Archived News Item

Going Somewhere

Being a teen ain’t what it used to be.

Well, I don’t know, maybe it is. I can hardly profess membership in any past generations of our vaunted species. However, by all appearances, the ranks of teendom have changed considerably over the years—as has the culture surrounding us.

Let’s talk college. Did colleges exist 50 or 100 years ago? Most certainly. But due to one thing or another, the focus of teenaged existence in most circles has changed from, say, anything else at all to a single, overarching goal: GET THEE TO COLLEGE.

Everything you do, anything you are, every decision or choice you make, all of it links somehow to that final lofty end. Why must you clean up your room? Because you won’t get into your college of choice with undies on the floor, of course. Geez. Everybody knows that.

College is the ultimate. You must study hard to learn the material to get good grades to score high on the SATs to drop your name ahead of ten quadrillion other poor souls to find yourself, in some eventual place and time, at a decent college—and god forbid you do not, because then, in the words of Matt Stone, you will die poor and lonely.

So it seems.

But on slightly deeper examination, suspicious gaps beging to appear in this dogmatic approach. One obvious argument is the common one: Plenty of ridiculously successful people (talking about success in terms of, well, cash) didn’t make much of a showing in their college years. Ask any disgruntled teen. They’ve got a list of famous names. Trust me.

Yet . . . no. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fly, because all you need to do is look at the huge number of successful people who did walk the college road, and compare them to the meager number of those who didn’t, and you’ll very quickly start to blanch at the disproportionate figures. Not to mention, half of those famous names that notoriously “dropped out of school” or “went to Idaho State” have all kinds of other credentials—like they were only a few weeks short of their degree, or they’d already been trained, or they’re a legend and a genius in their own time. Yes, Einstein did badly in school. That’s nice. Are you Einstein?

On the other hand, there are plenty of slightly less notorious persons who do have very rewarding lives and who do not sport a degree from Wechargelotsofmoney U. Quite simply, they’re the people who don’t need one.

Look around you. How many of your friends or acquaintances are lawyers, physicists, doctors, or news pundits? And how many are plumbers, telephone sanitizers, or movers? The former group has a fancy-pants education and needs it; the latter may or may not, but can survive without it. You need only ask which group is inherently happier—in most cases, the answer is neither.

“Sure,” say the critics, which is everybody. “But in more and more jobs nowadays you need some kind of degree, even those that aren’t specialized.”

Aye. Here’s where the hard lines of Good and Evil collide, because this is true, and the day when McDonald’s requires a liberal arts degree (rather than just employing everybody who holds one) may not be far off. Even if you can make a living in your chosen career without the boon of higher education—and its “prestige” can easily be more important to your success than anything it taught you—it will often be much harder.

Recently I’ve been holding a correspondence with a media and web designer of some note, who has some interesting things to say. However, in the end, she herself may be the best example of how things work. She made some poor choices about her education; because of them, she took a longer and a harder path. But the path does have an end. She is now, by most standards, successful.

You can do a great deal with the jump-start of a good college education, and it will stay with you for a long time; you can do a great deal without a college-education as well. The first means harder work in the short term and less work, with a possible further grasp, in the long term. The second means conceivably less work now, and much more later. Both are possible. Both can work.

They are not mutually exclusive.

The two together can part oceans.

— Brandon