Delinking Education and Employment

Imagine this scenario. You have a high school grad who goes to college in the fall. To make ends meet, he takes a part time job as a dishwasher at a restaurant that provides fine dining. This kid pursues his degree which is a double major in biology and French. His post-grad plans are to go to medical school. But while washing those dishes at the restaurant, he starts to fill in as a waiter, a bartender, and eventually, a cook. He enjoys his job, and by the time he graduates from college he has already become an accomplished chef. He is then faced with a dilemma. Go to med school or stick with cooking? He decides he loves cooking more, and his grades in organic chemistry weren't that great. He goes on with the cooking thing and opens his own bistro.

Now, here is a guy who wasted all that money on college. What a fool! He should have decided to stick with cooking from the start and not spent all that money on tuition and all that time learning shit he didn't need to know. But he enjoyed French and biology. Looking back, he was glad he went to college. But as they say, life is what happens when you are making other plans.

FB has an interesting post here that asks if all that higher education is worth it with an accompanying table of occupations that don't require a college degree but have a significant number of degree holders. Are these the ones that graduated with a low GPA or majored in underwater basket weaving? I doubt it.

I'm old fashioned in the sense that I think education and knowledge should be valued for its own sake. To that extent, I think it is worth it. Knowing French is better than not knowing French even if it does nothing for your career. But that career aspect is the litmus test for the value of an education, and it is stupid.

Many people value education purely in terms of employment. Will it get me a job? Will it earn me a high salary? To a secondary extent, people ask if it will also help them attain status. On the basis of these questions alone, the best career path for a student is to attend an Ivy League school and medical school and become a doctor. Anything else--business, law, engineering, or what have you--is stupid. Medicine is where it is at. Everyone should be a doctor.

But we recognize the nonsense in this. In a world full of doctors, we wouldn't have good food to eat because no one would know how to cook. The world is full of niches, and we all find our spots. Or as I am fond of pointing out, the Arabic scholar was an unemployed bum until 9/11 happened. Now, he is rich because he can translate shit for the CIA.

As we learned during the housing bubble and its collapse, the fundamental flaw in the conventional wisdom was the idea that the house you lived in was not a consumer item but an investment. I still deal with this ignorance as people berate me for continuing to be a renter. Likewise, in the education bubble, people value degrees in relation to jobs. Education and employment have been linked. This is why college students think it makes sense to take out all those student loans in much the same way that homeowners thought it made sense to keep buying ever more expensive homes or to take out all those home equity loans. The future economics made the present decisions make perfect sense. But then that future fails to appear. This is how you get a cab driver with a Ph.D. in default on his student loans and living with his parents. The first thing people ask is what he studied in school, and they might be shocked to discover that it was nuclear physics. But ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall (and his Pakistani heritage,) jobs have been hard to come by for this individual.

Education became linked with employment after World War II as more people were able to attend college thanks to the GI Bill. Companies began to eschew aptitude tests because it got them in trouble for racial and sexual discrimination, so they began using college degrees as a proxy. It didn't matter what the degree was in. What mattered was that you could read, do basic math, and show up for work on a regular basis. A bachelor's degree was a good indicator that you could do these things. The result of this was that this degree was prized by everyone as the coin of entry into the middle class.

Alongside this growth was a greater value placed on highly specialized degrees in technical fields. The liberal arts began to take second place to the university as glorified trade school. You could get a job with a history degree, but to get a good job, you needed to study engineering, physics, and chemistry. Naturally, the bulk of these majors found employment in defense related sectors. Then, those folks got downsized after the end of the Cold War. I remember Michael Douglas in Falling Down as D-FENS, the highly agitated unemployed defense engineer who wreaks havoc as payback on a society that didn't value him anymore.

The fact is that there is a huge gap between what you know and what you do for a living. This isn't a problem until you put a price tag on what you know, and that is what college does. It sells what is essentially free on the hopes of attaining better employment. This link is the crux of the problem. It is the spark and federal student loans and grants are the wind that blows this spark into a raging inferno.

When you delink education and employment, amazing things occur. First of all, you start learning more stuff as you look less to acquiring a piece of paper and work towards satisfying your own curiosity and needs. Second of all, you save tons of money because you don't need to pay a school for that piece of paper which is only necessary for attaining a job. Third, you look more to specialized training to fulfill career demands. This training tends to be short, focused, and cheap.

There are certain bits of conventional wisdom that I disagree with. Here they are:

-Education is worthless unless it leads to a high paying occupation.

This is a utilitarian viewpoint. If we applied it to food, we would eat a fiber filled fortified loaf of bread and water to fill our nutritional needs and get rid of pizza, sushi, and fried chicken. Learning is worthwhile apart from a paycheck.

-Science and technical majors are better than liberal arts and business majors.

I used to subscribe to this notion until I ended up working with some of the geeks. I used to work with a chemical engineer--delivering pizzas. I knew an electrical engineer who made his living as a frame carpenter. And I met a ceramics major who made her living making ceramics. The fact is that the job market is dictated by supply and demand which is why diesel mechanics can find a job while automotive engineers find themselves out of work. Outside of medicine, I don't know of a single reliable major that has a guaranteed job attached and a high income.

-You need a degree to become successful.

This is obviously not true. Consider that I finished my degree where Bill Gates didn't. There is simply no comparison. I don't think Bill cares that he dropped out. On the more mundane level, I know plenty of people with just high school diplomas that do just fine when it comes to making money. Your talent and your virtues matter more than just about anything else when it comes to doing a good job. If you do good work, good money will come your way.

When I talk about these topics, people tend to assume certain things about my worldview. When I celebrate the blue collar people, others think I am against learning and education. When I write or talk about the many cerebral subjects I am interested in, people assume that I am some sort of elitist intellectual snob. The reality is that I value both intelligence and a good work ethic, and I eschew status as being empty and meaningless. I don't resemble anyone from this age, but I do find affinity with people from a prior age. This would be the Puritans, the Quakers, and the Founding Fathers. Their unique blend of hard work, literacy, practical skills, and love of freedom are similar to my own. These were people who plowed the fields during the day and read books at night and didn't feel one bit inferior to those Europeans.

I think what this country needs are those old fashioned virtues and values. When it comes to employment, I think people should strive for a quality work ethic and to do work they can be proud of instead of seeking a job title. And, in the evenings when the work is done, I think people should read books and learn things. Naturally, people think I am an idiot for living like this, but I can speak without sounding like a fool, feel good about my work, and be debt free. Being literate and blue collar goes against everything the current culture stands for, but this is why I thrive while everyone struggles in their ignorance. They have no clue. They want to be rich, lazy, and stupid. I don't.

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