One of the major challenges keeping young people from developing a healthy sense of control is their narrow and distorted views of the adult world and what it takes to be successful and have a satisfying life … These views foster fear and competition. They affect high-achieving kids, for whom a rigid view of the path to success creates unnecessary stress, anxiety, and mental health problems, and low-achieving kids, many of whom conclude at a young age that they will never be successful, so why try at all. …
The reality is that we become successful in this world by working hard at something that comes easily to us and that engages us. We need to tell our kids that the skill set required to be a successful student is, in many ways, very different from the skill set that will lead you to have a successful career and a good life. …
We need to assure kids that the majority of successful people were not straight-A students. … Ability is not a simple matter of grades.
Don’t misunderstand us: being a good student and getting a degree from an elite college clearly have their benefits, but there are alternative paths. Focusing all our attention on just one path will make a lot of kids feel left out. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 304-305]
“The forgotten half” is a term used in educational circles to refer to those who are work-bound after high school, not college-bound. If we include everyone who drops out of college or community college without a degree, that number is closer to two-thirds. The current system makes life as difficult for them as it possibly can. …
[M]ost guidance counselors now see their role as encouraging everyone to go to college—a four-year college if possible, a community college for those with the weakest academic records. Too few counselors tell work-bound high-school students how much money crane operators or stonemasons make compared to people who deliver pizza or sell shoes. Too few tell them about the new technical specialties that are being produced by a changing job market, and how much they pay. Too few assess the non-academic abilities of work-bound students and direct them toward occupations in which they can reasonably expect to succeed. …
Large numbers of students who have neither the interest nor the ability to succeed in the academic track are in it anyway, sometimes dropping out, sometimes stumbling through to the high-school diploma, never having acquired the assets that CTE (career and technical education) could have provided. The culprit is the misbegotten, pernicious, wrongheaded idea that not going to college means you’re a failure. It deforms the behavior of all the actors in America’s high schools—principals, teachers, guidance counselors, students, and parents. …
[T]he problems created by shortfalls in CTE funding and facilities are minor compared with the problem created by disdain. Choices to not attend college or to drop out of college and go to work need our understanding and—this is imperative—our respect. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 147-150]
Most people don’t have a university degree. In the U.S. nearly two thirds do not. … So it’s folly to create an economy that makes a university diploma a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life. Elites have, during this period, so valorized a university degree both as an avenue for advancement and as a basis for social esteem … that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate. And they miss the harsh judgment it imposes on those who haven’t gone to university. … This harsh judgment is precisely what accounts for much of the anger and resentment and sense of grievance, among working people against elites, that fueled the populist backlash …
Broadly speaking, we should focus less on arming people for meritocratic competition, and focus more on affirming the dignity of work. We should ask what policies will ensure that those who don’t have advanced degrees or fancy credentials, those who don’t inhabit the privileged ranks of the professional classes, can find work that enables them to support a family, contribute to their community, and win social recognition for doing so. …
It’s important to broaden access to higher education for those who can’t afford it. But it’s also important to lower the stakes of the frenzied competition to get it. And this means investing more … in those forms of learning that most people rely on to prepare themselves for the world of work and of citizenship. … promoting, funding, and honoring vocational and technical training and apprenticeships. The failure of many of our societies to do this not only constricts economic opportunity for those who don’t aspire to a university degree, it also reflects the meritocratic priorities (I would say the credentialist prejudices) of those who govern. [Michael Sandel, “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” YouTube, uploaded by Geneva Graduate Institute, 27 Sept. 2022, 41:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rUeUM2HIQ]
Our communities depend on an enormous diversity of talents, roles, and occupations. The work of electricians, builders, plumbers, chefs, paramedics, carpenters, mechanics, engineers, security staff, and all the rest (who may or may not have college degrees) is absolutely vital to the quality of each of our lives. Very many people in these occupations enjoy them enormously and gain great fulfillment from them. One effect of the emphasis on academic work in schools is that the education system is not focused on these roles and typically considers them second-rate options for people who don’t make the academic cut.
As the story goes, the smart kids go to college. The others may leave school early and look for a job or apply for a vocational course to learn a trade of some sort. Either way, they have taken a step down the status ladder in education. This academic/vocational caste system is one of the most corrosive problems in education. [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, p. 17]
[O]ur country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. …
Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed ‘alternative.’ Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as ‘vocational consolation prizes,’ and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to ‘create’ over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. [Mike Rowe, “The First Four Years Are the Hardest”, 3 Sept. 2012, https://mikerowe.com/2012/09/the-first-four-years-are-the-hardest/] quoted by [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, p. 236]
Everyone can find a place for herself or himself if allowed the time to explore the possibilities and if there is access to decent and loving advice. There are some high school guidance counselors who can also be helpful, but in my experience the advice that comes from the high school usually depends upon school performance rather than an intimate knowledge of young people’s dreams and aspirations. “Good” students are channeled in one way, “bad” ones in others. …
The fact is, school counseling is usually cold and mechanical. Students are rarely encouraged to try things that their grades don’t seem to qualify them for. Yet motivation often counts for more than grades, and young people who have a direction, and have some support, can usually get where they want to go with or without good grades. The problem is that often high school counselors are a burdened species. There are usually too few of them at a school to spend time knowing the individual needs and aspirations of all the students. … However, the rare counselor who cares is like a member of the family, and should be part of the student’s support network as early as possible in his or her high school career. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, p. 24]
It is easy to put a dollar value on education and say that a fancy college is worth more than cooking school, that law school is worth more than art school, that medical school is worth more than cabinetmaking school. This way of placing value on work is characteristic of people in my generation in our society. We are the ones who have made it through college and have too often turned away from the value of labor that our grandparents had. Yet often our children see a bigger world, one in which many forms of work lead to dignity and in which the financial rewards of work are less important than the personal and spiritual rewards.
It is important to support the dreams of young people and be with them when they explore what is one of the most essential aspects of their existence: the choice of a vocation. Getting a good job in the hope of doing something satisfying with the money and time one earns by becoming rich is foolish. Becoming rich is a gamble itself, and staying healthy while struggling to succeed is even chancier. A full but modest life dedicated to meaningful work makes more sense. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, p. 34]
I’ve been working with many young people who have chosen routes to lifetime vocations that do not involve going to college right after high school. These youngsters are not dropouts, or school problems. In fact, most of them are at or near the top of their classes, are engaged in extracurricular activities such as the student council, the school paper, and the band. Some are athletes, and others are involved in art, music, dance, or computer science. These young people decided not to go straight to college after high school, but to work or travel instead, and consider college only if it fit into the larger scheme of what they wanted to do with their lives. … They refused to rush off to college or center their lives around preparing for well-paying, high-status jobs. In fact, money and status were less important to them than the quality of their lives and the usefulness of the work they did. Many of these youngsters were accused, by their parents and teachers, of being romantic and unrealistic, of not knowing how hard and difficult survival is in our society. Yet it’s possible that they are more realistic and sensible than youngsters who force themselves through college in order to prepare themselves to “go out into the world” ready to compete, make money, and wait until retirement to enjoy themselves. There are many good reasons to encourage young people to live modest, socially useful, and personally rewarding lives and avoid the neuroticism and violence that accompanies a single-minded quest for money and status. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, pp. 4-5]
There are valuable things that can be learned at colleges, both culturally and technically, and professions that can only be learned there. For some people college can open up unimaginable possibilities and change the whole nature and direction of their lives. However, this isn’t true for everyone, and one ought to consider what other useful things there are for young people to do right after high school. [Herbert Kohl, The Question is College: Guiding Your Child to the Right Choices After High School, Times / Random House, 1989, p. 8]
For the most part education systems … are organized on the false assumptions that life is linear and inorganic. The conventional story is that you study particular disciplines and stay with the prescribed program, and pass all the tests, your life will fall neatly into place. If you don’t, it won’t.
Well, it might work that way, according to how sure you are of what you want to do. Then again, it might not. For example, there is often no direct relationship between what you study in school and the work you do when you leave … [Katherine Brooks, director of Liberal Arts Career services at the University of Texas at Austin] estimates that less than a third of the alumni who stay in touch with her are in careers that are directly related to their college studies. [Ken Robinson, Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, Viking / Penguin, 2013, pp. 27-29]
[T]here is an overarching consideration so important it is hard to express adequately: the satisfaction of being good at what one does for a living (and knowing it), compared to the melancholy of being mediocre at what one does for a living (and knowing it). This is another truth about living a human life that a seventeen-year-old might not yet understand on his own, but that a guidance counselor can bring to his attention.
Guidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in their charge. Even for students who have the academic ability to succeed in college, going directly to college may be a bad way for them to discover who they are and how they should make a living. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, p. 96]
The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a BA. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs is expanding rapidly. … The increase in wealth in American society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsmanship. … There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when the range of such jobs has been so wide. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 94-95]
[Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers] noted in 2019 that average college graduates with no graduate degree earned about $78,000 per year—$33,000 more than someone with just a high school diploma. …
Now for the throat clearing and caveats, which should give some of you a bit of pause. Averages are just that, and the tidy story they tell can often mask trouble. … Finishing [college] in a timely fashion makes an enormous difference … both because the extra time in school costs money and because of the opportunity cost if you are not in the workforce for that extra year or two.
Much also depends on your major. … Most science, technology, engineering, or math majors are very likely to achieve a positive return on their investment, but arts or humanities majors who attend private colleges with average costs have only a 50 percent or so chance …
[This report] is quick to remind readers that [it] examined only earnings—not the value of the friends or contacts students make, the higher household income that might result from a spouse they might meet in college, or the overall feelings of well-being and life satisfaction that may result from higher education. Also, [it] doesn’t necessarily want people who are passionate about particular subjects to switch away from those majors. Researchers … don’t have a good way to know what would happen if students who love literature switched to engineering just because they thought they were supposed to. Would another $2 million come their way? Even if it did, would it be worth it if they were miserable at work?
And then there’s this: A full 25 percent of people who graduate from college do not earn more than those who completed only high school, according to a 2014 New York Fed report. … But … college pays off more for people from higher-income families. [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, HarperCollins, 2021, pp. 233-235]
Jacob Mincer of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Columbia University states flatly that of “20 to 30 percent of students at any level, the additional schooling has been a waste, at least in terms of earnings.” College fails to work its income-raising magic for almost a third of those who go. More than half of those people in 1972 who earned $15,000 or more reached that comfortable bracket without the benefit of a college education. Jencks says that financial success in the U.S. depends on a good deal of luck, and the most sophisticated regression analyses have yet to demonstrate otherwise. [Caroline Bird, “College is a Waste of Time and Money,” The Case Against College, David McKay Co., 1975, https://www.scribd.com/document/46775622/Caroline-Bird-College-is-a-Waste-of-Time-and-Money]
Psychic income is primarily what students mean when they talk about getting a good job. During the most affluent years of the late 1960s and 1970s college students told their placement officers that they wanted to be researchers, college professors, artists, city planners, social workers, poets, book publishers, archeologists, ballet dancers, or authors. …
But colleges fail to warn students that jobs of these kinds are hard to come by, even for qualified applicants, and they rarely accept the responsibility of helping students choose a career that will lead to a job. When a young person says he is interested in helping people, his counselor tells him to become a psychologist. But jobs in psychology are scarce. The Department of Labor, for instance, estimates there will be 4,300 new jobs for psychologists in 1975 while colleges are expected to turn out 58,430 B.A.s in psychology that year. …
The outlook isn’t much better for students majoring in other psychic-pay disciplines: sociology, English, journalism, anthropology, forestry, education. Whatever college graduates want to do, most of them are going to wind up doing what there is to do. [Caroline Bird, “College is a Waste of Time and Money,” The Case Against College, David McKay Co., 1975, https://www.scribd.com/document/46775622/Caroline-Bird-College-is-a-Waste-of-Time-and-Money]
Perhaps the biggest and most damaging myth confronting students and parents who are choosing a college is that a “big-name” institution is a prerequisite or an assurance of a top quality education and/or a successful career afterwards. …
Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. …
All this is not to suggest that there are no differences in academic quality between institutions. There are in fact vast differences—but big names are not a reliable guide to those differences. Those big names are often a result of faculty research activity, whose effects on undergraduate teaching are at best questionable. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 106-107]
Let’s start with some of the myths about raising a successful child that have come to resemble gospel. …
Attending a prestigious school gives kids added advantages in life: … [A] comparative study [was done] of students accepted at Yale who actually attended the school and those who were accepted but ended up going to less prestigious schools for family or financial reasons. Down the road, they found no difference in job advancement or pay between these two groups. … Bright, hardworking kids tend to do well regardless of the school they attend.
Yes, but won’t my child get to make connections at prestigious schools that will open doors in the future? … The issue isn’t whether prestigious schools offer tickets to opportunity. They often do. The issue is the price you are willing to have your child pay for these tickets. There are kids who belong at the most prestigious schools in the country and who find their way in through a combination of academic talent, hard work, and a bit of good fortune. But there are other kids who give up their childhood, their integrity, their health, and their psychological stability to get into these schools. In spite of parents’ rationalization that “they’ll thank me down the line,” very few of these kids will. [Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, HarperCollins, 2012, pp. 15-17]
[W]here you go to college does not make an enormous difference to your success in life. … Researchers Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger have followed the career trajectories of the same class of high school graduates for decades. Among students who had comparable SAT scores, whether or not they went to an elite college made little difference in their earning potential. … Another study from Gallup and Purdue University found that the type of college students attended (e.g., public versus private; highly selective versus less selective) made very little difference to their workplace engagement and well-being. The factors that best predicted well-being were those more intrinsic to the college experience itself, such as: 1) having a professor who showed personal interest in them, stimulated them to learn, and encouraged them; 2) having an internship or job in college that allowed them to apply what they were learning; and 3) being actively involved in extracurricular activities or projects that took a semester or more to complete. … What these studies suggest is that if you’re bright and motivated, it doesn’t much matter where you go to school. For some kids, knowing this makes it a bit easier to pay attention to what’s really important to them. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, pp. 130-131]
Although it is true that the single best predictor of lifetime income is the number of years completed in school, it is also the case that this relationship does not necessarily depend on where one’s schooling was obtained (Berg, Bibb, Finegan, Swafford, 1981). … Nor is institutional prestige a good predictor of later on-the-job satisfaction; neither does it predict well one’s effectiveness on the job as rated by supervisors. …
A second kind of reassurance—a reminder, actually—is that a successful occupational career depends not only on the number of years one spends in school, but also on the reasons for learning. Recall that students who perceive school as an opportunity to better themselves are more likely to persist longer, whereas those who see school as a way to bolster a sense of worth by outscoring others are likely to quit sooner (e.g., Nicholls et al., 1985). Given the importance of motivational factors in the decision to continue in school, parents often fear the wrong thing. … What matters ultimately is not performance but learning; not short-term gains but the reasons for achieving. If the reasons are right, achievement will likely flourish without the goad of competition. Otherwise, children may do just enough to win the prize and little more. [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 235-251]
When we ask high school principals and independent school heads, “Why don’t you just tell kids the truth about college? That where you go makes very little difference in later life and isn’t a predictor of success?” they consistently say, “If we did that, we would get angry calls and letters from parents who believe that if their children understood the truth, they would not work hard in school and would fail in life.”
We have found that simply telling kids the truth about the world—including the advantages of being a good student—increases their flexibility and drive. It motivates unmotivated kids to shift the emphasis from “Here are the hoops I will have to jump through to be successful” to “Here are some of the ways I can choose to develop myself in order to make an important contribution to this world.” [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 309]
There are many reasons why adolescents might not be ready to go to college right after high school. They may lack the adequate academic skills. They may lack self-awareness or self-regulation skills, or struggle with anxiety or depression. They may not be ready to manage the details of living independently. Or they may be burned out from four years of going pedal to the metal in high school. They may be prone to social isolation. Or their brains simply may not be developed enough. Remember, just as kids develop physically at different rates, the same is true of their brains. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 293]
“As anyone who has ever taught high school will attest, even among teens who attend the very best high schools, many simply hate school. They have never done well in school, see no relevance in it, never do assignments, and habitually cut classes or are truant. … Why do policy makers seem to want to deny the existence of students who exhibit these attitudes and behaviors? …
“Career and Technical Education is to some students what Advanced Placement and honors courses are to others.” [Kenneth Gray, “Is High School Career and Technical Education Obsolete?”] …
Vocational students are typically “academic underachievers” before entering the vocational track. The right metric isn’t, “How do vocational students compare to average students?” but rather, “How do vocational students compare to comparable students who didn’t study a trade?” Vocational ed fares well by this metric. It raises pay more than academic coursework. It reduces unemployment more than academic coursework. It even boosts high school graduation: the academically uninclined are less prone to quit school when they don’t detest all their classes. Vocational education even seems to deter crime. [Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 225-227]
To say that no more than 20 percent of all students have the academic ability to deal with college-level material seems to be false on its face, since the number of BAs awarded in 2005 amounted to 35 percent of all twenty-three-year-olds (I will use BA as shorthand for all bachelor’s degrees and college as shorthand for four-year residential colleges or universities). It is also contradicted by studies of college readiness that say higher percentages of students, as many as 65 percent of high school graduates, are qualified for admission to a four-year college.
This brings us to a distinction that you should keep in mind: … I am asking how many high school graduates can cope with college-level material in the core disciplines of the arts and sciences, not how many can survive four years at today’s colleges and walk away with diplomas. If surviving to a diploma is the definition of “cope with college-level material,” then almost anyone can do it if he shops for easy courses in an easy major at an easy college. But as soon as we focus on college-level material traditionally defined, the requirements become stringent. …
How many of America’s seventeen-year-olds can meet the benchmarks? Three independent methods of calculating the answer to that question, described in the notes, lead to an estimate of 9 to 12 percent, with a realistic best-guess of about 10 percent.
So few can do well in real colleges because real college-level material is hard. [Charles Murray, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Three Rivers, 2008, pp. 68-70]
[I]n this country [the bachelor’s degree] is recognized and honored as something everybody should have if he can scrape up the money to get it. This is just the trouble with it. Since it is conferred at the wrong point for the wrong reasons, it induces students to remain in college till the wrong point for the wrong reasons. …
Their presence gives the colleges the reputation of kindergartens and country clubs. It interferes with the education of those who are trying to get an education. It confuses the aims and functions of the higher learning. And the country is deprived of the useful work these young people might be doing instead of wasting their time in “college life.” [Robert M. Hutchins, Education for Freedom, 1943, Louisiana State UP, 1947, p. 75, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.501404]
For most of the twentieth century, the United States stood alone in the quality of its higher-education system and the percentage of its young people who successfully passed through that system. …
During those years, “upward mobility with regard to education characterized American society,” wrote [Harvard economists Claudia] Goldin and [Lawrence] Katz. “Each generation of Americans achieved a level of education that greatly exceeded that of the previous one.” But now that progress has stopped, or at least stalled, and the nation’s higher-education system has ceased to be the instrument of social mobility and growing equality that it was for so much of the twentieth century. [Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, pp. 148-149]
College is a bet, but so is avoiding it outright—a big one at that. And though all of us are right to wonder if our kids have what it takes not to end up among the college graduates who don’t earn more than high school graduates do, the opposite question is necessary, too: If they don’t graduate from college, what are the odds that they’ll be among the small percentage of people who make it—who start a business or find a trade that will always be in demand? And if they don’t outearn the average college graduate—if they never do or never come close—will they be happy about that?
In his book on adjunct professors, The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress takes a somewhat cynical view of all of this. There is no wage premium for college graduates, he writes; just a wage defense. A college degree is “indispensable employment insurance,” nothing more and nothing less, although it may cost somewhat more at private universities. If he’s right, we can ask ourselves this: How comfortable are we when we go without insurance in other parts of our lives? [Ron Lieber, The Price You Pay For College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make, Harper Collins, 2021, pp. 239]
Related:
– How are young people prepared for the world of work?
– What is the proper function of the university?
– What is the reality of the university?
– Strategies for Cultivating Vocation