You’re not going to believe this.
 
Our beloved President Barack Obama gave a speech to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Primarily included in the speech were plans for taxes and education.
 
Here’s where it gets good. Obama has made his position on lower income families very clear from the beginning. Education, he believes, is a critical step for lower income groups to get ahead in life. I tend to agree.
 
In order to prepare future generations of progeny for the real world skills they’ll need, Obama plans to have community colleges team up with McDonald’s Corp., Gap, Inc., Pacific Gas & Electric, Accenture Plc and United Technologies, Corp.
 
Yes. Our saving grace — the missing component to our dilapidated educational system — is that McDonald’s doesn’t run that, too. If the education we give our kids has a slowly degenerating case of Parkinsons, the last thing it needs is a cup of salted death fries.
 
What gives? Will we be taking “Burger Flipping 1001” or “Intro to Re-folding Clothes 1101”?
 
Well, the plan is that McDonald’s will be teaching Professional Literacy programs. PG&E will be training students for jobs in the energy field, in addition to helping community colleges with little things like say, curriculum design. Gap plans to pair up with colleges in seven cities, offering cutting-edge, top-of-the-line, in-store training. The list goes on.
 
First of all, I’d like to step a little out of bounds and say that if a program, any program, is so terribly inefficient, so wonderfully and intensely impotent that it cannot adequately prepare students for jobs like folding clothes at the Gap or working the drive-thru at McDonald’s, we have a serious problem. Throwing money at it is like tossing cash onto the Titanic as it sinks into the murky, ice-cold waters of “we did this to ourselves.”
 
I can hear you already – “Ah, it’s no big deal! Higher education is taking a little cut here and there, just a smidgen, so our brothers in education can get a little help. Ya know, paying it forward, bro.”
 
The cuts that we see in higher education are akin to a friend sending you an e-mail about how they’ve recently lost 45 pounds, and in only a few minutes. “Wow!” you say, impressed, of course. “How’d you do it, friend?”
 
Then they, with the shamelessness only a politician can muster, reply, “Well, I just cut my leg off right here below the hip. I don’t walk so great anymore, but ya’ know, I save a killing on shoes now.”
 
I know, I know — it’s mean to pick on poor Obama because it’s just a poor decision made by a man with good intentions and solely in isolation. Surely, no one with a successful background in the cutthroat, intense and globalized economy we live in now would possibly agree with this.
 
No way.
 
On an absolutely unrelated topic, Melinda Gates, the wife of Bill Gates, said community colleges (the very same currently unprepared, by their assertion, for a McDonald’s job) are “hidden gems,” and has a $35 million love gift to back it up.
 
Imagine it: the computers bought by universities in order to teach us with flagship–quality education, many running on Windows, helped fluff up the Gates’ empire, only to later be given to community colleges for McDonald’s programs. What a joke.
 
Pennies, pennies, compared to what you paid, you hypocritical spender, you.
 
Obama wrote a big ol’ golden check last March in the meager amount of one billion American blood, sweat and tears dollars for community college worker training programs, with your little old name at the bottom.
 
The Associated Press and Standford University did a little curious polling for us because they like to check on how we’re holding up. They found that “we,” or around 71 percent of Americans, think it’s sometimes better for people to head off the community colleges in lieu of four-year universities.
 
Like the Titanic, this is dragging out far too long with too many people involved for me to think this is the least bit funny, and unfortunately, it seems we will be remembered for our tragic failure rather than our beautiful voyage.
 
Devin Graham is a 21-year-old business management senior from Prairieville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_dgraham.
 
 
 
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Contact Devin Graham at [email protected]