Episode 36 - The College Trap

Reagan Faulkner breaks down why the modern university system is financially and culturally broken, arguing that college has become an expensive indoctrination pipeline rather than a pathway to prosperity. She unpacks staggering student debt numbers, inflated tuition, weak job outcomes, and how DEI-driven campus culture, social hierarchies, and radical curricula shape a generation that is over-schooled, under-skilled, and deeply in debt. Drawing on her own experience as a current college student, Reagan contrasts oversupplied white-collar degrees with high-paying blue-collar trades, exposes how “student success” centers rebrand banned DEI, and calls parents and students to either reject the college trap entirely or build competing, truly educational institutions rooted in traditional American values.

Transcript

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What's up guys and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. Now today we're going to be taking on a controversial topic that seems to be getting less and less controversial by the day. Today we're going to be taking on the university system and why college is a scam. Look, we've been lied to. Since kindergarten they've been grooming you for a seat in a lecture hall that you can't afford to get a degree that you don't need to find a job that doesn't exist. We have 43 million Americans suffering from student loan debt. We have 16% of the adult population living on a leash held by the administrative state. You aren't being educated. You are being controlled. Now let's dive in to the numbers because the math really isn't mathing. Generally, colleges are broken up into about three tiers. We're going to have our large public research universities, our mid-sized public research universities, and then our smaller community college. So when we're looking at these large public research colleges and universities, that's going to be about 70,000 to 100,000 students. Then these mid-sized public universities, you'll have about 30,000 to 60,000. Then in these community colleges, you'll have tens of thousands of students sprawled across various campuses. If you're from North Carolina, think about Wake Tech and how you have small subsets of students at multiple different Wake Tech campuses across the triangle. Let's look at what some of these large public universities include. Some of the largest in the United States include Ivy Tech Community College, which has 100,000 students. That's kind of outside of this tier. This is kind of an outlier there. You've got Arizona State University with about 80,000 students. Then you've got the University of Central Florida with about 70,000 students. Ohio State University is in the very high 60,000s of students. They've got 68,000 or 69,000 students. Now, let's talk about the job market. When we talk about this, make sure you keep those numbers that I just told you in mind. There are approximately 90,900 nutritionists in the United States. There are approximately 49,300 journalists in the United States, 16,644 dermatologists, and about 70,000 licensed chiropractors in the United States. These numbers are anywhere ranging from 2023 to 2026. So fairly modern supply and demand shouldn't have shifted that much in three years. Little bit, nothing crazy. These are still fairly accurate numbers. Each of these careers typically requires a college education. Yet if we look at just a subset of these major universities that I just talked about, we often find that they tend to have more students enrolled, literally enrolled in their undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Then there are actual jobs in the fields that are available in some of these industries. I mean, 49,300 journalists is literally the size of like the University of Central Florida is a little less than double the amount of journalists that there are currently employed in the United States of America. This creates an oversupply of graduates for certain professions, for a lot of professions actually. And now what about the cost? Is the cost worth it? Is this going to work out in the end? For a first-time full-time undergraduate student, the average cost of college is about $38,270 per year. According to the Education Data Initiative, the average cost of college has more than doubled in the 21st century with a compound annual growth rate of 4.04%. When you factor in student loan interest, when you factor in the lost potential income that you could have been making when you had a job and you weren't in college, you were working 40 hours a week because you weren't studying, you weren't in college, investing in a bachelor's degree can ultimately cost upwards of $500,000. Think of that, upwards of half a million dollars between what you spend on your tuition, your school supplies, your room and board, your food, and then the lost potential income where you could have been doing another job or another career. Today, student loan debt stands at a staggering$1.8 trillion, spread across about 43 million Americans. Think about that. 16% of our total adult population is suffering from student loan debt. And for what? According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the starting salary for college grads in 2025 was anywhere between $68,680 and $69,600. Meanwhile, the guy who skipped the four-year indoctrination camp to become an elevator mechanic is making $103,000 annually. He has no debt, he has a real skill, and he's actually building the country while you're busy deconstructing your gender in a $50,000 diversity seminar. Who's the smart one now? Let's put that into perspective. Blue-collar jobs often pay equally, if not more. USAWage.com reports that in 2022, elevator installers in federal, state, and local government, that's kind of that specific industry for elevator installers. If you know anything about elevator installers, they can work in a variety of different industries. So elevator installers, they're specifically working in federal, state, and local government, that's going to be like specific government-owned buildings, make a median of $103,610. Elevator installers that work specifically in construction are making about $100,480. UnionPaySkills reports that plumbers across the nation make an average of $94,164 a year based on a 40-hour work week. Salary.com reports that HVAC technicians make an average of $77,780 as of April 1st, 2026. None of these careers require anything greater than a college education, yet they all pay more than the starting salary of a recent college grad. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're probably saying, Reagan, come on, that's just a starting salary. Obviously, those graduates are going to have better incomes after a couple of years of experience. Yeah, you're kind of right in thinking that. It's true, but that's for the graduates that actually manage to find and hold a job. According to the 2025 Cengage Group Graduate Employability Report, only 30% of graduates in that year, 2025, just one year ago, have found full-time employment. Only 30%, that means 60%, have not found full-time employment. If we think about this in terms of the House or the Senate, that's almost a supermajority of recent 2025 college grads that have not found employment. When situations like this arise in a typical market, supply and demand usually neutralizes the problem. For example, when one market is oversaturated and another is undersaturated, these markets typically recalibrate to reach equilibrium, right? That's supply and demand, the invisible hand, right? That's what we think. So, in theory, more people should start getting apprenticeships and fewer people should go to college, and that'll recalibrate our labor market. However, students have been educated since literally elementary school that they need to go to college, and this thinking doesn't go away in a split second or because of the laws of supply and demand. Our kindergarten teachers talked about their alma mater and they told us to go to college. They said, oh, no, you have to come to school so that you can get ready to go to college. In third grade, that's when end-of-grade testing started and we were introduced to the infamous EOGs. Then in middle school, we had to take the PSATs or the pre-SATs. Then in high school, we were forced to take the ACT and the SAT. Most middle- and upper-class Americans never thought that not going to college was even an option for them. Gen Z was forced into unreasonable extracurriculars to be competitive and get scholarships. AP and dual-enrollment classes were forced on our throats to get GPAs over a 4.0, and we were taught that the blue-collar trade school kids in our classes were fundamentally different. We were taught to be perfect. We were taught to overachieve, to go to the best college, to make six figures, to make sure that we could live in the suburbs, buy an SUV, have a couple of kids, and repeat the entire process with them. This cycle is all too normal to modern-day Americans and there's no end in sight. Parents don't wanna pay for tutoring, for sports and coaching and other extracurriculars just for their kids to not go to college and for it to not build their resume. Kids don't wanna work and try this hard and perfect their sport and perfect their academics just to not go to college and have no purpose behind it. I mean, what are you gonna do if you're the state-winning soccer team or whatever four years in a row and you go and become an elevator mechanic? There's no scholarship there. Granted, you don't have to pay to be an elevator mechanic, but what are you gonna do with all that soccer knowledge? Absolutely nothing, and your parents probably spent a couple of grand investing to make sure that you were the MVP on that state-winning team. I mean, here's the caveat. Not doing these extracurriculars, though, because you might think, why don't they just not do it? Why don't they just not invest thousands of dollars into that soccer coaching? Why don't they just tap out, opt out, not do it? It ostracizes the students because now we have originated social hierarchies because of these extracurriculars. They aren't popular. They don't have as many friends. They're seen as antisocial, unathletic, or lazy because the literal rest of the grade or the rest of the school is engaged in these extracurriculars in order to go to college and in order to pursue this life and this path that we've been programmed to believe is the only potential way. Overachievement has raised anxiety in young Americans. It's created a fast food culture because parents are constantly running through this drive-through and that drive-through because little Susie has to get to soccer practice or dance practice or gymnastics practice. And ultimately, it's created a brand new social hierarchy for students in schools. I mean, I saw it at my time at a private school where we referred to everybody as you were either the honors kids, the AP kids, or the standard kids. And it created this social hierarchy where the kids that weren't doing APs and they weren't doing honors classes were kind of treated and thought down by the honors and AP kids because they were just kind of like, oh, they're in the standard classes. They're in the CP classes. Like, they're just, they're not honors. They're never gonna go to this school or that school. It has literally created social hierarchies. If you weren't in this specific out-of-school club, I guess, I did not do club sports, but if you weren't in this specific club sport or that specific club sport, then you were never gonna be in with those soccer girls or with those cheer girls or those gymnastics girls. There are literally social hierarchies that are built for students and Gen Z and Gen Alpha around what groups you're in, what classes you take, even what sport you play. I mean, lacrosse girls were treated completely different than soccer girls. It is insane. It is totally and completely wild. And unless we resolve this part of our American culture, we will never address the college imbalance. We will never stop it. We will never fix the supply and demand and the imbalanced labor market. College prices are going up more and more because Americans still see a value in a college education. So there's more demand and less supply, but the salaries and wages are decreasing because the supply of higher educated Americans is greater than the demand. Not to mention the exceptional failures of the American higher education system, which should be more aptly referred to as the final stage of the American indoctrination system. And guess what? They've rebranded. In North Carolina, they banned DEI. So what did the universities do when they didn't have their favorite baby little DEI? They just changed the name. So now it's called the Student Success and Resource Centers. And it's the same radicalism just with a fresh coat of paint. They aren't teaching you how to succeed. They're teaching you how to be a victim, a perpetual and a permanent victim. They want you to believe that the administrative state is your only hope while they pick your pockets for four years. Think about what they actually teach you. Here are just a few things that Americans are being taught while they're in college. You can change your major as many times as you want, and it's not going to cost you anything. Your college degree is going to cost the same whether you change your major one time, zero times or five times, even if it causes you to take more semesters and take longer to graduate. That's obviously very false. That will cost you a lot of money if your child is not graduating from undergrad for six or seven or eight years compared to the typical four-year path or even graduating early at three years. They teach you that gender is a social construct. They teach you that businesses will fail unless they follow corporate social responsibility guidelines to combat climate change. They teach you that globalization and offshoring are actually good for the country, that it doesn't decrease jobs and lead to places like the Rust Belt. They teach you that you are a fragile, individual, little teapot, and nobody can actually understand your feelings or your experiences because they're intrinsic to yourself, and that means that you can act and do whatever you want because nobody understands your thoughts or experiences or feelings. They teach you that everything is interdisciplinary, and as such, research is more important than actually producing tangible goods. They teach you that capitalism yields oppression and corruption. During orientation, we, at my school, we were taught that sexual assault is a typical experience that most college students will go through and that, basically, you just have to deal with it. They teach you how to identify and help somebody with alcohol poisoning when you're walking back from the dining hallway and somebody's passed out in the middle of the quad and you don't know what to do. They teach you how to engage in hookup culture safely and all the different things that are available in the health center to do that. Now, what they don't teach you is how to effectively plan your classes. They don't teach you the best practices for getting a job during college and how to balance your schoolwork and your job. They don't teach you the best practices for contacting your academic advisors, nor do they teach your academic advisors how to academically advise you. I know, a little surprising, huh? They don't teach you how to avoid the party scene to focus on academics and make sure that you're not one of those people passed out in the quad getting picked up by somebody leaving the dining hall late. And they don't teach you alternatives to, or alternative extracurriculars that aren't partying, things like the mock trial program or student government or other clubs that you can join. Most every college also has diversity centers, which are where students who feel marginalized, such as the LGBTQ plus center, the African-American center, the Asian and Pacific Islander center and the Hispanic cultural centers. That's where those, you know, people who feel marginalized or different or just kind of, I guess, different, really. Those are really the only words that I can think of marginalized and different. That's kind of where the school tells you to go. And in North Carolina, many of these have gone through a multitude of reclassifications where they were the diversity centers and then they became the cultural centers. And now, like I said, they are the student success and resource centers. This is due again to the new statutes from the UNC System Board of Governors banning DEI. So these systems have had to reclassify and disguise themselves as unique opportunities for students in order to raise retention rates. That's where that student success and resource center comes from. It's, at least where I go to school, we call it, there's a student success, student success and retention is one of the big campaigns, one of the big initiatives. So the student success and resource centers, it's supposed to make you think it's for students who are having a hard time getting acclimated to class, make sure that they raise the retention rates. But what it is, is diversity centers that should be banned, camouflaging themselves as something different that not even every student is able to use and they definitely don't teach anything about student success or resources or retention. Now, according to the Education Data Initiative, first-time, full-time undergraduate freshmen have a 12-month dropout rate of 22.3%. And 43.1 million Americans were college dropouts as of July, 2023, with about 1,009,237 of them actually re-enrolling that fall. So not a lot re-enrolled, that's one 43rd, that's not a lot of people re-enrolling. Retention is a big deal for schools, which is why something called the Student Success and Resource Center would be heavily supported. However, at least at my school, they are diversity centers in disguise to avoid being shuttered down after the Board of Governors decisions. Only minority students in each of the classifications are actually socially accepted to go in there. Like if I went into any of these places, any of these cultural centers or diversity centers or whatever they're actually called or whatever they actually are, I would be looked at. I probably wouldn't really be helped or treated correctly. They're there and they say all students are welcome, but there are certain students that can go in there that definitely will be treated different than other people, and that namely would be the groups that they are kind of classified and branded for. They are indoctrination hubs with bookshelves holding literature full of stories concerning America's oppression of underrepresented marginalized communities, discrimination, and yes, critical theory. In order to graduate, students must take diversity and aesthetics classes too. At UNCG, I'm told that they actually have to take a class on sexuality and gender ideology. Again, this is what I'm told, so I could be wrong if anybody from UNCG is listening, DM me, let me know. I would love to know if this is actually true, but that is what I'm told. This is to create the diversity and aesthetics classes that is, this is to create a holistic, well-rounded liberal arts educated student, but radical professors and radical curriculums indoctrinate students that don't have a firm foundation or worldview. They are able to fundamentally change students that did not go into school understanding history, understanding literature, understanding the values and traditions of America. They are able to brainwash them to believe things that are not true. They're able to brainwash them to believe an altered course of history, an altered course of economics, of business, of literature, of every topic that you could imagine. We're told that we must go through this indoctrination camp for four years in order to make money and be successful. However, then we are producing adults that are in debt, that can't find a job, that are convinced they've been oppressed, that literally have a completely warped and altered view of America's histories, traditions, and values. And now they hate America because they were forced to spend literally 22 years preparing for and going to college just to be broke, unemployed, and indoctrinated. They treat you like this fragile little teapot that I've talked about. They tell you that you're marginalized, underrepresented, and oppressed, literally no matter who you are, aside from a straight white man. And they spend four years making you weak so that you're easier to control. We don't want safe spaces. What we want is a job market that actually awards merit instead of awarding equity. History classes teach that our culture in our country is racist and oppressive. Diversity classes teach that DEI and affirmative action are the only answers. Economics and business classes teach that the European socialist countries have it right and that America has it all wrong. This changes voting blocks. This changes culture. This changes attitudes. And yes, this changes our entire country. Higher education is in desperate need of market correction, of reform, and of the purging of radical anti-American professors and curriculums. And no, I don't mean anything violent by purging. I just mean they need to go somewhere else. They need to be exposed for the curriculums and the topics that they're teaching. And if that's what the school wants, then maybe the school should be classified as biased and that they don't follow free expression clauses and really dive into what they actually believe. Or if the schools don't align with those teachings and those curriculums, the professors need to go find somewhere else to be employed. Boards of trustees and governors need more oversight on what these colleges are really doing. I hate bureaucracy. You know that I hate bureaucracy, but I promise no one besides the actual students and oftentimes not even the students at these schools and universities and the directors and chairs of the departments know what is actually happening and what is being taught and who it is being taught by. As a current college student, I can assure you that if normal, rational, traditional parents knew what we were being taught, knew what was happening behind the scenes, knew what was happening on campus, who our professors, our chairs, and our administrators and directors really are, knew what campus therapists and mentors were encouraging students to do, knew the real ROI versus the cost, knew the radical teachings of the student success and resource centers, not a single one would ever actually consider sending their child to a college campus. Not a single rational, traditional, normal parent would ever even consider it. It's time for Americans to do one of two things. Either A, stop going to college, self-educate, create a real life for yourself and reject the culture and indoctrination that we've spent 18 years being programmed into, or B, create actual competition to these public institutions places like Hillsdale College to combat the indoctrination and actually educate Americans through the teachings and values of historically successful techniques inherent to Ivy League colleges before their detrimental radicalization. Again, if parents actually knew what was happening on these campuses, if they knew what the mentors were encouraging their kids to do, if they knew the radical cost compared to what they thought their ROI was going to be of these degrees, not a single rational parents would send their child to university. We have two choices. Either stop entirely going to college and self-educate or we build our own institutions. We need more Hillsdale Colleges and less indoctrination hubs. We've been programmed for 18 years to think that a degree is the only path to a quote-unquote good life. That's a lie. The good life is found in financial independence, it's found in traditional values and it's found in rejecting the culture that wants you broke and compliant. The rebellion of our generation isn't found in a protest or going to a diversity center, it's found in going to a trade school, starting a small business and having a bank account that doesn't belong to the federal government. Stop paying people to hate you and reject the scam. Thank y'all so much for joining me on this episode of the Reagan Faulkner Show. For more, remember to check us out on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and now Substack at the Reagan Faulkner Show and Facebook and Instagram at the Wilmington Standard. And remember, if you're looking for organic, ethically sourced coffee with emission, you can get 10% off your next order of seven weeks coffee using code REGAN2026. That's all caps, R-E-A-G-A-N 2026. Like and subscribe if you enjoyed today's content and comment what you want me to cover next. Thank y'all so much and I will see you on the next one.