Education: big mistake or bad idea?
Published by Kyso Kisaen September 9th, 2007 in A million ways to mortgage the future, Blogitics, Circle Jerking, Conformity, Culture, Edumakashun, Politics, Purposefully Inflammatory, Soapbox, book larnin'“How much are YOU WORTH?” A shady computer tech school in my area begins their radio commercials asking people to pause and reflect on that question before going on to imply that a certification in information technology will be worth about 50K right at graduation, and creating a false sense of prestige by saying you have to pass a test (oh, god, not a test!) to qualify for their program. For a person stuck in some of the armpits of service jobs we have here, such an offer must sound pretty tempting - I know that at my least employed and most desperate I spent $200 on a bartending course that was laughably useless although by the time I was willing to admit that, the check had already cleared and the classroom had moved on to the next geographical set of suckers. I keep the certification just to remind myself that I’m not as smart as I think I am.
I thought about that a few days ago when Cog over at Offsprung touched a nerve on the topic of useless vs useful college degrees. Cog, who I guess got burned by his expensive but ultimately not lucrative undergraduate program, subscribes to “the idea of college is to spend lots of money to get a degree that will get you a job.” A view that drives others (like me) insane. By the middle of the thread, it was very clear that this was a highly personal subject that divided people into roughly three or four camps that were speaking different languages. And I thought about it when I ran into today’s MSN list’o'the hour, Top Earning College Degrees.
Of the top 10 starting salaries according to major, no fewer than five have the word “engineering” in them. Two or three others (depending on how you count economics) involve high finance, and the remaining ones are computer related. Unifying theme? Math, and plenty of it. And they’re freaking hard.
The participants in Cog’s conversation were heavy on the liberal arts degrees, no shock since college graduates in general are heavy on the liberal arts. As far as I can tell, they divided into camps roughly along these lines:
1) Cog’s Supporters: People who feel that since the conventional wisdom is that you need a degree to get a decent job then you should pick your major based on lists like the one offered by MSN to ensure that you’re not burning money.
2) People who feel that education is it’s own reward.
3) Sensible Educational Theory types, who’d like to agree with statement 2 but have been crushed by reality and would like us hoity-toity learn-for-the-love-of-it types to wake up to the real world, kids.
I belong to group 2, but I have to admit to being a bit of a hypocrite; I ended up trading a kind of joke major for a more impressive, and more reliably lucrative, one. You see, my original major was communications, which I studied at a University that cost as much per year as three or four years at the place I ended up graduating from. So really, I almost made the same costly mistake that Cog appears to think he made. But by the end of that year I was bored out of my mind, I hated the school, and I realized that for what I wanted to do, college was the complete wrong path.
So I quit, and spent a year in theatre, doing some prop stuff and stagehand stuff. But when I realized that I could -if I was lucky and worked my ass off- maybe someday have my boss’ job, I quit that too. I went back to school but this time I majored in physics, and it took 5 years which basically sucked the whole way through. But then I got my degree and it really was the magic piece of paper everyone thinks a college degree is, and I’ve been doing pretty OK ever since.
So with that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to use this thread to sort out some confusion I saw between the camps in Cog’s thread, because it seems that a lot of people were talking over each other. The whole thing has a tawdry Mommy-war vibe to it, with opposing camps that each have really good points but are defensive and see only where they disagree. So let’s open this can of worms with an insanely long post!
The False Dichotomy: Useless V Useful Majors
Cog starts out with the standard list of the so-called useless majors, such as English and Philosophy, communications and art. And I guess by Cog’s definition of useful, he’s got a point. Liberal arts degrees tend to bring in less money than certain other degrees, and some, like communications, attract lots of students, meaning that even if you do get any useful skills out of the class your pool of competition is enormous.
But, plenty of people with degrees in English and art will tell you they’re doing perfectly fine. And I’m wondering if these majors aren’t taking the fall for the unreasonable expectations of the people getting them. Charles Schwab’s 2007 Teens and Money survey has high schoolers claiming that they expect to make six figure salaries - and since the pressure to go to college has been on since probably the 70’s, and really ramped in the 80’s-90’s, you can’t tell me that any one of us who started college between 1995 and now were that much more reasonable when we started out. I don’t think I ever fantasized about six figures, but I did want to eventually make as much as my non-college-educated parents do combined, and with a mass comm degree, yeah right.
Anyway, I think that instead of defining majors as useless or useful (because let’s face it, claiming a degree is useless because it only got you a shit-paying job is a slap in the face to teachers, social workers and a whole bunch of other people that society needs so much, we require them to get Masters degrees in order to get shafted with their crappy, crappy paychecks) let’s be honest even if it makes us sound like greedy bastards: a lot of people’s problems with their degrees is that they are not lucrative enough. It’s not useful or useless, it’s lucrative or insufficiently remunerative. It’s OK to sound like a greedy bastard when we’re deconstructing the social expectation that we pay in advance for a college degree in return for the promise of greater success later. If years and years worth of graduates are finding it’s a bad investment, then we owe it to the next wave of students to have an honest discussion about the money aspect.
And of course, using the useless/useful model leads to…
You Hippies Should Have Chosen Better Majors
Women, especially, hear this a lot when they complain that their female-dominated jobs make crap for wages. For Cog, this may have been valid, if annoying accusation: he says his degree is in “sound engineering” so he could conceivably have chosen electrical engineering or something similarly impressive and in-demand. But for the history majors, the marketing majors, the teachers and the nurses, what do you say to them? Want to make a living wage? Should have taken calculus in high school and developed a love of 80-hour workweeks and been an architect or engineer instead! Ha!
Clearly, we look for more than just money when we chose a major. If you hate math (and plenty of Americans, especially the be-vagina-ed ones, do because that’s how our society programs us) then you’re up shit creek in terms of starting salary. If you’re bored out of your mind by business classes, then why major in business? Your competition for jobs is going to be those people in your classes who loved every second of Business Marketing II. And don’t we tell kids they should try to do what makes them happy? Don’t worry about the money, was the advice given to me when I was starting out. Bad advice, yes, but to chose a career path I hated just because someone else makes a decent living off of it is also a terrible plan.
Cog’s thread touched on two different versions of this problem. The first is the one most of us are familiar with: how many jobs are there in Arcola, Illinois for a newbie English & Women’s Studies double major from State U. For that matter, what does someone like Lauren do with her teaching degree in the middle of Indiana when she discovers that teaching isn’t for her? What happens when all of the liberal arts majors in your area end up competing for the same mid-to-upper level service jobs? What if you’ve been told your whole life that education was the key to a better life and that turns out not to be true because there ain’t any jobs in your area for pretty much everyone?
The second version may be more keenly felt by the upper-middle class types who were specifically told all their lives that if they just followed the community-approved life path then everything would turn out OK. Cog, and I know he’s not the only one out there, has a ’sound engineering’ degree - I almost chose a similar program to be my second major if I’d stayed at Overpriced Private School. People willing to shell out for the upper-crust schools get to chose from an exquisite buffet of trendy undergraduate degrees. My Overpriced U had a special four-FOUR-FOUR! majors in ONE program that seemed designed to tempt the type of naive, upper-middle-class type A overachievers into attending that school; it wasn’t until after you were settled in for a semester that everyone from students to faculty would warn you not to take that bloated, near-useless mishmash of intro courses because employers felt that graduates with those degrees lacked focus.
But then you get out of your super-specific trendy major and discover that jobs are few and far between, and if you’re really unlucky (as graduates of a certain technical program in my area are) you find that you may even have to battle negative stereotypes about graduates of your program within your chosen industry. The sense of betrayal must be keen - everyone lied to you, and you wish someone would have set you straight before you spent 4 years and 100K on it. Where do the would-have-been actors and not-quite-fashion buyers end up?
Does the guy who would have been a record producer but now has to settle for the same jobs as the rest of us have the same right to bitch as the gal who gave teaching her very best shot but found she could make the same money for less frustration elsewhere? Should 18 year olds be given options that could severely limit their future opportunities without being trained to look, I mean really examine, their choices? When only a third of Americans even have a degree, should we really be hyping the college path to the undecided or the unambitious? The problem of finding that your degree is not going to do what you thought it would strikes nearly all majors and all but the tippiest-top of the prestige ladder. Is this knee-jerk reaction to say that it’s the graduate’s fault for not having chosen one of the few magic majors (law, for example, or engineering) a useful attitude when this problem of trying to fit a square peg of education into the round hole of your regional economy is so ubiquitous?
Do you even need college?
I guess here we have to define what we want out of a job - and here, again, Cog’s thread participants seemed to be talking past each other. Some jobs require a degree: one commenter was talking about wanting to major in finance because she can’t learn all that she needs on the job. I’ll cede that point. But you’ll notice that finance is on the top-10 earner’s jobs up there with engineering, another job that you’ll need to take classes for even if you have tons of on the job experience (ask my poor would-have-been father-in-law, who is fairly comfortable after years of working for the state but is also so close yet so far away from a civil engineer’s sweet, sweet salary). Other commenters at Cog’s place seemed to be willing to settle for less ambitious white collar jobs. Now my comments on the necessity of a college education were based on the guys I know who do sales, and there, a college degree will only get you so far.
I’ll agree that there are jobs where you need the degree, but those are jobs where you don’t need any degree, you need the right damn degree, and if we were all able to do that then the jobs wouldn’t be worth so much. The vast majority of people want to turn their business or Russian translation or geography degrees into something useful, and so I think for the purposes of that conversation we can just toss the extreme money-earners right out of the conversation. I think we need to make a clear distinction between jobs you can get with the degree you have now, and ones you have to go back to ’start’ and get re-degreed for. And for the former, you will be competing with people who have no degrees but maybe more job experience. And if the position requires a degree just as a weeder requirement, then you’ll be competing with other degreed applicants and you’ll need to figure out another way to stand out.
And for those jobs where a degree is second to experience, college kids then start out at a disadvantage with respect to the non-degreed in how much debt they start their young lives with. Four years behind in experience AND extra debt that makes starting salaries seem too small? That’s quite the raw deal for a person who saw their degree as just a ticket to a job.
So how much do you need college? I have no fucking idea, and the litmus test seems to be getting your degree and waiting to see where you are in five years. Perhaps if we have a productive enough discussion, we’ll be able to hammer out something a little better than that.
YMMV
This conversation is going to get quickly muddied up if we’re not all careful. Variables that matter include but are not limited to: degree earned, the state of the economy when you graduated, your location, the prestige of your program, traditional vs non-traditional students, your expectations and your non-school issues. So let’s all try to not take things too personally, aight?
18 Responses to “Education: big mistake or bad idea?”
- 1 Pingback on Sep 10th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Given that I’m doing a PhD in English (young adult literature), I think it’s pretty obvious which group I fall into.
As for if it’s “useful”– it makes me happy, and that is its use. Obviously, my educational path would not make everyone happy, and for those people, it would not be useful. In some ways, studying a branch of children’s literature is seen as conventionally “useful” because people still value literacy in children, but at the same time, it’s a branch of literature studies that is stigmatised because so many people don’t see children’s/young adult literature as “real” literature.
So much of this is colored by class. My parents were the first generation to go to college, both majored in accounting — a degree with an obvious one-to-one correspondence between degree and job. They were dubious about the whole liberal arts enterprise, and would’ve been horrified (possibly to the point of pulling their financial support) had I majored in English or philosophy. I think they did want me to do what made me happy — but happy in the longer view, not just for four years. So I thought very hard about the possible careers that could come of each major I considered, settled on biology, and went to medical school. So far that’s working out okay.
Now my husband’s parents are PhDs, with a longer family tradition of higher education, and they are more of the “do what makes you happy” types. Being a history major worked for his mom, so why would she stop him? I noticed the same thing in college — we had a lot of kids of academics, and they felt much freer to choose anything they wanted than those of us with parents outside the academe, esp those of us who were second or first generation students.
Gah, you’ve hit a sore subject for me. My BA is in Classical Studies, which means I have a boatload of archaeology, art history, ancient history, Greek and Latin. I studied what I *loved*, and still love, and my only real goal as an undergrad was to get that PhD and teach, and write long scholarly papers and poke around old ruins. I didn’t care if I ever made any money - the 60K a year a tenured professor made seemed impossibly rich to me. But then I made the mistake of getting married to someone who, to put it MILDLY, did not support my humble goals. I got pregnant, and had to drop out of grad school (where I was studying Religious Studies - the goal being to be an expert on women’s issues in ancient religions) because he couldn’t be bothered to watch our child three nights a week while I attended my classes. I’ve regretted caving ever since, and only did it because I was scared of him, and scared of leaving my infant daughter with him.
Even now, 12 years after the fact, I PINE for those dusty books and those obscure arguments and puzzling out what the hell you do with the pluperfect. But now I’m a single mother, working in marketing, and I can’t go back. And yet…would I have traded anything for that experience? That period of time when I got to be immersed in my true love - books and the distant past? No. Not for anything. And if my kids wanted to study something equally ‘worthless’, I would encourage them to do it, and stick with it through grad school, and not let anyone derail them. I’ll always be a 2 - learning something you love is *priceless*.
Well, like you said, it depends on what you want out of it if your degree is useless. I would love to be a full time, perpetual student, but it just isn’t practical. I tend to fall into group 2, with some leanings toward group 3.
I have a MS in physics from a middle of the road state university in Ohio. It is, in fact, fairly useless for me (even though I would probably do it again if I had to do it over–with some supplementals to make it a little more useful). I could, I I suppose, go to work in industry and make decent money (with long hours and I wouldn’t especially enjoy it), but what I really want to do is teach. But I have the wrong degree for secondary schools (straight physics–only two recent education class at all) and I didn’t go far enough for a post-secondary teaching job (most of those require a PhD and would also require research and grant writing, which I do not want to do, plus, I like my family and would like to see them on occasion). So I teach part time at said local state U and substitute full time in public schools until my kids get in school and I can afford to go back. It isn’t so bad, really, but it is a bit of a hassle.
But then you get out of your super-specific trendy major and discover that jobs are few and far between, and if you’re really unlucky (as graduates of a certain technical program in my area are) you find that you may even have to battle negative stereotypes about graduates of your program within your chosen industry. The sense of betrayal must be keen - everyone lied to you, and you wish someone would have set you straight before you spent 4 years and 100K on it. Where do the would-have-been actors and not-quite-fashion buyers end up?
This is me. Big entrance scholarship, promise of near-guaranteed employment upon graduation, and the dot.com bubble breaks in my third year and suddenly there’s a glut on the market of graphic designers who expect six-figure salaries. My degree is barely worth the paper it’s printed on, and I’m left feeling that my major shouldn’t be taught in universities at all (I could have learned the same material at a college for a fraction of the price), let alone warrant professional fees.
That said, at 18 I was in no position to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. That’s one big mark in favour of “useless” liberal arts degrees—more varied courses early on would have given me a better idea of what I wanted to do with my life. The one consolation is that my rather chaotic career path landed me back in school anyway, so maybe I can make up for it.
All I know is that when i started college at a fancy ass university that is famous for computer science/engineering, I had a lot of conversations with ‘future engineers’ who all bragged that they were going to be making 80K right when they graduated. This happened for some of them, but others… lets just say I knew one guy who was workin at bruegger’s bagels.
I studied what I loved, learned a variety of skills, some marketable and some not, found/made a flexible interdisciplinary niche for myself, and am way better off than a lot of people. I prolly won’t make 6 figures but you never know. I think that leaving school w/ a set of flexible skills and some techy/computer leanings (even in ’soft’ subjects) is key. My fancy degree helps, but I did not follow the trendy path to super-wealth like I could have. I traded security for freedom and I pay for it all the time, but I’m absolutely certain this was the right decision.
I never knew what I wanted to ‘be’ and thought the question was totally stupid. No one can see the end of any path. You just choose the path to go down because it looks the nicest to you- listening to someone else who tells you what is at the end of which path is the dumbest thing you can do. Especially if it involves specialization in only ONE thing. I will always advise people to be flexible over super-specialized.
I am the first member of my family with a college degree, and with that background I can safely say that it’s absolutely necessary. What a lot of people who took being middle class as a birthright fail to understand is that you actually need some social capital to be in that class, and a bachelor’s in minimal. Without it, I’d be no one, even if my skills were the same. With it, I was conditioned to be a member of the class that I’m in now, and that’s about more than money. It’s about entitlements, networking, even dating opportunities. It’s crucial.
I dropped out and became a ROCK MUSICIAN. Most of my friends are musicians and artists, and only a handful have degrees.
The men fare a lot better than the gals (financially at playing music, painting, and the like), which is probably why the wimmins nowadays are more focused on getting a degree in the first place. If you aren’t going to be taken seriously as an artist, you better have that degree to fall back on.
I think it is actually true that when you are female, there are many who will use any ammunition at all against you, including things like “you don’t have a degree”, when a degree is not required from similarly situated males. (I must interject that I am not talking about music degrees here. As far as I know, a degree in music is more of an impediment to Rock Stardom than not. I am thinking about painting and fine arts.)
It is sad, but the artsy fartsy world has become more and more miogynistic in the last twenty years….it was more egalitarian in 1982 than it is now. I think America was less racist then too.
What a lot of people who took being middle class as a birthright fail to understand is that you actually need some social capital to be in that class, and a bachelor’s in minimal. Without it, I’d be no one, even if my skills were the same. With it, I was conditioned to be a member of the class that I’m in now, and that’s about more than money. It’s about entitlements, networking, even dating opportunities. It’s crucial.
Gee, I wish somebody’d told me about that ten years or so ago. Granted that I’m not certain the middle class is something to which I aspire, given my experiences of it in youth, but it would be nice to have the option to choose one way or the other. (Of course, I’m still trying to determine in what context is ‘no one’, in the quoted paragraph.)
Regarding college and university, in general: I’m one of those folks who goes to university, finds out it’s nothing like what he expected, and drops out. How much did I need college? I suppose I can’t say for certain. But I’m a computer geek for a living, and from where I am there doesn’t seem to be much of any ‘career path’, at least not in an upward direction — I’m no blazing genius and I haven’t even got a bachelor’s degree in the field, so pick-up programming jobs and system administration work appears to be just about all I’m going to be able to find, at least around here. So long as the pay for that kind of work doesn’t go to crap, I should probably manage okay, but I wish I’d had enough clue seven years ago not to drop out, and I also wish I were willing to go into massive student-loan debt to go back to school — if I could be certain I’d be able to pay off the loans, I’d do it, but with things the way they are now, I just don’t dare.
I have so many conflicting feelings about this issue, so it’s hard for me to sort out where exactly I stand.
I, like Amanda, am a first-generation college graduate. I totally agree with her that for reasons not directly related to content, a college degree is increasingly essential. You just get access to resources and social connections that you don’t get as much elsewhere. This is a little problematic, though; I think college has gotten overly vocationalized and our society doesn’t offer as many opportunities for people to learn to do something they like and that they can make a living at without going to college. As one who’s taught in college, I’ve seen a lot of students who just don’t want to be there, but they go because (especially if you come from a middle-class family) that’s “just what you do”. But college isn’t for everyone, which is not to say there’s anything “wrong” with those people. They just need other avenues in order to develop their interests and talents.
As an aside, I recently read that some of the trades in my area are having a hard time getting people to fill available jobs. These are typically blue-collar skilled jobs in which you can start at around $50,000/yr., which is not bad for your first job. But these jobs don’t have the cachet of a desk job at MicroBorg; we’ve almost done too good a job of guiding people towards college in training for a white-collar job.
I majored in a science as an undergraduate, and I was thinking about changing my major to something very different by my sophomore year because I was underachieving and thought that the major I’d picked wasn’t for me. I let my parents talk me out of changing, and both, being working-class folk, thought I should focus more on my earning potential; my father told me flat out that trying to find “happiness” in my future job was useless and that I needed to go for the money. I stuck with it. Turns out that within two years of graduating, I was done with the sciences and made a change anyway.
After working as a temp to make ends meet, I decided to go for the happiness thing and pursue graduate school in history. Let me say that, in my experience, there are also pitfalls to the “education for its own sake” view. Education is good for its own sake, ultimately, so I don’t believe in the idea of the “useless” degree. It is, however, possible to go too far in pursuit of this noble dream, especially at the graduate school level. I would never tell someone that he or she shouldn’t go to grad school in the liberal arts, but I would tell someone to think very carefully about it, and if he or she is just finishing up undergraduate study, to take some time away from school and do something else.
If you can be happy without going to grad school, I would argue that you don’t need to go. The opportunity cost for Ph.D. study is significant. My field - history - has an average time-to-Ph.D. of about nine years. That’s nine years spent in relative peonage, and if you’re looking for an academic job, your prospects are, quite frankly, awful. Unless you’re from one of the very top programs, you’ll very likely spend a few years adjuncting wherever you can get a job. If you do get a tenure-track job, you have to be willing to go just about anywhere to do it; I love where I live and I decided that I won’t go to just any place just so I can call myself an academic.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great going through old books and archives and finding something new and writing about it. I love being an historian - at least in the abstract. But those archives and old books don’t pay the bills. It’s nice to be able to eat decently, have my own roof over my own head, and have some degree of independence.
Sorry this is so long. I think I could write several blog posts on this.
My parents both have degrees, and insisted that I get one just to be competitive in the workplace. They were pleased when I started in software engineering, a little less pleased when I transferred schools and switched to computer science, slightly disappointed when I dropped that in favor of graphic design, and downright hostile when I switched to art history. But writing papers made me happy, and the extra few years at school got me a boatload of tech experience, which I turned into a decent paying IT job when I left.
The key, though, was knowing people. I got a summer job in conference desk work, which got me noticed by the director of the student/staff tech support department. Those jobs landed me a management position the next summer in the conference department. Due to the location of my office, I stumbled into a web development position, which didn’t work out so well, but got me some fancy recommendation letters, so that when my friend’s dad’s engineering firm needed an IT manager, I got hired on the spot. They didn’t care that I spent umpteen years pasting letters onto poster board and writing papers about Artemesia Gentileschi. I knew a guy, and I had something like 10 years of computer tech and programming experience. That’s what counts.
Networking >= job experience > degree > no degree
Given my current experience and the fact that the rest of my familial generation which doesn’t have degrees is employed, I’m going to say that having a college degree isn’t essential unless you are going into a specialized field like business where that knowledge can’t be picked up intuitively. I did well in school and everything, yet I still can’t find work. I don’t hold anyone to blame for this, but the liberal arts education doesn’t really help to make one competitive in areas where work experience is more important than education like the area I live in now. Right now, I can’t even get a secretary job because even though I know all of the work, I don’t have enough work experience. I’m lucky because I actually really liked college and will go back because of my high job prospects. But, I’m confident that there are other people exactly like me, a year out from their liberal arts degree and struggling to get on their feet. FWIW, I graduated in African American Studies and Politics. When people don’t understand what one of your majors is, finding work is really a chore. Really, college is a grand networking scheme. Only if someone had told me that before I went and decided to do sound engineering for my work-study job instead of something that I could actually use.
Well — YMMV.
I’m a PhD in English currently an Assistant Prof (yes, I have the elusive Tenure Track job) at a good, if isolated, Provincial University.
And hot damn, is this a great job. The ultrafun bits are teaching and research — never-ending joy and fascination, both of them, so much pleasure that I actually feel like I’m pulling off a fast one — they PAY me to do this stuff! SWEEET! The not-so fun bits are marking (shudder) and writing, which is best described as staring at the computer screen until your eyes bleed or fifteen hours have passed, whichever comes first. Then when you’ve finished, you do it some more.
Even the money is good — well, oddly enough, *especially* the money, which I never expected to be this good. The nice thing about graduate work in the humanities is that your expectations are so low that even a normal middle-class salary seems like wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And I do, actually, make better than average money, as do most of us from half-decent schools who have the astounding good luck to get one of these jobs.
I don’t like the town I’m in much, and I’m still paying off student loans the size of Mount McKinley, but I am strikingly, nay, astoundingly happy in my work and the job comes with intellectual and personal perks that are unbeatable in any field.
And, in all honesty, were I to win the lottery, I would not quit. Move, maybe. Quit, not.
So the answer is, yes, if you love the subject you’re studying, then the game is worth the candle. I was happy as a sessional, too: I didn’t make much money, maybe 35,000 - 40,000 but it beat all hell out of middle-management grunt work and/ or secretarial stuff which pays the same wage for utter, soul-destroying misery. Which would you rather do, answer emails or explain poetry?
The main problem with Academia is that it’s rather like the priesthood: it’s a way of life, but one that you need to pay for up front, before you know that it’s right for you.
But yes, I’m on the side of doing what you love: you’ll be better at it than something you don’t like, and I can’t imagine being locked into something I disliked for the rest of my life.
I feel like I don’t really fall into any of those categories, because I want to be a teacher, but I don’t especially love learning (weird, right? I also don’t like kids that much. but put a bunch of them in a classroom and have me try to explain how to multiply fractions and I could do that all day). So for me, college is ultimately about the degree, and then the certification, but it’s certainly not about the money (ha).
I do sort of wish we still had two-year teacher’s colleges–I’d much rather spend two years learning about education than spend four years and a lot more money learning some about education and some about stuff I don’t care about, because honestly, I don’t love learning for learning’s sake. I like reading books, and talking to people, but I could care less about the specifics of most things. Maybe this is a terrible quality for a future teacher to have. I like to think I offset it with other qualities that all of my favorite teachers had–pateince, a sense of humor, an ability not to take things too personally, and others (I hope).
I do think we need to step up the vocational training in this country. A liberal arts education isn’t for everyone, not even in an ideal society–lord knows I don’t especially want one (in no small part because I feel like I’m learning a lot more so far in my year off, at an Americorps organization, than I did freshman year of college) and it’s a real shame that vocational education is seen as somehow “lesser.”
If what you want out of life is to focus on loving learning, then go ahead and pick a major that makes you sigh with geeky pleasure. But not everyone gets like that about learning, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
The trick is to find something you like that you will also get paid a lot to do. I’ve known since I was about 5 years old that I wanted to do some variety of biology. Veterinary science didn’t work out because I’m lazy and I was competing with a zillion Type A freaks for a very few spots at a vet school. Fortunately I realized this my freshman year. I took an entomology class because it sounded interesting, and fell in love. On the other hand, I double majored in Russian and my Ph.D minor is Spanish, for the simple reason that I also love languages. To me, it doesn’t necessarily matter what you major in. It matters how flexible you are and how willing you are to gain new experiences. For example, my sister-in-law majored in classics with an emphasis in art. She now makes boatloads of money designing scenes for department stores and decorating houses - and she recently spent time in Italy painting a villa to make it ready for tourists. Who wouldn’t be happy with that? On the other hand, one of my best friends just got her MFA in creative writing. She flat out refuses to do anything but that which might someday obtain her a tenure-track position, so she’s stuck in a shitty adjunct job.
The topic I could write on this could fill several blogposts, but here’s just one question I’ll throw out to the blogsphere:
What do you do when you hate math but don’t know what you love?
What I find most disturbing is the trend of requiring a BA for positions that really only demand minimal on the job training and common sense. It seems to me that requiring BA’s for “administrative” (secretarial) work that pays little and kills brain cells and little to no chance of advancement is part of some grand conspiracy to charge people to remain in the middle class.
I love the education I received an wouldn’t trade it for anything, am I bitter about spending the last 3 years as a glorified secretary? A little, but I’m more upset that people, especially women who couldn’t swing the state U like I did are being shut out of jobs like mine when I know that I don’t need the analytical, writing or critical thinking skills I amassed in college to perform my job. I need patience, common sense, and nerves of steel.
Bottom line, a service economy will be the end of us all.