Housing bubble, economy, education bubble

     Years ago, I got myself in a jam with then-governor William Donald Schaffer by blowing the whistle on colleges like the University of Maryland.  Colleges, I said, are in the business of making money, and the best place to find money is in the bank accounts of parents who want their children to get a college degree so they can make more money.
    Maybe you've noticed the word "money" comes up a lot. Which is okay. You have to have money to do just about anything, even gather a group of volunteers to give free lunches to the needy, but the lunches, of course, are not free, because food costs money, and somebody has to pay for the food ---  Anyway, money is the operative word.
    Until, that is, they have your money, and then the message changes. Colleges market the idea that they will give your child/student the credentials they need to make money, but the real idea of any good college is to engage students in learning, life-long learning, for the sake of learning.
      Okay.  All I was saying, don't take my money as the parent of a student under false pretenses. It's about the kid getting a job in his or her field, of course, and that might require my money, but don't take my money, then tell my kid there's no room in the classes he wants to take because the college has a policy of promoting opportunities for the less fortunate, who are getting some of my money so they can go to college and push my kid out of the courses he needs to graduate.
     It might sound complicated, but it's not. It's about money, until it's about social justice or equal opportunity or diversity or whatever. I can even support the ideal, but let me donate separate money for that -- not tuition to a school that won't let my kid take a course because someone from Nepal has registered and they need that profile to meet the diversity objective.
    All of which brings me to this point:  We all are beginning to get the point that a housing bubble happens when you violate the basic rules of putting too much into something with too small a return. Duh. The economy bubble bursts when you owe more than you can pay.
     A bubble is something full of air, without substance or strength, meaning not real, or invalid.
     When you think about it, the costs of housing and the economic bubbles are caused by unrealistic expectations. Houses cost too much more than they are worth, simply put. Jobs are lost when someone figures out that salaries are too much, too many, too -- superfluous.
     But you have to pay big salaries because money is how we gauge success. So expensive, over-sized houses that we really don't need are on the market, bought in large part by people with college degrees that cost a lot of money.
     If you're still with me, let me put it this way before you jump ship:  What if we decide to pop all the bubbles?
     What if we get an education because we want to be educated, not paid big money?
     What if we pay for work according to what it's worth, not according to the degree required to apply for the job?
     What if we hire smart people for certain jobs whether they have the questionable credentials of certain college degrees?
     I can make a cracker-jack reporter out of a bright, inquisitive and industrious person of any age, gender or nationality, but I can't justify paying today's average reporters with a college degree enough to cover his college loan debt -- assuming he's competent in the first place (an assumption that is too often made just because he has a degree).
     If we started with realities instead of marketing, greed, and phony credentials or images as goals, we could avoid a lot of life's bubbles.