Life & Wisdom Quote by David Eddings

Eddings lands the punch by treating the college degree not as an achievement but as packaging. The “Prime US Beef” stamp is a deliberately low, commercial image: a credential as a grading label, a student as inventory, education as a process of standardizing a product for market. It’s funny because it’s ugly, and it’s ugly because it’s recognizable. He’s not attacking learning so much as the industrial, assembly-line version of it that promises transformation while delivering a label.

Reed College functions here as the foil and the alibi. By singling out a place that “required a thesis,” Eddings flatters rigor without getting pious about it; the thesis becomes a symbolic refusal to treat students as pre-cut meat. The subtext is that institutions can choose whether a degree represents demonstrated thinking or merely time served. The thesis requirement is less about pages and footnotes than about forcing a student to produce something that can’t be mass-processed.

The second sentence does the sharper work. “They just walk you through” suggests a guided tour, not an intellectual ordeal; “hand out the diplomas” turns graduation into distribution; “you fill in your name later on” is the devastating tag, implying interchangeability. Anyone could be slotted into the same certificate because the system has stopped caring who you actually became.

Contextually, it’s an author’s complaint delivered with tradesman’s pragmatism: credentials matter in public life, but too often they’re treated like branding. Eddings uses comedy to argue for a harder standard - one that insists a mind, not just a body, showed up.