That’s the title of a worthwhile article in the current issue of The Atlantic.

The author teaches evening English classes at one of those colleges that will enroll anyone with some money. He feels lousy about having to give bad grades to pathetic students who just don’t have the capacity to write a coherent sentence.

What jumps out are the reasons why most of his students are in school. It is not because they have any yearning for knowledge. They just want to “get ahead” and the system they live in places undue faith in college credentials as indicators of worth. The author (who remains anonymous), says, “I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.”

In other words, the students are there because of our credentialitis.

The system isn’t just wasteful. “No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass,” writes the author.

I suspect he’d agree with my notion of “predatory educating.”