Q&A

Q: What should a graduating high school senior do in terms of education and career?

A: I get hit with this question almost weekly especially from folks on Facebook in regards to things I post concerning the higher ed bubble. I will do my best to answer it.

The most basic advice I can give is to never take on debt to acquire an education. With tuition so high, the job market sucking ass like it does, and the fact that the debt is yours until the day you die, borrowing money for school is a certain ticket to financial hardship and ruin no matter what you major in. At some point, this bubble will reach a crisis and pop. I don't know when that will be, but it can't be much longer.

If you can go to college and not amass debt, you are ahead of the game. This can be done with scholarships, going to a cheaper school, having rich parents, taking advantage of the GI Bill, etc. It also helps if you work while going to school.

I don't think everyone should go to college. This requires a gut check, but I would tell anyone that unless you are an A student in high school you should consider learning a trade. This doesn't mean that you are dumb. I wish I had stuck with a trade, and I would like to learn one now. What young people need to understand is that people don't go to college, so they can end up serving coffee at Starbucks. The reason this happens is that B students who would excel at a trade were pushed into the A track and ended up with C results. Even the ones who do fairly well and end up in their chosen profession see their earnings eroded by debt payments such that they are no better off than someone who learned a trade. In fact, they are worse off.

For the smart kids, the question comes down to pursuing an education versus pursuing a marketable skill. There is a difference between education and training. Education goes to your development as an intelligent person. You can tell the difference between an educated person and someone who merely learned a skill. The educated person talks with a certain richness and depth that comes from an expanded worldview. The merely trained individual talks about professional wrestling. The fact is that you can train animals to do complex tasks, and the uneducated are not much different than chimpanzees. You can always tell the uneducated because if you talk about Shakespeare or Aristotle their eyes roll back in their skulls, and they immediately want to change the subject.

Everyone should strive to be educated, and this is what college originally was about. Along the way as employers started to see the value of these educated individuals, they gave them preference in hiring. Colleges became glorified trade schools for the nerds, and bullshit generators for the status seekers. The result is that college grads today have never been dumber than they are now. Paying for this substandard education makes no sense now. The person seeking a true liberal arts education should put together a home study course such as the Great Books curriculum and teach themselves. This is way cheaper and more valuable.

This leaves the issue of training. The only schooling you should pay for is that required to get a job. This may be as simple as attending a trade school or community college or as advanced as getting a medical degree. The job you seek should be of real value to the real world. An engineering degree is worthwhile but definitely not a liberal arts degree or a business degree or anything in the social sciences, law, etc. But even then, these degrees can also be problematic as is discovered when talking to an unemployed computer programmer or mechanical engineer. This is because job markets fluctuate with the law of supply and demand. The only answer to this is a diversified skill set.

This is the age old debate of the generalist vs. the specialist. The specialist either makes a ton of money, or he is eating Alpo on the street. The generalist makes average pay, but he is rarely eating Alpo. It is a given that today's hot job market will experience a reversal within a decade. My advice is to diversify that skill set. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is develop job skills while going to college that are complementary. The electrical engineer should work as an electrician. The mechanical engineer should work in a garage. The pre-med major should also double in pharmacy or nursing. Becoming proficient in a foreign language helps.

I have found in my working life that what employers really want aren't the best and the most talented, but the ones who could produce the most value for the least amount of cash. The employees who do this are the ones with a variety of skills. As a consumer, you know this. You want those extra features. You want a smartphone with a GPS. You want the DVD player in the headrest for the kids to watch. Employers are no different.

A young person with a good work ethic, a diversified skill set, and no debt will always do well. This is what college used to give young people. Back in the day, college students worked menial jobs, learned a heavy course curriculum, and could graduate with a blank financial slate. Nowadays, college is a four to six year party and a lifetime hangover. I realize now that when I graduated from college that my generation was the last one to be able to get a real education at an affordable price. This is over with thanks to the federal government.

If I were starting over today as a fresh high school graduate, I would just read a lot of library books and stuff on the internet for my own enrichment, and I would pursue apprenticeships as a plumber and an electrician or perhaps go to my local tech school for training. I would pursue a "blue collar Ph.D." that emphasized practical skills in a variety of fields. The people I meet who do this seem to enjoy their jobs, make a good living at what they do, and never worry about a job. I would not recommend this career path for the next Einstein, but I was never an Einstein. I'm just a B student who liked to read.

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