HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher host Bill Maher slammed higher education as a “grift” and a “luxury daycare center” staffed with “overpaid babysitters,” on the latest episode broadcast Friday.
Maher began his “New Rule” monologue segment by saying that President Joe Biden’s “American Families Plan” is an endorsement of the idea “that the more time humans spend in classrooms, staring at blackboards, the better.”
“Liberals see more school the way Republicans see tax cuts — as the answer to everything,” he continued. “We imagine going to college as the way to fight income inequality, but actually, it does the reverse.”
“If you have a bachelor’s degree, you make about 65 percent more than someone who doesn’t, and with a master’s degree, it’s more like 100 percent more,” Maher explained. “And the unemployment rate of college grads is about half what it is for high school grads.”
Therefore, he asked, “Is it really liberal for someone who doesn’t go to college and makes less money to pay for people who do go and make more?”
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Maher went on to call colleges “giant, luxury daycare centers, with overpaid babysitters anxious to indulge every student whim.”
“Why is China kicking our ass? Because in 2019, we issued more undergrad degrees in visual and performing arts than in computer and information science or math,” he quipped.
The talk show host then mentioned actress Lori Loughlin — who served a two-month jail sentence for her role in the infamous college admissions bribery scam — stating, “Say what you want about Lori Loughlin, at least she understood that one good scam deserves another.”
Maher also argued that “colleges are businesses, selling a consumer product for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” giving customers a “magical piece of paper” to credential themselves.
“In the grift that is our higher education, when you want to ‘move up’ — hold on there, not so fast, toll booth ahead — you need to pay for more ‘education’ before we decide if you can do what you do,” he added. “Fuck, this is what Scientology does, makes you keep taking courses to move up to the bridge of total freedom.”
Maher also pointed out the fact that the cost for obtaining a college degree has gone up four times the rate of inflation, and colleges are getting away with charging “whatever they want” because a degree is “so necessary” in order to move up in society.
“Since 1985, the average cost of college has risen 500 percent — it doubles every nine years,” he explained. “Every year it increases at four times the rate of inflation. And yet, no one knows how to change a tire.”
“The answer isn’t to make college free. The answer is to make it more unnecessary — which it is for most jobs,” he declared.
Despite his long history of left-wing ideology, Maher has turned against the more totalitarian, “woke” faction of progressives in the past year.
Last month, the talk show host lamented that the left has become the party of “speech codes and blacklists and moral panics.”
“I don’t want to live in a world where liberals are the uptight ones and conservatives do drugs and get laid,” Maher said. “Once upon a time, the right were the ones offended by everything. They were the party of speech codes and blacklists and moral panics and demanding some TV show had to go. Well, now that’s us.”
“We’re the fun-suckers now,” he added. “We suck the fun out of everything: Halloween, the Oscars, childhood, Twitter, comedy. It’s like woke kids on campus decided to be all the worst parts of a Southern Baptist, and that’s wrong. Because it’s cultural appropriation.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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