Megan McArdle: You Are Killing The Atlantic

Inverse Square illustrates yet again why people such as myself have stopped paying for The Atlantic: an institution which gives a platform to Megan McArdle is doing a grave disservice to our nation.

Most recently, she’s started with a more or less reasonable premise: an awful lot of federal educational aid is wasted on subpar schools which produce degrees but not learning. It is often said that for-profit schools are the biggest beneficiaries of the GI bill, and some of those for-profit schools seem to exist solely to take in the maximum amount of federal student aid (GI bill or otherwise) while producing as little education as possible.

However, she does not proceed to the sane and reasonable conclusion that we need to improve the quality of our educational institutions, perhaps through some sort of accreditation reform. Instead, she argues that we should stop subsidizing and rewarding the education of our military and civil servants.

Jumping to that conclusion (without even a hint of research) is somewhere between preposterous and perverse. Which, of course, is vintage McArdle. (As the Square says: “it’s a pretty good default to assume that pretty much anything she says is false…”)

Now, I do love a cleverly-phrased preposterous conclusion. The best parts of this very blog are preposterous and perverse. I really don’t object to McArdle writing it. I object to anyone paying for it. McArdle ought to get a real job bloviate in her spare time like the rest of us.

Or, you know, put some actual work into her output. Maybe if she had some kind of rigorous training in the craft of writing accurately and not just a knack for a catchy phrase…