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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?
Published in General
Right, again, mostly agree. It’s just that it’s a pretty complicated package, which can make it hard to streamline in a totally clear and direct way. But absolutely: focusing the undergraduate curriculum, making it more rigorous, and chasing out people who aren’t capable of/interested in handling that, would improve the situation enormously.
I’m sure it’s not merely a defensive posture, but the fact is that a large portion of your accomplishments are in that world, and so the worth of college is tied to your ego.
I’ve managed to avoid filing for financial bankruptcy, but over the past several years, I’ve gone through an ego bankruptcy. I’ve seen my car be repossessed, my house sold at foreclosure, my engineer husband work as a dishwasher, and my own employment goals go from lawyer to secretary to selling shoes for less than I made ten years prior. Every traditional middle-class accomplishment was stripped away, and I found I’d have gladly traded away all the “advantages” of having that education for the banality of a husband with a steady job, a home to tend, and children to mother.
I denounce college not to win conservative applause, but to spare others similar pain.
Rachel, we are in substantial agreement. Research-only professors are useless… to the student. Truth be told, I too am useless to the student. Yes, I am useful to somebody, and so are they. But we are useless to the student.
The stated topic is “What Should Twenty-Somethings Be Doing With Themselves?” The research purpose of a university is almost completely unrelated to this question. Except for this: are the research-only professors funded independently, or do they effectively draw resources away from the colleges’ teaching activity? Again, someone benefits from these professors; just not the student.
Put another way, what if colleges added another purpose to their mission — say, the reduction of litter in national parks. “But they’re doing good,” you might say. I agree. But tuition, state funding, Pell grants, etc. all had to be increased by 25% to fund the additional litter gatherers (and their administrators). This good activity makes it that much more expensive for students to attend college.
You have my sympathy, Amy. Sometimes life is just full of plain old bad luck. We’re really in a period of sea change right now. We’re moving to a new type of economy that isn’t fully developed yet, but many people played by the old rules, not realizing what was happening. Most people as a matter of fact. I’ve known so many young people who have been negatively affected by economic and job-opportunity changes. When the blue model dies and the new system emerges, we will better understand the rules. So I guess that’s what a debate like this is all about–what are the new rules going to be? They are slowly taking shape. I hope discussions like this help determine that shape.
You’re advising everyone!? That’s a tall order.
If you advise 100 young men, maybe 5 will look into it. 100 Woman, maybe 1 will. That’s a start. I guessed I missed the point: Are you trying to give them realistic advise or more general “You Can Be President” type clap-trap?
So we agree that most of the people who go to college shouldn’t be there, and that most of the people employed by colleges shouldn’t be there either. Seems like burning them down is a fine idea. Oh, and remind me which college Shakespeare did his MFA at…
And sometimes that bad luck comes in the form of people saying, “Well, this worked for me and my friends, so you should do it too.”
I really do believe in the value of a liberal arts education. But I want to homeschool because I believe I can give that to my kids faster, better, and cheaper at home than at a college. And then when they’re look at what to do with their life, they’ll have that education, if not the credential, when they then find a way to make a career.
But people weren’t lying to you. It happened because the world is in the process of changing. I see a new system forming where people don’t so much gain a particular degree as a set of skills gained through single classes or online learning and the like, perhaps with certifications, which will be much cheaper than college per se. That seems like a good thing. Rob has an interesting post on this subject today too.
I don’t think they were lying. They were just wrong. And sometimes bad luck is listening to people you trusted but who turned out to be wrong. The fact that they were sincere and had my best interests at heart when they advised me to throw away my fertile years and mortgage my life for a “quality education” that I had to take off my resume to get my current job doesn’t make my situation any less awful.
Many times college is helpful. Many times college is neutral. And sometimes, college is what comes out the northbound end of a southbound horse. We do no one any favors by pretending that third situation only happens to the unintelligent who shouldn’t have been in college anyway.
I think you have a pretty distorted idea of how benevolent academia has been to me. I’m not denying that I’ve been blessed in many ways, and I have plenty of sympathy for your situation; nevertheless, in terms of rejection and personal humiliation suffered *directly* at the hands of the academic world (as opposed to just as a side effect of the debt), I’m sure I have you beat hands down. Literally years of not being able to plan how our future should go because I can’t get my advisor to read my dissertation. Being pushed, in very unsubtle ways, into an obvious second-class status to people who were my friends and peers in earlier stages of the academic game. I’ve had lots of unhappiness and resentment to contend with, believe me. (cont)
Such professional success as I enjoy now isn’t mostly through the academic world, but outside of it; adjuncting is pretty unsatisfying work, and there’s absolutely no future in it. So, now that things are going a little better, I could easily conclude (in fact someone recently suggested this to me), “I never needed those university losers anyway. I’m just naturally smart and talented, and it’s too bad I didn’t just go into journalism a long time ago and I could be mid-career by now as a writer”.
That would be pretty satisfying to my ego, especially after feeling spurned and overlooked for so long, but… I just don’t think it’s true. I think I did develop a lot intellectually and even morally from those experiences, and would be a less effective writer now but for those experiences. Even though they in many ways used me kind of badly, I think I owe those departments something.
I don’t have a really great sense for what happened in your case. Obviously you’re not stupid, and I know you hit the law market at exactly the wrong time, which is just the sort of terrible luck that you can’t anticipate and that can really leave you in a bad situation.
But, given the kind of reform I’d favor, I think the chances of it happening would be much less. If college education were more rigorous, and we weren’t churning out people with degrees and no real knowledge, then the people who *did* manage to get degrees would find themselves much more employable. Even if they had to take on a lot of debt, though of course I’d like to diminish that too.
It’s also hard for me to discern what happened in your situation because I can’t quite figure out what your attitude towards education was all along. There are unintelligent people who might be good at something but who aren’t born to be students. They just shouldn’t be in four-year liberal arts programs. But obviously that’s not you.
Then there are people who are smart but don’t take their education seriously enough or never quite figure out what the point is. Or they’re so “pragmatically focused” that they get a degree with a fancy name (often in business) that involves little intellectual growth. Or they get trapped in lower-level liberal fluff classes and don’t know to look for something else.
These are all potentially sympathetic cases, but if that’s you, you’re not really in a position to evaluate how useful liberal arts study might be for people who seriously seek it out and embrace it. To me then the moral is just that we need to do a better job engaging the people who really stand to benefit.
Bringing things back to my original question, though, I think the dialectic went something like this. I wanted to discuss what young people ought to be accomplishing in their early twenties, but especially what college-bound kids (and their parents) are looking for so we could consider how better to give it to them.
I guess part of the moral of Amy’s story is, if you just want a steady job, find a more direct route.
But if you want some combination of increased maturity and intellectual growth and exploring your talents and interests, I guess I do still think that something college-like is probably what a lot of people are looking for, and I think it’s still possible to get it in today’s universities. But maybe the combined lesson of my and Casey’s experiences is that we need to make it easier to find, and ideally mandatory for everyone who is in university at all.
One more comment and then I’ll stop swamping the thread… I don’t know, given the opportunity cost, whether getting a PhD was really a good thing or not. I think my reasons for choosing it were totally understandable and even well-considered, and the things that made it frustrating and difficult were not really foreseeable. Then again, I did know from the get-go that it was the sort of path where such frustrations could arise.
I definitely wouldn’t advise anyone to get a PhD with my thesis advisor, and I wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about advising people to get philosophy PhDs at all these days. I know the limitations.
But, I’m not going to let those abstract musings draw me into denying the real good I got from it. And just in general, it’s good to approach life that way when we can. Even relatively poor decisions can have some upsides, and while I can imagine other lives I might have lived that would have been good in other ways, the one I picked certainly has its rewards.
‘grow up’ (con’t)
So then I got married, changed occupations to increase income, had 3 children, completed 2 more years of undergraduate work at night for a BA, made some real estate investments, completed a Masters Degree, at night, wound up my working career as a senior level executive and now am retired with 7 grandchildren. Got here with the help of a great companion who took care of most of the day-to-day family matters.
This is anecdotal, of course, but my assessment is that we have evolved some societal norms that tend to inhibit the kind of commitment I had when I finally ‘grew up’. Many of the values I was taught as a youth are no more, much of the costs of thing are hidden/subsidized by parents and/or government so, for many, that grow up point is elusive. I find that if I try to advise a twenty year old based on how I lived my life to this point, they react as if I’m some crazy old fool.
I see a problem. You can work hard in the trades and make a good living but by the time you are fifty every joint in your body hurts every minute of every day, and if you have saved two quarters to rub together they can be taken from you at any moment by any liar who can find a lawyer. Between the stress of physical work and the stress of helplessly knowing you have no right to your hard-earned money, you’ll probably die before you can get Social Security. But hey, that leaves more money for the softhanded liars and lawyers to enjoy a comfortable retirement, during which they can congratulate themselves for being too smart to work with their hands.
Thanks Bob!
I define grown up as a person with a high degree of self-sufficiency and the ability to accept the opportunity costs of his or her choices.
[long post incoming]
Oh, you’re right, my humiliation wasn’t directly at the hands of the academy. No, my fury toward my professors came from being told for three years how I would soon be a part of a profession, and all these adjunct lawyers and special event speakers would be my colleagues, and if I didn’t want to be a lawyer, the education would useful for anything. A year after graduation, it was pretty clear “my colleagues” didn’t think my education had prepared me to be their colleague. So I tried to be their servant – a paralegal, an administrative assistant, a secretary. Surely the fact that I knew something about the law would be an asset to someone who can also type 70 wpm? No. I even tried to volunteer and was told by the lawyers’ silence that to pay me nothing would be to pay me more than I was worth.
[cont]
So when I humbled myself to go back to selling shoes – a joke of a career e.g. Al Bundy – what did I find? That far from helping me be a better, more employable person, J.D. was a pair of scarlet letters on my name. I was only hired because one of my pre-law school coworkers was now a manger and could vouch for me over the district manager’s objections. I tried to accept my fate, to take my job seriously. I met every goal and worked to become an assistant or store manager, the only way to get full-time hours. I was refused because I had gone to law school. Only when I finally decided to start lying by omission about my education was I able to find anyone willing hire me to work full-time for anything.
And all the while, I had to deal with their demands for money. Far from having a family member pay for my personal growth that hasn’t born financial fruit, my debt is greater than my parent’s net worth.
[cont]
If my husband and I are very thrifty and keep ourselves barren for the next ten years, we may be able to enter our forties with the same net assets we had when we married – each other and an apartment of used furniture. Have you ever seen a homeless man and wished you were as wealthy as him? I have. Yes, I hate my education, to the point that in my darkest depression I wanted to immolate myself in the law school – to punish those professors by forcing them to hear my dying screams and smell my burning flesh.
Now, if you think one is wise to borrow money for ephemeral trivia, like the ability to see the parallels of Westerosi lore and English history, or some non-quantifiable benefits like “better reasoning skills” that can be learned a hundred other ways, well, that’s on your conscience. But as I have foolishly wasted my twenties and as I am currently losing my thirties to pay for my foolishness, I will not encourage others to follow me down this path.
Amy – your words are searing.
I I were in your shoes, I would be much more ruthless than you are being.
1: HAVE KIDS. Don’t wait for financial reasons. Your soul is screaming for it. DO IT.
2: Declare bankruptcy. Try (hard) to wipe it all away. It may work, or it may not. Then, too, if hyperinflation actually arrives, your debt will inflate away.
3: Remain open to other opportunities, profession-wise. It is hard to be rejected, but if you can believe G-d has a plan, then that plan means sticking your neck out, time and again, without losing faith.
Further: I shared your comment once about video games with my oldest, who wastes time with the best. It actually made a mark.
I was Ivy League educated. Loved it, and it opened many doors for me. I never regret it. I love that I can do just about anything.
My oldest this year, who is classically smart-but-lazy, was rejected at all the elite schools. I was not unduly upset about that – it would have been a terrible life lesson if he had been admitted despite being a relatively lousy student.
He is going to University of Texas at Dallas, where they are paying him to go (tuition, fees, + $4k/semester) because he tested really well. He tested well enough to be in a kind of honors-of-honors program occupied by only 25 kids out of 20,000. But in the end, I know that for all my love of a liberal arts education, the kid is going to a very fancy trade school. The trade, admittedly, is Computer Science, and Dallas is not a bad place to learn it.
But given that there is a real chance he will fail (if he does not keep a 3.5 GPA he is booted), I am glad he won’t be acquiring any debt along the way.
I’m trying. Unfortunately, ten years of IUDs have turned my womb in to the Rub’ Al Khali.
I can’t. The legal standard is “hopeless to repay,” and courts have ruled that being bedridden on Social Security disability isn’t enough to qualify for that. I certainly won’t. Sure, I could go into income based repayment, but 1) the Obama Administration is trying to put a cap on forgiveness at $70K, which doesn’t even pay half of what I owe, and 2) even if I could get my debt forgiven in 10 or 20 years, that debt is imputed as taxable income. If I can’t afford to pay $20K/yr in loans now, how am I going to pay the taxes on the $300K-$400K (after 10 or 20 years of accumulated interested) in 10 or 20 years? I need to stop screwing over future me, even if it means being screwed over now.
Amy, you’ve probably already chased down every option.
But on the off chance, you could theoretically get a minimum wage gig at a 501(c)(3) non profit, then take advantage of the “Public Service Loan Forgiveness provision in the CCRAA.”
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_aid_indigent_defendants/initiatives/loan_repayment_assistance_programs/federal_loan_repayment_assistance_information.html
However, I’m sure the devil himself lurks in the details.