How to cope with rising college costs: send your kid somewhere else.

For sixty years, blue-collar Americans have beavered away with the assumption that “my kid’s gonna go to college.”

And for all too many, the punishment has been a dream achieved.

As a result, we have more home-equity loans and college-educated waiters than any other country on the planet.

This is not like the WW2 vets who flooded the universities under the GI bill, a social revolution that ensured that college would no longer be the refuge of rudderless twits with wealthy parents. (Luckily, many of those vets would become teachers to accommodate the flooding of baby boomers into the elementary schools.)

Today’s notion of college as a passageway to a higher class is as much a chimera as an exclusive club that anyone can join.

Pundits endlessly debate whether colleges should be glorified trade schools or monasterial institutes where pure knowledge can be pursued for its own sake.

Too often they are neither, serving as remedial camps for high school graduates who are largely illiterate, innumerate, and crashingly ignorant of elementary geography, let alone skills in reasoning and rhetoric that were once learned from McGuffey’s Readers by eighth-grade students.

When I was in business, I had a procession of highly-educated secretaries, from Yale English majors to holders of master’s degrees. But what I really needed was a Katherine Gibbs graduate.

Of course, nobody aspires to be “just a secretary” anymore. But even as the position has been gussied up to administrative assistant, it has been dumbed down. Try finding someone who can properly format a letter to a senator, or consult a secretary’s book of letters so a boss doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in writing a condolence letter.

It may offend our democratic yearnings to emulate Japan or Germany, separating secondary students onto different tracks to produce better trade-school graduates and fewer mal-educated college grads.

But do we want a better, more adaptable workforce? Or more purchased vanity?

As to those non-college graduates who fret about their lack of academic knowledge, my advice is simple: sell your television and buy an old set of Britannica, which can be had for a peppercorn.

You’ll be more educated than the average college graduate before you get out of the B’s.