ a year with out college. That is the problem, that is why there are too many lawyers in this country, that's why folks are graduating with 40-100k in student loans and default because no one told them not to take out those student loans if you were getting a degree that will only earn you 40K a year.

Nothing is wrong with seeking higher education, one must be smart about it and exercise common sense though Don't take out student loans. Maybe it will take you 10-12 years to get your BA or BS but at least it will be yours; you won't have "financed" your little piece of paper that says your smart. Just because you have a sheet of paper that says your smart, doesn't mean your smart. Some of the dumbest people I know have been college educated and some of the smartest people I know have never crossed the threshold of an institution of higher learning. It is possible to be smart and successful with out college. That is what he is saying.

People are better off with more knowledge and abilities than with fewer. Going to college is one way to increase that. Learning a trade through jr. college and apprenticeship or via trade-school is another way. Making the most of one's high school time, whether via a pre-college or vocational track, is yet another.

Sending everyone to college will be a huge waste of time and money, because most jobs that require college do so only as a screening device to identify people who are more intelligent and/or more disciplined than average, not because the job requires any knowledge that could not have been learned by a smart person in high school.

Send everyone to college, and employers will simply have to switch to some other easy way of screening out below-average candidates. (I suppose Obama's plan is to use the EEOC to prevent that. But that won't work; if employers are unable to legally select the more intelligent and/or disciplined people to hire, they'll just lose out to foreign competition all the faster.)

The main concern is the needs for the modern world require college educated people. Obama should have said, "Everyone should have the opportunity to go to college."