Its the usual narrative, a fixation on the private sector schools fleecing people with fraudulent credentials, which is a real problem, but fails to get down to the more fundamental problem which is far less convenient to the political agenda of the documentary makers, that this problem extends to all schools. In the push to universalize higher education the assumption was made that you could make successful people through access to university, failing to realize that many of the people who went to university in the past would have been successful regardless, they were a different breed. And so with the dumbing down of higher education you have the manufacturing of credentials and departments like with "gender studies" It wouldn't matter if these degrees didn't come with debt, they were worthless to begin with. Add the debt issue and you have created a self perpetuating machine of credential-ism through debt.
And not only that, you have created a system of manufacturing activists. This extended high school system created a self reinforcing filter for compliance, as the most compliant students would jump through all the hoops to succeed in the system, and having succeeded in the system, they would perpetuate this system of obedience to authority.
This system creates a perverse trust in academia when the microcosm of society they run themselves is the most dysfunctional around. Administrators and professors gorge themselves on the future generations debt.
No one ever asked if this level of education was truly necessary, possible or even sustainable. The fertility rate of "educated" women kind of says it all, either this is dysgenics in action, or its evolution as the obedience are weeded out, so it maybe self correcting in the end, but the collateral damage to civilization is too great to let it play out that way.
The solution is harsh but it is the only way to finally solve the problem, student debt should not be guaranteed, and loans should end, only then will colleges charge customers only what they can actually afford. The documentary makers so fond of their mad Maxine Waters clips would rather push to fuel the self destructive system by providing ever wider access, and even more unlimited funds.
This documentary dishonestly conflates the post war boom which was only possible through the destruction of all our competitors by war combined with the residual christian work ethic and family values we still had at the time with simple access to higher education. It turns a multi factorial issue into a simplistic uni-factorial problem where education becomes the magic bean solution, and that misguided notion is exactly what has created this monstrous machine of student debt and credentialism.
Go look up the "women's studies" departments salaries and department cost at your local college, and try to justify it, you can't, they only exist to manufacture their own justification for existing, and the financial damage is almost minimal compared to what that ripple of indoctrination does when it interacts with the rest of society, usually manifesting in just alternate forms of extortionate parasitism.
Spending its time blaming republicans, the documentary completely misses the point that the entire higher educational system is archaic. Most professors reciting the same lectures like automatons, they don't ask if a single exceptional professor in some video format would do better, for instance on YouTube where many examples already exist. This documentary is in service of a system which is highly inefficient and doesn't scale, asking all the wrong questions. The most basic one being that if students are this easily fooled into false programs, why would you imagine they were fit for a conventional degree program. These are people who would have been better suited to practical job training/vocational programs, which were pushed by the wayside by democrats who pushed the unrealistic dream that "everyone could be an astronaut". The scam goes much further than this documentary will acknowledge, because it implicates those they are ideologically in league with, and opens them to dealing with unquestioned presuppositions they would rather continue go unquestioned.
