Urging others to get off the magic escalator
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010Seven Reasons Not to Send Your Kids to College, which popped up on my Google News page recently has me steaming.
James Altucher, the article’s author and a hedge fund manager, has an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon, both in computer science. Although he pursued advanced higher education himself, he urges parents to tell their children “no college” and keep the money for themselves or to use it to help their offspring found a company, travel the world or volunteer.
Contrast Altucher’s advice to the attitude of Calvin Trillin’s father, described in “Messages from My Father,” one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing, published by The New Yorker in June 1994. Trillin’s father started saving for his son’s college education before Calvin was born.
His grand plan, I think, began with my going to Yale – not on a shoestring but in the way the sons of industrialists went to Yale. I would then be not simply a real American, unencumbered by poverty, but a privileged American—an American whose degree could give him some special, reservations-only escalator to success.
When young, Trillin was scornful (in the way that kids are) of his father’s goals for him, especially because his father’s college plan for him was inspired by a novel his father had read when he himself was young, called “Stover at Yale.” Later in life, though, Trillin revises his estimation of his father’s foresightedness when he looks around at a dinner party that he and his wife, Alice, are attending. Most of the other guests were also successful writers, and Trillin realizes that they had all attended the same kind of colleges that he had. “Passengers on the magic escalator?” he muses.
For the first time, I realized that my father’s vision of how this was supposed to work out might not have been as simplistic as I had always assumed. “My God!” I said to Alice on the way home that night. “Could he have been right?”
Is Altucher trying to pull the ladder up after he’s climbed it? Not willing to let others get on the magic escalator with him? He’s recommending colossal shortsightedness or exhibiting an insufferable elitism.
Of course, not every young person can or should go to Yale and not every college experience works out well. Let the buyer beware (both parents and students) about higher education, just as in health care or buying a home or other important life decisions.
But, in general, we should aspire to a highly educated population that can invent, create and innovate to jump start our lagging economy and compete globally.
Read Putting Our Brains on Hold by Bob Herbert, who writes that we’re becoming a nation of nitwits. We used to have the highest percentage of college graduates in the world. Today, we’re in twelfth place, behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia.
Read America Goes Dark by Paul Krugman, especially these sentences:
And what about the economy’s future? Everything we know about economic growth says that a well-educated population and high-quality infrastructure are crucial. Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward.
Our official unemployment rate is stuck at 9.5 percent, and the number of months that people are out of work keeps getting longer. We’re not heading in the right direction.
I haven’t been posting much on my blog recently, because I’ve been interviewing, editing and writing for Over 50 and Out of Work. I’ve been conducting interviews in New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, DC, Florida, West Virginia and Michigan, mostly in the homes of project participants.
All of the interviewees are over 50 years old, of course. They are Baby Boomers, who graduated from high school in the 1960s or 1970s. When they graduated from high school, jobs in manufacturing that didn’t require college degree (or even a high school diploma) were plentiful, and they provided workers with a middle class standard of living.
Most of those jobs don’t exist in the United States any longer, as can be seen from the graph below:
Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National): Bureau of Labor Statistics
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Series Id: CES3000000001
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Where do people go to work without college degrees today?
The July 2010 unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for people with only a high school education is 10.1 percent compared to 4.5 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Moreover, these unemployment rates understate reality. The data doesn’t reflect people who have stopped looking for work or who aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits any longer.
The people who are telling me their stories for Over 50 and Out of Work complete dozens of applications, submit hundreds of resumes and stand in long lines at job fairs with many more job seekers. Most of the time, when they apply for a job, they don’t get any response at all. They don’t get an acknowledgment from prospective employers that their application or resume has even been received. They believe employers use filters to limit the number of applicants they consider. Lack of a college degree is an easy screen for employers to impose.
I’ll sum up with a quote from a 50-year-old third-generation West Virginia steelworker who went to work in the mill when he was 19 years old. He’s been laid off eight or nine times over the years. He and his wife have lived frugally to make it through the layoffs, but they had a goal for both of their daughters.
“I made sure they went to college,” David Board said. “They didn’t have a choice.”
