Let me begin by saying that I am not anti-college. Polly and I have college educations, as do four of our children. We encouraged our children to attend the local community college. Four of them graduated from the Northwest State; one is working on his bachelor’s degree and another is finishing up her master’s degree. One of our sons is a certified auto mechanic. He currently is the shop manager for a local auto repair shop.
That said, high school counselors, parents, and well-intentioned adults are selling young adults a false bill of goods when they tell them that success in life requires a college education. It doesn’t, and young adults need to know this. Far too often, high school seniors feel pressured into attending college; vicariously fulfilling their parents’ dreams. Teens are often encouraged to go into deep debt to fulfill their “dream.” And that’s fine if they know what they want to do in life. Many eighteen-year-old teens, however, don’t. It took me two years post-high school to decide on going to college. Were those years wasted? Of course not. I spent them working full-time, learning real-world skills, including having my own car, apartment, and bank accounts. I suspect many parents fear their children will never go to college if they let them work for a year or two first. Why is that?
I live in the industrial Midwest, so what I say next will be colored by experiences living in rural Ohio. Working for a year or two after high school exposes young adults to the fact that a college education doesn’t guarantee higher income. Currently, an eighteen-year-old young person can get a job at a local manufacturing concern, making $40,000 a year with health insurance and benefits. Do your job and paths to management-level positions await, as three of our sons found out. While our oldest son is working on his bachelor’s degree, he started working at a large manufacturing concern at age eighteen –twenty-six years ago. He has made a good life for himself. Our oldest son works for the same business, as does Polly. In fact, five of our six children worked for this company at one time or another. Polly plans to retire in October, having spent twenty-seven years cleaning offices and buildings. She started as an entry-level employee and will leave as a manager. Factory work has been good to the Gerencser family, so I will never disparage the honorable (essential) work manufacturing workers perform. Personally, I HATED factory work. I worked for a number of factories in college and when Polly and I were first married. The monotony of the work drove me nuts, so two years into our marriage, I took a low-paying management position with Arthur Treacher’s. Six months later, I was promoted and became the general manager of their Brice Road store in Columbus. I found my “calling,” so to speak. From that time forward, I worked a plethora of jobs to make ends meet as a poorly paid pastor, but most of them were management positions.
Young adults should be encouraged to follow their bliss; to experience the fullness of this country of ours (and countries beyond our borders). If college is what they want to do, then fine. We need college-educated citizens to work jobs where advanced training is essential. That said, many jobs that management says require college educations don’t. As a sixty-six-year-old man, if I have learned anything, I have learned that “learning by doing” is often a good way to gain real-world skills. That’s why we need to encourage the establishment of apprentice programs — paths to well-paying careers. Our son is an auto mechanic. Everything he knows about cars and trucks comes from doing. He got his first taste of turning a wrench with his dad, mainly running for tools and holding flashlights. From there, he worked on his own vehicles, and that turned into a job at a local automobile dealership.
Young adults shouldn’t be pigeonholed, forced into post-high school paths parents and counselors want them to take. Certainly, parents play an instrumental part in their children’s post-high school futures. Local factory floors are littered with employees with college degrees. After college, they found themselves in debt, and upon learning that their chosen field either doesn’t pay well or there are no openings, they decided that factory work was a means to an end. And that’s okay too. I told all of my children that you can view factory work in one of several ways. First, it is a means to an end; the place where I earn money so I can do what I really want to do. Second, it is a good career path, one that could lead to management-level jobs if you apply yourself and do your time. Third, use your job as a way to further your education. Many companies pay for college. Several of our children followed this path. One of our sons worked in a factory for several years, and earned an associate’s degree in network administration. He parlayed his degree into an entry-level position with a local wireless internet provider. Today? He is their senior network administrator.
Different strokes for different folks, right? As a father and grandfather, I want my children and grandchildren to be happy and prosperous. The path each of them takes will vary, and I will support them in whatever they do. I am excited that two of our granddaughters are headed off to college next fall. It will be interesting to see what comes next. If one or more of my grandchildren decide to follow their parents into the factory or choose industrial trades, I will be just as excited for them too. My goal is to be their supporter and cheerleader, and not a demanding grandfather who is disappointed that they didn’t follow the path I wanted them to follow.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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There are many reasons to go to college, and, yes, a primary one is to gain job skills. It’s hard to know these days what will pan out in the years to come, many jobs that seem promising now may well succumb to AI, whether one goes to college or not. There is allegedly a crisis in China now because there are too many college-educated people and not nearly enough jobs available for their level of education. So, it’s still a bit of a crap shoot, even if you go to college. The claim commonly made is that college-educated people earn about $1.2 million more than those with only a high school degree. I and my brothers are perhaps a good case study. I went to college for about 11 years, and have a BA, MA, and PhD. I taught at a large public university for 30 years and retired with a very low six-figure salary. My brother got an associate’s degree in civil engineering in a 2-year program at a community college, joined an excellent engineering firm, and made probably 5-10 times as much money as I did over our lifetimes. Though I had the joy of ever working with young people, which truly is a joy. Another brother was in the retail auto industry—there were years he made $300K, and years he eeked by. He tried to get out of the rat race of selling cars, and became a parts specialist, but was laid off at several places when his salary got high enough to be considered a liability that could be diminished by replacing him with a novice. He ended up in retirement with a very modest income, mostly his and his wife’s social security. Thank Zeus for that source, Paul Ryan notwithstanding.
My two brothers illustrate another aspect of our lives, luck. You may end up working for a really great company that values you and propels you to a very comfortable life or you may become weasel fodder. I was lucky to get a job at a nationally-prominent university, lots and lots of people don’t. Surely luck is a factor, too, in the ministry—I wonder if Bruce had begun in some mega-church rolling in money if he would have followed the same course he did. Ironic in the extreme, but surely a factor even in Christian ministry. This absolutely brilliant person seems to me to have had many posts that barely supported him materially and surely didn’t properly appreciate his beautiful mind. No doubt that wears one down. I read somewhere once about the hazard of casting pearls before Philistines.
But to me the most important aspect of education is how it equips us to be in the world. Where would I be without Shakespeare, psychology, philosophy, astronomy, geology, 19th century British literature, and all of the other matchlessly beautiful things I studied in college? Engagement with these things changed my life forever. Every day, every moment of my life is informed by my education, I can scarcely take a breath without something coming to mind. These are the sacred trusts of our humanity, as far as I’m concerned, what we as a species have learned over the long years. Our knowledge, our art, our striving. My church is the public library. Education is a knife, it teaches us to slice and dice. Become a ninja. What good is a life with a blunt edge or no edge at all? For me as a student, college was a limitless buffet of the mind. I am still feasting 50 years later.
Enough, and apologies, I’m sure each of us could write a book on this topic.
In other countries, college is 3 years instead of 4. If we did that here in the US it would cut costs by a quarter.
I earned my BS in computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, back almost in the Pleistocene (1980). My career goal then was not so much being an engineer, as being someone able to support myself without living with my parents. I turned out to be a reasonable engineer, but a good engineering manager. Still, management is hard work, and Silicon Valley startups fail often. I got tired of being laid off when companies went under.
Since my husband was doing well as an engineer in a different subfield, he was open to me going back to school while I cared for my aged father. I earned my MS in geology at a California State University, one of our so-called second tier schools (as opposed to the University of California schools). Because my background was in engineering, I had a lot of undergrad classes to take to catch up at San José State. In general, I found the CSU to be a better environment for learning for an an ordinary person like me. I started my SJSU education at age 45.
My fellow students in the upper-division and graduate classes at SJSU were a mix of folks who’d gone to university or CC right out of high school, and others who had served in the US military, or had worked for a while before considering college, or had done CC and then worked for a year or three before coming to university. There were a couple of other retreads like me, changing our lives. In general, the people who’d had other experiences between high school and university were better students. They’d taken the time to figure out what career path they truly wanted to pursue, and were on that path.
Based on those observations, I am an enthusiastic supporter of higher education…for people who truly want it, and have envisioned a path to where it leads. Sometimes those folks are recent high school grads. Sometimes they are not. There are lots of other ways to make a decent living, and people who succeed at those professions do so by working hard and perfecting their skills. Not much different from successful university students.
But to mindlessly push young people into higher ed, before they’ve figured themselves out, is what leads to SJSU’s 40% graduation rate for incoming undergrads. Certainly it’s a commuter school, and some people drop out because of economic situations. More drop out because they weren’t ready for university at that point in their lives, which says nothing about who they are, what they’re really capable of, and so forth. It is simply a snapshot of where they are, right then. But I suspect far too many of them were there in the first place because the culture said that they must go to college right out of high school, no matter if that was a good path for them then.
Very well put. I’d add that colleges and universities are basically money making businesses. They want to graduate as many people as possible and you end up with too many chiefs and not enough Indians. I agree with Rand Valentine’s comment, if you can afford college you do come out a more well rounded person.
I recall as a college student right out of high school, there was some complaints about “retreads” disrupting the grading curve. But I also think people who have worked real world jobs are more receptive to assimilate new information. This meshes well with the notion of going to work first before high school. As the saying goes, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.
Another thing I’d point out, if you’re really interested in a topic you can sometimes audit classes (no credit but otherwise you get the full class) or you can go to the university, pick up the text book for classes you’re interested in. This probably won’t work because human nature requires the discipline that “taking a class” imposes, but I believe it is possible.
Ironically enough, it was teaching in college that convinced me there is too much emphasis on herding high school graduates into higher education. I saw many students—mainly those who’d come directly after high school—who were there because they didn’t know what else to do or because of the pressure of being the pride of their families and communities. (As the first in my family to attend college, I understand that all too well.)
I think one reason why college came to be so emphasized is that for many families—especially those of immigrants—it was an “impossible dream.” One reason why people emigrate is so that their kids could “do better.” And, a couple of generations ago, college was a way “up”—and to assimilation, which involves speaking and dressing in ways the culture considers “smart.”
Colleges and schools have perpetuated such notions. Because they’re businesses (albeit ones that benefit from not-for-profit status) they have to, especially as the number of college-age students is falling. And there sections of industries such as financial services and tech, that profit enormously from this arrangement.
I think another reason for the emphasis on college is the emphasis on metrics in gauging a school’s “success.” They are judged by students’ test scores and by what percentage go to college because, frankly, it’s easier than doing more holistic evaluations.
So evaluating students and schools perpetuates the notion that the kids who are “smarter” or “do better” go to college There are so many different kinds of intelligence and aptitude and focusing only on one kind is a dis-service not only to students who may not be good test-takers, but to society in general.
Here is a story of two siblings: One became a mechanic. The other got an MBA and became a hedge-fund manager. So, one has dirty hands but makes clean money, while the other has clean hands and dirty money.
Everyone has made such good points here. Not every person should go to college, and not every person should go to trade school. We really should be emphasizing to students to do what best suits them, and help them identify that without bias.
Living in the USA, but born and raised and worked in the UK until I was 50, the US education system seems designed to waste time and money. By the time you enter university in the UK you are expected to have completed all your gen ed, with qualifications to prove it, at university you spend 3-4 years of intensive study in your chosen field – which, in 90% of cases you know before you go to school.
I grew up in a small town in Tennessee. That town is now a large suburb of Metropolitan Nashville. My family was very poor financially and even poorer in social status. It was culturally and socially dominated by wealthy attorneys, medical doctors, and businessmen who were heavily steeped in nostalgia for a 19th century Upper Class social and cultural way of life that was, quite literally, “Gone with the Wind.”
Basically, and I kid you not, there were two classes of people in my southern town. The foregoing people formed a highly educated Upper Class, which included their sons and daughters in the local public school system. Everyone else in town, including most manufacturing workers; trade workers; and lowly paid common laborers, constituted a very large second group I would call “Living Pieces of Shit”. Many of you readers out there, our beloved Bruce, Polly, and all of their children and grandchildren, had they lived in my town in 1968, would have been classified as “Living Pieces of Shit”—–and they would have been treated that way by the “Gone with the Wind” group and the children and grandchildren of this group would have treated their children and grandchildren the same way on the street, in school, and perhaps even at church.
Being a poor kid, I was socially aspirational, thinking that I could become a “member” of the “Gone with the Wind” class—-but not be personally like the insufferable male and female pricks who otherwise constituted that group. Federal government commercials on T.V. in the 1960s told me that the way to do that was go to a good college, get a four-year degree with great grades, and then get a graduate professional degree with the same great grades. I did just that. I was the first person in my nuclear and extended family to earn college degrees.
I upped my social standing significantly as an adult, but I did it in another town that was not culturally and socially anything like the “Gone with the Wind” hometown of my growing-up years. I married an extremely smart woman who followed the same path as me into the adult world. I had hoped that both of our children would obtain college degrees and do as well (or better) financially and socially as we did. I had hoped even more that we might have one of those unique families where five grandchildren of ours would one day consist of a Corporate CEO, Heart Surgeon, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Famous Actor, and College Professor.
Alas, it was not to be. Our daughter flunked out of college (on purpose—as in premeditated) and refused to ever go back. Our son struggled in high school, dropped out temporarily, got his high school diploma on-line, and refused going to college. My daughter found a non-college career path she loves. My son wants a non-college career in business and is searching around for that career right now—–like Bruce did in his early, pastoral years years.
Even though I was successful in life, and so was my wife, if I went back to a high school reunion in my old hometown, the “Gone with the Wind” class members would still treat me like a member of the “Living Piece of Shit” class because that is how they were raised and it is just who they are. That is why I no longer go to high school reunions. I intensely dislike the members of the “Gone with the Wind” crowd and do not want to be physically, emotionally, or communicationally anywhere near all those hurtful people. I much prefer my status and relationships in towns and cities far from the one I grew up in long ago.
Just in case anyone wants to know, Gallatin, Tennessee was—-the place where I grew up——and a new generation of “Gone with the Wind” types probably still dominates the town. You can read about that town here:
https://www.gallatintn.gov/
I thought this was an interesting comment.
You are really describing something like the old ideas of aristocracy, with their emphasis on social standing.
When the USA revolutionaries said “all men are created equal”, they may not have meant it in the way it is understood today. I’m inclined to see that statement as a rejection of aristocracy and a rejection of ideas of social class. And I’m inclined to see the US civil war as an attempt by the confederacy to re-establish a system of aristocracy based on slavery.
When I look at politics, it sometime seems that conservatism is more about preserving ideas of aristocracy and social class than it is about economic.
On Bruce’s point about college, it has long seemed that people are using college as a pathway to social status rather than an emphasis on education.
For me, I always thought of myself as one of the ordinary people. But I did enjoy learning, and I saw university as about education rather than about social status. I’m inclined to agree with Bruce, that it isn’t for everyone.
Charles, I was going to ask – I grew up in Joelton. When my grandparents moved there in the mid-60s it was essentially farm country, but commuters who worked in Nashville were moving out of the city proper. Joelton wasn’t as severe as you mentioned Gallatin was, but there were a couple of upper-middle-class families who ruled the roost. Like you, I had aspirations too – and to be fair, my grandfather who had only finished 6th grade for whom the GI Bill helped him have a comfortable middle class life instilled the drive to succeed in me. He never got over that my mom (his daughter) dropped put of college to marry some rich guy who divorced her a year later. Anyway, I eventually got the hell out of the South and moved to NJ. My family are still in the Nashville area. My daughter graduated from Vanderbilt last year and is living in White’s Creek with my aunt and uncle, in a blue enclave surrounded by ruby red. There have been a lot of people moving to the Nashville area, but there’s still that old school classism that you described.
Hi Bruce. Thank you for not deleting my above post. I know it is hard to believe that a place like what I described actually existed at one time—–and may still exist. Being a trained social scientist, I doubt that my past and current understanding of that place and its people was wrong. I was just struggling to relate something that seemed to be almost “unrelatable.” to the normal human mind and how it was related to the question of going to college or not going to college. With college costs being so outrageous today, I think your advice in your main post was good advice for our current times and economics. For people who are Lower Class or Middle Class, taking on enormous debt to attend college is not wise. The trouble is that we need to find a way to bring American commerce and industry into the same way of thinking. Apprentice programs at all levels (even the mail room) in American commerce and Industry are the way to go. To paraphrase scripture, train up a new high school graduate in how to do a job well, and that training will not be forgotten in later years—–and it will pay enormous dividends to the company and the employee down the road.