Why do people go to grad school? It all depends. In "the humanities," people generally go to grad school because they like to smoke marijuana, or because they dislike the prospect of finding a "real job," or—and this one is key to the whole grad school house of cards—because they "want to teach." The elusive and illusive prospect of a career in academia helps many kids justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on a graduate degree that qualifies them for no other jobs. Strangely, people who major in fields that have actual applicability to the world outside of college campuses have other career goals.

Today, Vanity Fair published several excerpts from the romantic correspondence of a young Barack Obama, displaying a penetrating mind and an impressive command of language on the part of the future president, who had just transferred from Occidental College to Columbia. His letters, as biographer David Maraniss writes, "wove [their] way though literature, politics, and personal philosophy"; our own Maureen O'Connor notes that they "reference T.S. Eliot, 'bourgeois liberalism,' and Jacques Derrida."

America is currently embroiled in a student loan bubble and when it pops, wooo buddy. *Makes whistling sound, gazes off into distance*... let's just say that I hope you can use some lacquer and a long stick to turn your college diploma into some sort of edged weapon to fight off the starving graduate student food mobs. Let's just leave it at that. Let's not get explicit, except to say that banks will literally take your mother's home if you try to not pay them back, so, you know, the weapon thing is maybe the way to go.

The recent near-total collapse of the global economy has had some real negative effects. Life savings wiped out; retirements ruined; people evicted from their homes. The fact that 23-year-olds are working at Starbucks even after they've earned their English diplomas? Not at the top of the list.

¡Hola! That is what the state of Arizona says to its Mexican friends and residents, to distract them from the knife being plunged into their backs at the same moment. The primary problem facing the foreclosure-wracked drought-plagued desert state of Arizona: Mexicans learning things. Arizona will put a stop to that—¡muy rapido!

UCLA was forced to send out retractions to 894 high school seniors who were inadvertently admitted to the elite school following a slip-up on the part of the financial aid office.

Could it be that all of the facile Republican rhetoric about college being for snobbish elites who don't want to connect with real, moral America is absolutely true? Yes. Well. In the sense that college makes you more racist. Though Republicans should support that! So much cognitive dissonance today.

College acceptance letters have begun rolling out for the class of 2016 and, as Steve Cohen of The Daily Beast notes, things are looking especially bleak for so-called "unhooked white girls."

Now look, before all of you undergrad business majors get all hot under your golf shirt collars and start angrily pounding on your cubicle walls and throwing around your fraternity-branded shot glasses: this is not from me, okay? This is from "The Wall Street Journal," a newspaper that you may have heard of at some point in one of your business classes. (If you haven't, that's okay.) It's not that business majors are bad. Not at all. You're just not as sharp as the other kids.

As we know by now, Rick Santorum is no fan of college; recently he took aim at California's state schools for not offering courses in American History. Too bad the claim is completely false, as Stephen Colbert made clear on tonight's Colbert Report. The only question that remains is where exactly did Santorum pull that fact from? You know the answer.

Last weekend, the Washington Post ran an op-ed insinuating that college professors might not "work hard enough," citing high average salaries and relatively low workloads for full-time professors. True? Untrue? It doesn't matter. (Except to academia [=boring].) When it comes to winning these public debates, all that matters are the "optics" of the thing. From Inside Higher Ed:

A new "behavioural capability framework" proposed by the administration at RMIT University in Australia would require professors to be "positive" and "optimistic," as a rule. It would mandate niceness, in academia.

We must admit that we will never ever tire of directing your attention to the accumulation of evidence that "law school" is, by and large, a massive fraud perpetrated upon society's most overacquisitive young driftabouts, and one whose effect is to turn out a massive class of highly indebted functionaries whose skill set is not only undeveloped to the point of worthlessness, but that, when developed, is, for the most part, detrimental to the function of justice. The fact that law school's popularity is crumbling away as the magnitude of the systemic scam becomes ever more apparent can only be taken as a redeeming ray of hope for the future of our nation's collective critical thinking skills.

Santa Monica College is an absolutely god damn humongous community college in California. They have a problem faced by many such institutions these days: no money$$$ from their broke-ass state government, and one bazillion kids trying to get in, because everyone is poor and shit these days. How to take advantage of one of these problems to solve the other? Charge more money$$$, for the "good" classes!

21-year-old Scout Willis is a senior at Brown University and, according to Ivy League gossip blog IvyGate, behind pseudonymous Twitter account @BougPunk where she describes her boozy exploits. Among them: Avoiding Terry Richardson sex acts, stealing from American Apparel, and sneaking into Chateau Marmont (Does the progeny of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore really have to "sneak in"?) and charging snacks to Lindsay Lohan's room.

Not long ago, getting into college involved nothing more than a fair-to-middling G.P.A., an essay about reading to the blind, and your parents' checkbook. Things are a bit more complicated now. College budgets are being slashed. Competition is intense. So intense that kids are starting the "college hunt" in ninth grade. Are you really prepared? You're about to be.

Let's learn about Harvard kids and their senses of humor! A Harvard tipster sends us the following explanation for the video you see above:

When we last checked in on the student loan bubble, debt levels stood at "unimaginably huge." And now? Still unimaginably huge. And poised to destroy your family, as well!

Nice.

Boy were Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum up to some crazy stuff this weekend. Romney couldn't get out of his own way in Michigan, apparently he thought mentioning all the cars his wife drives and all his NASCAR team-owning buddies would help him not seem like an elitist. And Rick Santorum railed against college because being dumb is preferable now. On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart broke it all down.