"We inspire lives, not minds"

Gregory Wygoni
The Silhouette

In a move that surprises no one, universities across the world have decided to expel their students and close entry to their undergraduate programs. Despite complaints from the registrar of having to do more work, the change will take place immediately and inefficiently, just as university protocols should be done.

That means everyone is thrown out, including the proud mother on 143 Apple Street, whose son is on the Dean Honour’s List. Finally, the day of idiotic bumper stickers may be behind us.

This international rule, dubbed as a saving grace by scholars and clown-college professors alike, stems from the inability for universities to properly prepare a generation.

“We admit,” said Dean of Imagine-U, “we have been charging exorbitant fees for something you could acquire at your local library. Hell, who even needs a library? There are hundreds of online courses for free right now. I am in a course about Cryptography at this very moment. It’s so much fun!”

Yet such fun is not universal. Sobering critics have voiced concern that there will be no place for young adults to drink now, purchase prescription drugs, or sleep for many more hours then necessary. “If there is no school, how will they skip class? If there are no exams, how will their all-nighters and cramming be justified? Where will our sons and daughters have their one-night stands, and whose expensive student-house covered in cockroaches and happy mold will they be able to wash their own puke from? Not my house. So I ask you ivory tower elitists, where?”

Other critics have screeched that this decision has come too late, and that too many twenty-some-things-or-others are unemployed, lacking experience and living in their parents’ basements. They have been in a slump for far too long, and the new generation without a degree will have a great advantage in terms of experience and knowledge, not to mention no financial burdens of the last 4-7 years, to their older counterparts.

To the growing vexation of the latter groups’ parents, deans around the world simultaneously shrugged, “What were we suppose to do? We inspire minds, not lives here.”

However, invectives abounded from many student unions in a near welcome-week like cheer. Such Neanderthal-esque criticism, with its colourful grammar and entitled privilege, came in the midst of intense training for beer pong and ultimate Frisbee. “It is like-uh-totez in-uh-approp you knowww? What is I to tell my rents now? Da fu-”

Without school, this student-run newspaper becomes toilet paper, whereas with school, it becomes wrapping paper for your burritos and pitas. At the very least when there is undergraduate education, we go in the front and come out the end, going through the institution’s digestive system with all our hopes and dreams, nutrition, absorbed from us piece by piece, semester by semester, each exam taking our soul and short term memory, each class monstrously depriving us of a former drive to learn, and it all being finagled from us by tuition and beer. And at the end, this corporeal institution flushes us down as writhing stuff left to hit the fan, and we face the real world.

Without school, we are only shit.

Despite reassurances from Deans and poorly trained guidance councilors, many students are asking where can they now acquire a useless piece of paper that does not guarantee knowledge or experience. In fact, most students wonder what they will cheat on, where will they acquire grades to believe they are intelligent and worthwhile and where can they ignorantly memorize facts.

To such points, the Dean of Imagine-U could only guess, “Grad school?”

A few undergraduate degrees are still available, engineering, medicine, medical engineering, and the hackeysack teams for all universities will still be allowed to compete in the Grand Kick this coming weekend.

In a last-minute attempt to appease the calumny, universities globally cited Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as proof “you could do it all” without an undergraduate paper. “I mean look at those guys, and look at me,” said sententious professor of education, A. Kademic as he entered his beat-up Honda.  “They are all billionaires. We could all learn a lesson a thing or two from those guys…”

Coincidentally, zero per cent of all students now have debt.