You know, a few days ago I asked some of my friends for their ideas for another blog posting. I took a break from blogging so that I could concentrate on approaching course deadlines and get some rather nasty assignments off my desk. But I have now reduced the amount of things on my desk, and I return to my blog. My friends wanted me to talk about college. More specifically, the cultural pressure on young people to go to college, both positive and negative and the stigma attached to those who discover that they’re not suited for college. Well that’s an important topic, and so, having spent ten years in college and graduate school, and having spent the past four of those years with a steady teaching load, I feel myself well qualified to reflect on these things.
Firstly, how does our society view college? Well, I realize I’m speaking in generalizations, but that’s alright. College funds are a good place to start. How often do you hear things like, “saving for your children’s college education,” and so on. That begs the question of whether or not it’s the parents’ responsibility to foot the bill for tuition. That’s a whole other discussion and I won’t get into it. Still, the presence of college funds for children, whether formally established as in an escrow account or just some sort of savings that you funnel your spare money into over the course of the first eighteen years of your kid’s life, college funds are a popular thing to set up. Of course, a college fund presupposes that a child will want to go to college, that their vocational interests will be of such a nature as will be most benefited by college experience.
This assumption, that college is definitely the best place for our kids to go, has had a number of interesting consequences. I’ve talked about the lowering of college admissions standards, a phenomenon with many causes, so I won’t rehash it here. I’ve also talked about the spike in gen ed coursework. What I haven’t discussed yet is the proliferation in truly useless degrees. By ‘useless,’ I don’t mean English degrees or philosophy degrees or other subject-related degrees, whether or not they have immediate applicability to the working world. By, ‘useless,’ I refer to degrees that don’t actually result in the training of a student in a particular area of study. After all, engineering, economics, entomology and English literature all have this in common. When you’ve done with the coursework, you’re quite knowledgeable in that area. Or at least, you ought to be. A senior-level English lit major can talk about Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, Plath and Ginsburg with a greater depth of knowledge than someone who didn’t study them. An engineering student can talk about metal fatigue, polymer synthesis and hydrostatic pressure. An entomologist can distinguish between multiple species of beetle and discuss their lifespans, habits and place in the food chain. This is what we expect. These are the results of their separate educations regardless of what you or I may think of their chosen field of study.
So what sorts of degrees qualify as useless? Consider some of the following. A certain university in the south offers the following: B.A. in liberal studies, B.A. in continuing education, B.A. in college studies. A certain school in the southeast offers an M.A. in Liberal Studies. Another offers an M.A. in Liberal Education. My own schools, all three of the ones I’ve attended, offer such degrees. These degrees are largely composed of a large dose of courses in various sectors of the humanities, together with a series of courses the student chooses in consultation with their advisor. The university propaganda insists that these sorts of degrees are intended for the self-starter who doesn’t want to be confined to a particular major and who wants to be prepared for a wide variety of post-collegiate studies. Trust me. I’ve read the catalogues and that’s just how they’re advertised. The problem is that I’ve also met the types of students to whom these degrees appeal. I’ve met a lot of them. Multiple examples. With few exceptions, these degrees attract the type of person who can’t otherwise pick a major. You can’t stay in “undecided status,” lacking a declared course of study, forever. But if you could, these people would. They tend to either have no idea what interests them as a course of study or, conversely, to have so many disparate and conflicting interests as to be paralyze by their own minds and unable, or unwilling, to make a choice and settle into a degree track. These people also have no sense of what they want to do with their lives and only the vaguest notion of why they’re in school in the first place. In short, most of your liberal studies majors aren’t cut out for college, but our society has given them the notion that they don’t have a choice.
So what about those who recognize that college isn’t for them and who choose not to pursue it? These sorts of people don’t run to type. You can’t generalize and say that someone chose not to go to school because they’d rather do manual labor, for example. I’ve met a lot of intelligent people who don’t want to break their backs for a living, and yet who also don’t care for the college environment. That being said, I’ve met a number of degree-holding people who are working in fast-food. Hmmmm. Still, what does our society say to the person who doesn’t want to go to college?
Well, how often have I met people in companies of one stripe or another who are blocked from further advancement owing to a lack of credentials. Not executive credentials or some company credential, but specifically, a lack of a 4-year degree. And how often do such people find themselves working below much younger, and much less experienced people, people who have arrived at their positions either by default because they had a 4-year degree to their credit, or alternatively, because their degree opened rungs on the career ladder otherwise closed off. I’ve met a lot of people in this position, and they have my sympathy. Often, experience, hard-won experience, is trumped by a piece of paper with B.S. or MBA written upon it. Speaking of the MBA, we’ve done a good job at nullifying its value too. Initially, the MBA was an advanced business degree intended for those who’d gone to college and then worked for a few years, gaining experience before going back to school. It was never meant to be a prerequisite to working in the business world. Except, of course, that it has become just that. Often times you won’t even find entry-level work in business without this Master’s in Business Administration degree. Something’s gone wrong here. And I’m not a disgruntled laborer or middle-level exec pointing this out. I’m one such educated person, and I’m here to tell you, their complaints have a point to them.
I recently came across an interesting book put out in 2010, Blue-Collar and Proud of It, by Joe Lamacchia. Joe Lamacchia is a successful, intelligent, articulate man, a millionaire several times over, and he never spent a day in college. He runs a series of landscaping concerns in Boston, and his book is a compilation of information about various trades. Most of it is aimed at those who want to work with their hands, and it discusses each trade, the work involved, the work environment, the training and certifications you need, and contains a state by state guide to trade schools and special training institutes and apprenticeships for the various trades it discusses. It’s a hefty volume and I didn’t read every page of it, but his introduction runs along the lines of this blog. Joe points out that we’re brainwashing our youth into believing that they’ll never be anything unless they go to college. Now, Joe has nothing against college. He’s not an anti-intellectual. Anti-intellectuals are easy to spot and easier to dismiss. To those who want to go to college, he’s all for it. His book is aimed at that segment who doesn’t really want to go, but who has come to believe, because our culture has told them so, that they won’t amount to a damned thing without going. And so they go. They march through the 4-year degrees and leave with the credential, and they’re still stuck not knowing what they want to do with it. Something’s gone wrong here.
My message is simply this. Just because you don’t want to go to college doesn’t mean you’re not a worthwhile person or can’t contribute meaningfully to the society in which you live. There are many ways to make a living and be productive, and not all of them, despite what your parents or your teachers may have told you, require college educations. College educations have their purposes, and those are good purposes. I could never have done anything other than go to college. It was and is the best thing for me beyond any question. But everyone isn’t me. And I know this.
My message ends with this challenge to my non-college-minded friends and loved ones. Be careful that you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that deciding not to go to school is the end of your decision-making process. You still have the same obligation to find your area where you can contribute. I don’t care what it is. But it should be something where you feel useful. Drifting is a non-option. But if you’re searching, then don’t stop searching until you’ve found it, and once found, pursue that goal with all the discipline and diligence required of you. Not going to college doesn’t mean that what you choose will be easy. It can be as hard in a different way, but the same habits of discipline and hard work that allow you to survive a doctorate are the same ones that allow you to go to trade school and then work your way up to expert status in a trade or some other profession. I don’t care what people do for a living. I just care that they’re trying to do something.
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