The specter of college haunts Maggie Walker like a ghost haunts an old Victorian mansion. It permeates the very fabric of our educational domicile. Everybody applies to college — everybody is obsessed with college. But everybody is wrong. College may just be the greatest scam of the twenty-first century. Everything you’ve done, from when you first cried after being born (trying to gain sympathy from an admissions officer, I’m sure), to reading this article in The Jabberwock (to show colleges you’re an “enlightened individual”), has all been for naught. Unfortunately, it is our utmost regret to inform you that you have wasted the last fifteen to eighteen years of your life. View us not as gleeful messengers, but as sorrowful prophets, merely spreading the truth of the universe.

First, like many, I know you hate hypocrites. We personally are the biggest hypocrites, and also hate ourselves (we hate hypocrisy). And yet, going to a college is, in the words of the great poet Dante, “[as] bitter [as] the taste of another man’s bread and…[as] heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.” It is like going into the house of a hypocrite. We hate to call out examples. So first, everyone’s favorite college, Harveryhard College, has a motto of Verum. For those non-rabbits in the audience, that is Latin for “truth.” Harveryhard has certainly done an exemplary job of upholding the truth in the past few years, especially through the numerous financial grants they receive from the parents of children who will go on to be Harveryhard students. How wonderful it is that the people who donate the most to Harveryhard somehow correlate with an increasing acceptance rate! What a beautiful, burgeoning bastion of truth. Another, perhaps more local example, is Dolly Madison's Husband’s College. Their supposed motto is “knowledge is a blessing of liberty.” Their actual motto may as well be “money is liberty,” given how expensive their tuition is, so exorbitant that it takes more students from Northern Virginia than its own region. Finally, Virginia Consumption University has a motto of “make it real.” No, really. We did not make this up. So, I implore all of you to “make it real” yourself and make yourself at home at their 93 percent acceptance rate college. Don't forget to buy the latest Virginia Consumption University shoes at Dick’s Sporting Goods©!

Furthermore, college exposes you to the greatest evil of the world, one that makes all others pale in comparison, alcohol. Not only is getting drunk dangerous and haram, it is also REALLY dangerous. Statistics show that getting drunk makes you 50 percent less awesome (as stated by Bill Nye the Russian Spy). We know you don’t want to be 50 percent less awesome. So then why are you wasting your life to go to a college that is a conduit for 50 percent less awesome people? Also, why bother getting drunk only on the weekends (and Thursday, if you’re a business major) when you can feel a spiritual high everyday while meditating sober. This spiritual high is best found in a foreign country, and thus an alternative to wasting your life in college is asking your parents for a small loan of 50,000 dollars that you will use to “soul search” in the great country of Europe. Of course, we know you’re actually just going to, as the kids would say with their bastardization of the English language, “be a jit” and party all that (perhaps) hard-earned money away, but just take a few meditation classes, buy some hippie clothing, and say you’ve come back a changed man. After all, Walter White himself has stressed the importance of gap years. Can you imagine taking a gap year, and fully experiencing freedom for one year — partying, playing video games all night, rotting away in your mother’s basement—then having to go to the rigid, suppressing routine of college for FOUR years? 

On top of that, the required curriculum in colleges are atrocious. Can you imagine the horror of having to take an English class again as a STEM kid?! Or what about taking Mathematics as a Humanities kid? We are indoctrinated throughout our entire “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” lives to believe that college is where we FINALLY get to specialize, and yet this in and of itself is nothing more than a delusion created by the deep state.

And, at the end of the day, for what? So you can get a piece of cardstock that signifies your employability to do rote tasks for the next few decades, a mere cog in the machine? When technology advances, and all the knowledge you’ve accumulated so far becomes irrelevant, you will be condemned to a poor life, an even more insignificant cog in the same machine: working at the same McDonalds you were working at as a highschooler. When you can finally retire around the age of seventy-five with a grand total of 8,000 in your bank account, you’ll go to the exotic locale of Virginia Beach maybe once, with the fortune you have amassed, admire the sunset you’ve built your life to see, and die. Then, you will know, you have wasted the last seventy-five to seventy-eight years of your life. But none of this would have happened if you had attended a real prestigious university, like Hogwarts, instead of a dumb American college. You’re a rizzard, Harry!

*This article is satire. It is not intended to be taken seriously and does not reflect any of the authors’ personal ideals. Any references to persons, colleges, or events are purely fictional or coincidental.