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What Should Twenty-Somethings Be Doing With Themselves?
I’m particularly thinking of the younger ones, who are still minimally employable and not terribly mature.
A lot of people are realizing that college isn’t a great deal for many (or most) people. But one of the reasons people send their kids to college is because they want them to have a pleasant post-adolescent/early-adulthood transitional experience. I’m not suggesting that colleges do a great job of providing this. Many people spend their college years wasting enormous amounts of time and money while eroding their moral character. Still, in broad terms, you can see how college seems like the right choice to many people. It offers some independence, but also some supervision; it has a natural starting and ending point; professors and counselors and friends will encourage students to spend their years there planning for some productive future to follow. And of course you get a degree (assuming you finish, that is).
One reason undergraduate education is hanging on despite its problems is because people don’t know where else to get those things. And I think it’s a legitimate question. The military is a great option for some, but not everyone is suited to it and the military doesn’t have space for every single 20-year-old anyway. Early marriage is another way to go (though newlyweds still need a livelihood), and I think it would be good if that were more socially acceptable. Realistically though, I don’t think we’re likely to see 21-year-olds racing to the altar anytime in the near future. It isn’t what they or their parents want. They want to feel more established and mature before marriage.
Part of the key to diminishing the influence of higher ed may be recognizing how much people want that type of transitional experience for their kids. They don’t want to get married right away, and they want their post-adolescent years to be challenging without being too punishing. Given that demand, is there another way to meet it that is less ruinously expensive and more productive? Could we turn vocational apprenticeships into more of a college-type experience? Create more service opportunities? Other ideas?
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Good point Amy. Sales are a skill, like any other that is a mix of innate ability, learning (of a different kind), and hard work. I think what a lot of people are getting about here with trades is that the pendulum has swung too far in the college/professional direction, and it is time that society started valuing all forms of work and/or career.
Rachel, I think you are overstating the skills required for most jobs. Pretty much any corporate job can be done by anybody. Most college grads end up in corporate jobs. The only reason one needs the degree is to make the minimum requirement in the job posting.
Oh, you mean like not being like the college professor who came into my shoe store to prepare for a research expedition to Greece and when I asked what kind of research she was doing, replied with, “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested.” Because of course, as a salesperson I must be uneducated, unintelligent, and incurious compared to a professor of archaeology.
For the 18 year old high school graduates who already has the self discipline and motivation college is the right move. However, this is a minority of (< 25%) not a majority. There is however another subset of people for whom college is probably better suited after they have been in the working world for a few years and been forced to learn good work habits (showing up on time, being courteous with customers or co-workers, getting along with a boss, etc.). There is another subset for whom college will never be the right path, and those that will never develop effective work habits.
I think a big problem with our economy today is a general lack of good work habits.
Rachel, I think what’s going on is that the college route has traditionally been assumed to be the best route for smart kids. It is the route that I took. And it worked for me. I’m a college-educated person making good money in the field in which I studied.
Now given that college is no longer a $10K decision, but a $100K decision, that changes the equation. We’re all casting around to expand the list of options. Few are defending the traditional college route because the conventional wisdom needs no defense. It’s still the obvious, default answer for many young people.
So if not college, then what? Well, trades are one answer.
How many plumbers does it take to change a light bulb? The short answer, of course, is that plumbers don’t change light bulbs.
The real answer is the plumbers’ wage. If the wage is high, society is demanding more plumbers. If low, then not so much. A smart kid would be smart to examine the cost of tuition, room & board; but also take note of the local plumber’s wage.
Perhaps another word for this would be “drive.”
Some people are hungry. They work harder, are highly committed, and do whatever it takes to get the job done. This is the person EVERY employer wants.
The best thing my dad ever did for me was hire me out to do odd jobs for the elderly ladies in our neighborhood (I grew up in a rust belt town, there were a lot of old ladies). Everything from gutter cleaning, moving, snow removal, etc… I learned the value of hard work, helping people, and why it pays to have a job indoors. :)
…and that is the thing….I had a father. It wasn’t actually the hard work, it was the mentorship that made it a vital part of maturing me. (The D.I. at Parris Island did a decent amount as well ;) )
To be fair, it’s entirely possible that’s she’s “researching” something along the lines of the gender and racial impact of male privilege as expressed in the treatment of Grecian pottery shards by mid-period Elizabethan poets, which you’d have to admit, wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anybody, even her.
100% Amen
Nah, when I exposed myself as a college graduate (and I could see on her face the mental shift from seeing me as “idiot minimum wage-slave” to “poor pitiful underemployed smart person”) she revealed that she was doing research on candle holders at a Zeusian temple. And attending the wedding of my Latin teacher while she was over there.
What does it take to become a plumber?
Edit: I see Probable Cause (#65) beat me to it (& others? I haven’t read all the posts). I love my plumber. He’s capable, efficient, reasonably priced, & cheerful. He’s also pushing 60 & tells me there aren’t enough younger plumbers coming along.
That only underscores my point. “Drive” is fairly specifically directed; nobody has a completely undefined “drive” that could be applied to any goal imaginable. We “hunger” for particular sorts of fulfillment or accomplishment. In my case it was education itself that enabled me to find that direction. And I don’t think that’s some freakish rare circumstance; it’s happened to many people, and it’s what we hope will happen when we send our children to college. Thus, saying that “drive is more important than education” doesn’t make much sense. No opportunity benefits us if we don’t make good use of it, but education can often be quite helpful in focusing and refining our goals, enabling us to develop that discipline and corresponding hunger.
Rachel, Education is critical and should be offered by universities. Or, if not, they should offer job training. But instead they keep a foot in each camp and commit to neither. And we customers aren’t exactly sure what we want. So the whole thing ends up as nothing more than a multi-year activity that delays progress.
I would disagree with the “we.” Maybe in your family folks can afford an education for education’s sake. In mine, college is about punching your ticket and learning what you need to get a better paying job. (Hence my mother’s bemusement at the ladies at church who had degrees but “wasted” themselves by being SAHMs.) My parents neither needed nor wanted to spend money on Shakespeare and philosophy on the road to being an RN, nuclear power plant operator, or diagnostic imaging technician. They just had to get their card punched on the road to graduation.
Sure, it would be wonderful if we all could study whatever we wanted to and find our bliss. But for those of us who believe that education is an investment, we bloody well want a positive ROI. And that is strongly correlated with knowing what you’re doing in college before you go.
Well, our company just hired two. They were both summer interns, and once they graduate, they come back as full-time employees. Not a bad gig.
Three responses, Amy:
1) Even if you definitely want a major with an obvious and immediate professional application, students at 4-year schools need far more credits than any particular major will require from you. If you have the desire, you should have time to learn some Shakespeare and Aristotle along the way.
2) This isn’t just a fancy way to pass the time. Liberal arts students have shown more growth in “soft skills” (roughly, analytic and communicative skills) than students from any other major. Employers need those skills for many jobs.
3) I know a lot of enthusiastic liberal arts majors from college who went on to be very professionally successful. They were smart and disciplined and had transcripts to prove it, and they did well in many different sectors of the economy. Most of them weren’t sure in their earlier undergraduate years what they wanted to do.
Rachel asks how many plumbers does society need. The answer is ‘lots’.
I have asked before, how many people studying Shakespeare (not reading, studying, in order to make new discoveries) society needs. I think an estimate of 1,000 would be on the high side. I am entirely confident that this quota would be filled by the sons and daughters of the rich willing to pay full freight to attend college, even allowing for the duffers and pretenders.
Since society’s requirements for advanced study will be gladly met by those able to afford it, we can stop contorting the entire ‘education’ system into a conveyor belt for creating college tuition payers.
The idea that one is more likely to become a well-rounded person and/or ‘find’ oneself in a hothouse of hormones and leftist twaddle that is a modern university, as opposed to having an actual job surrounded by adults, strikes me as ludicrous.
This may not be a popular truth to middle-class parents wanting to give their offspring a leg-up in the corrupt system we now have, but real truths hurt. Just not as much as not telling them.
Geneferei, there are a whole lot of high school English teachers who were literature majors. How many English teachers does the nation need? Lots. I’d say about the same number as plumbers. And I don’t think you would argue that learning to write on at least a basic level is fluff.
No, that’s not fluff. That’s also not necessarily a skill a college graduate learns, either, given that my law school teaches supplemental classes on high level writing topics like subject-verb agreement.
No, they don’t. They need people who are smart and willing to work. Judging from the number of bankers and managers whose writing I read, the ability to craft an intelligible sentence isn’t important in the business world.
Here’s the problem — smart people who are able willing to work hard are going to be successful in pretty much anything they do. If they went to college, they were successful because of their degrees and personal networks.
But if they hadn’t gone to college, they still would have been personally successful. They may not have been as rich or as prestigious, perhaps a retail mogul instead of a doctor or lawyer.
It’s actually a hindrance. I mean that literally.
Writing poorly confidently shows you are busy and important. Writing at the highest levels is like modern art. I makes sense only to those “in the know”.
I could not disagree more strongly. Most of my work is communication, in one form or another. Clear communication builds clear understanding and then productive work follows. The better I write, the better my company functions on all levels.
When I miscommunicate, it takes days for the ripples to settle down.
I wouldn’t got so far as to say hindrance. Considering a fair portion of my job is to translate between the poorly expressed ideas of loan officers and underwriters on one side and the poorly expressed ideas of appraisers on the other, if these people — predominantly college graduates — were actually able to communicate clearly, I might not have a job.
It does give lie to the notion instilled in me by parents and teachers that if one sounds like an idiot on paper, one will never have a good job.
genferei #77 and Merina #78 illustrate exactly the problem.
Is college a place where future scholars connect with current scholars?
Is college a place where future workers go to broaden their minds?
Is college a place where future workers go to train for jobs?
Is college a place to find yourself?
The problem is that we answer yes to all of those things and, in trying to do everything, we do nothing.
If we just pick one – say future scholars – then everyone who isn’t a future scholar will know to go somewhere else. Or if job training then future scholars can go somewhere else.
Sorry, I wrote that poorly.
I don’t mean a hindrance to you in your work. If you communicate well you’ll have less pain and your work will go smoothly.
But if you fill your emails with jargon and catchphrases and acronyms then the reader has no idea what the email is about and figures the author must simply be mentally beyond them. These people get promoted again and again.
I’m exaggerating but not by much. There is an art to playing the part of Important Businessman.
Not sure how to meld the social experience of college in to post-high school time, but I’ve long thought it would be more expedient to channel kids during high school into what they wanted to do. One example: Those wishing to play pro sports should skip college altogether; wipe college sports out altogether and send them straight to training camp or whatever the pro sports teams put together as their entry system. That way college/university recovers a semblance of a place for “higher learning” instead of trying to also support athletes with a showcase and meal ticket to the pro level. Businesses could also combine forces to create recruitment/training schools specifically geared to teaching what would be needed on the job. These could be run less expensively than traditional college if part of the payment was that the student graduate would work for the companies providing the training for a number of years after. This is a random idea off the top of my head; there’s plenty of ways to blow holes in it, I’m sure.
I believe it. In my case, it is MY company, and my audience includes my owners and partners. They all need to be on board as we build up steam, not merely wishing me well from the shore.
What a waste of resources!
I think if we recalibrated our ideas about how people prepare for their roles in life we would have a situation where the genuine needs of individuals could be met in a multitude of ways. One size fits all – especially when that one size is so expensive and requires delaying the entry into adulthood until your mid-20s – destroys lives.
I am arguing that (as Casey puts it) the role of universities should be to prepare scholars, and that society needs hardly any of those.
This is not so far from the situation in Switzerland, for example, where there is no social significance about having attended university or not.
Casey, I think your point here has merit. To some extent the market is bifurcating already, with community colleges, tech schools and online offerings competing with four year institutions. I think the trend will continue.
I believe what’s going to throw the process into overdrive is this. One generation has done very well getting four year degrees at a reasonable price. Their wages over their lifetimes have more than compensated for their initial investment. They have encouraged their children to do the same, regardless of cost.
Many in this second generation are getting burned. They are conveying a different message to their children: caveat emptor.
While I agree that many fewer people should go to college and that some majors are worthless, I’d take us back to where our university education was maybe 50 years ago. Many fewer people attended college then, but people got training for all kinds of other work on the job, in trade schools and so on. Still, I think college is appropriate for many professions. My son is studying biochem right now. I don’t think he’d learn what he needs to on-the-job and he is really excited about what he is learning. Hopefully it will lead to a job that allows him to use his talents for the benefit of everyone.
Just wondering–do you think we’d be having this argument if the government had not pumped so much easy money into college loans, so that the cost of education was more in line with what it was 50 years ago relative to average incomes? Further, think about this. How did the GI bill affect the country? I’d argue that it really helped the country move forward at top speed after the WWII.
Probable Cause, I think by this point the thread itself should provide ample answer to your earlier contention that the college track “needs no defense”. In mainstream society perhaps it doesn’t, but among conservatives it really does. They hate the Academy, and not without reason; it’s an enormous money suck and it has played an enormous role in tilting the country leftwards. Of course it angers conservatives that they are coercively taxed to fund a hugely effective political indoctrination machine. But their schemes to torpedo the university system tend to founder on one problem: they often want to work on the assumption that the universities aren’t doing anything very useful. They are.
I say that accepting all sorts of criticisms. Yes, they’re hugely wasteful; yes, other life paths should be more accepted; yes, there’s an opportunity cost to everything, including college. But even today, it’s still very much worth it for many people, and not just for the piece of paper. Intense study actually can do very good things for you, especially if you have the interest and aptitude for it.