Is the well-entrenched belief that a college degree is the ticket to a better life perpetuated by mind control manipulation to further program the minds of the young, and impoverish them as well?

The two do go hand in hand. This has been the direction of things for many, many years now, that higher education is considered to be the distinguishing feature of people who are intelligent and accomplished. It is truly a legacy of the bygone era when the aristocracy, by virtue of their political connections and inherited wealth, spent their time seeking out the learned scholars, thinkers, and seekers of their time to emulate them and learn things they could entrance their friends with and impress the ladies with discourse over dinner, but rarely to do something truly meaningful. This practice has continued and gradually became more and more accessible to a wider class of people with increased affluence as a consequence of mechanization and scientific advancements supporting acquisition of better control of the lifestyle to provide comforts and luxuries to the masses. The intent all along was to provide a kind of programming in a pseudo-education that would keep people preoccupied in believing they were accomplishing something worthy. That appealed to their ego as well, that they too could be learned and contribute ideas, and be a player contributing to human thought and progress. The reality is, the world can only support so many thinkers, and scholars, and writers, and researchers. The idea anyone can be anything they choose is not realistic. Someone has to mind the routine and mundane tasks of living. This is particularly pernicious when the whole promise of higher education is little more than a more demanding version of the lower grades in school—a series of make-work exercises and hurdles to achieve advancement by mastering a succession of increasingly difficult intellectual challenges devised by teachers who think they are helping hone the minds of their pupils to do important things which they themselves are not doing. But in actuality, simply turning a gigantic hamster wheel where the human students are the hamsters forced to run and keep up at the risk of being expelled and left behind. Those who can go the distance have pride in the proof of accomplishment in their diploma, but it is a hollow victory because in most cases, it contributes little other than as a kind of club membership that has taken years and years of their lives to earn but does actually very little to promote their creativity and talents in a useful way. While some of the knowledge has applicability for careers some will choose, what they truly need to know, they can learn much more quickly knowing it is truly needed and important to them compared to the many, many years of schooling in a highly varied range of subjects they find boring and irrelevant to their lives. Whereas if there had been a focus on practical tasks to accomplish, and in parallel, opportunities to gain specialized knowledge through study, they would sort through career options to find what might be a good fit and would have applied themselves years before to achieve a high level of expert knowledge with a cultivation of inner talent and ability along with it. And at the same time, students of today are graduating from college with little idea of what they want to do or can do in society. The counterparts rising up the ranks through an apprentice system would already be highly experienced and accomplished experts in their fields and would be commanding a high level of compensation financially because they would be doing something truly needed and a productive member of society. The myths of higher education and the massive costs that have ballooned beyond reason, are a tremendous waste of human effort and financial resources, turning out generation after generation of emperors with no clothes.