I was talking to someone on a water taxi a few months ago about her workplace prospects. She was working at a large industrial concern in Hamburg, and she needed to get another degree in order to advance in her career. We chatted briefly about how there’s a resource for exactly her type of situation: An online portal for immigrants or prospective immigrants searching for educational options in Germany, looking for programs that won’t be overly expensive or require C2-level German.
The German educational portal is here. Another, for Sweden, is here. And a French one is here.
I thought of that conversation this week, while reading a slightly-old-but-still-accurate piece on how the Trump administration is not ruling out a military draft as it slogs through the process of exiting the quagmire it has created for itself in Iran. Seemingly ended at one point, the conflict has flared up again as of this week.
It all made me want to send those European university study portal links to as many of my draft-age American friends as possible. So here we are.
Let’s be clear: In most of Europe, and in many other places, higher education is either free or nearly free. That includes, in many cases, free tuition for people who come from other countries. The educational policy of the U.S. is an outlier on this front, and I believe it is an outlier for a reason.
The American higher education system has been set up to be virtually impossible to use without one of three precursors being in place:
The presence of a wealthy family to pay one’s bills
The willingness to go into extreme debt, making one a virtual indentured servant for up to 3 decades of one’s life
orThe willingness to fight in someone else’s war in order get an ROTC scholarship
It is the third bullet item that is, I believe, the point of the whole morass of a system. Starting in the late 1970s, the oligarchs who hold power in the United States made a very calculated decision. Realizing that they couldn’t have an outright draft because it would lead to an engaged anti-war faction of the type that opposed military action in Vietnam, they decided to do a soft draft by just making life miserable enough for the young and poor that they would sign up to fight. This proved to be very profitable, as subsequent wars that didn’t really accomplish much nonetheless brought in a lot of revenue for defense contractors.
(Andrew Cockburn of Harper’s, whom I interviewed years ago, wrote an excellent book, Kill Chain, that covers in its opening chapters just how delusional the Vietnam-era American military leadership was, with defense contractors selling the idea of an automated war. That was an idea that fell apart spectacularly but brought lots of money to certain pockets.)
I am not the first person to come to these conclusions about the U.S. higher ed system, nor will I be the last.
But that doesn’t mean the idea is not worth discussing every now and then.
Thankfully, there are other roads young people can follow.
Instead of shooting people you don’t know or taking out $60,000 in loans for the privilege of reading some books you could get at the library, there is, of course, the option of going abroad.
That option is not available to everyone, since you still have to pay your way to Europe or another destination. I absolutely want to acknowledge and respect that brutal fact. But for those who have the option, a $700 one-way plane ticket to a free uni education in Germany or Sweden or France is a hell of a lot cheaper than a loan that will take decades to pay off. And it certainly beats fighting a war over how much BP has to pay for a barrel of crude oil, even as the world steadily moves away from fossil fuels.
Which brings us back to oil-rich Iran.
The engagement in Iran is, unfortunately, likely to last much longer than the Trump administration initially acknowledged. They have already renamed the war once (from “operation epic fury” to “operation project freedom”) to avoid the 60-day congressional approval deadline, then officially “ended” the war, which, again, is very much still occurring. And it goes on, whether they want it to or not. They’ve lost control over the timeline. As the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote.
But so do you.
You can choose to drive a glorified mail Jeep into battle and feel the boring gut sickness of killing a bunch of other schmucks via remote control because some asshole in a suit tells you to. That’s a choice.
Or you can do some devious recruiting of your draft-aged friends and abscond with a bunch of the greedy suited bastards’ human bullets, going across the ocean or down to Mexico on your own terms and learning to design buildings and heal the sick and plant trees and explore the oceans and lay out railroads and just generally take part joyfully in the chorus of a big world that every day is singing and singing and singing and singing.
The choice is yours.
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Highlighted links from this piece:
Could There Be a Military Draft? Trump Administration Says It’s ‘On Table’ (Military.com)
Your path to studying in Germany (German national government publication)
Higher education in Sweden (Swedish national government publication)
Campus France: Studying in France (French national government publication)
US launches seventh straight night of strikes on Iran (Al Jazeera)
Selected additional links from this piece:
Flowers Are Still Better Than Bullets 45 Years After the Kent State Massacre (ACLU)
Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, by Andrew Cockburn (Bookshop.org)
Other recent writing:
Selected related tags on this site:
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Public domain image of ROTC students at Clemson University sourced from https://nara.getarchive.net/de/media/cadets-with-clemson-universitys-army-rotc-program-e2b5e8