Sunday, 16 November
Good Morning
Justin…
A college
student I know says his education costs sixty thousand dollars a year. It’s a private school in upstate New York so
maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised at the small fortune required to get a
degree. State schools are more reasonable
but students today are still required to take on enormous debt in order to get
a higher education. That means you are
soon faced with stiff monthly payments once you receive your diploma and become
a bright jobseeker, intent on landing a well-paying position in a highly
competitive environment. You can’t
afford to founder and be branded a deadbeat at the start of your adult
career. Living at home well into your
twenties implodes the hard-fought self-respect you earned attaining good grades
while tackling challenging subjects. A
person is likely to second-guess their choices.
You find a Bachelor’s degree in biology certifies you to clean out
animal cages and wash test tubes while you work on a more advanced degree. You better know who you are, what you want
and have a realistic career strategy by your sophomore year if you are to avoid
writing blogs about life viewed from the sidelines. What a picture; you still in your pajamas
tapping away on your laptop just beneath your framed diploma. It’s a good thing your phone’s disconnected –
what with all the creditors menacing you.
This is not
the first time eager graduates have been thrown a curve by the economy. I remember a story many years ago of a man
with a Ph.D. in physics having to settle for driving a cab in San Francisco. At least he wasn’t faced with paying off
crushing debt. During those years the
cost of textbooks for your courses cost more than your tuition at California
state-sponsored universities. What a
dream that was. It allowed you to experiment,
find out who you were, what you liked. You
could change majors without fear if you liked.
It was even feasible for a student with little means to get a degree in
topics like Art History or English Literature or Drama. No, you weren’t likely to get a job in your
field of study. Chances are you wound up
watering plants at a local nursery but you were free of creditors. You could pull up stakes and move to a small
mountain town in Arizona. Here you would
work as a DJ for minimum wage while you worked on your first novel – never to
be published. Friends would be getting
married, buying new cars and setting career goals for where they wanted to be
five years hence. That’s OK. You had the great outdoors and a good deal of
free time to enjoy it.
I’m at the
age of collecting Social Security. I
never figured out what I wanted to do for a living. It was a life largely of improvisation. It’s not a strategy that brings a tidy
pension once you reach retirement. Still,
I doubt if I could have been successful working any other way. I hated giving up the time it took to be
practical.
The schools
thought it a good idea to learn speed
reading when I was a kid. I think
President Kennedy was said to read over twelve hundred words a minute. The trick was to search for key words and
phrases as you skimmed down the page. Yeah,
I think most people call this approach skimming. I hated it.
It’s like stuffing your mouth and spend five minutes eating during your
lunch hour. There was no time for
appreciating anything. I would gladly
skim through topics I didn’t care for in school. Most books, though, I preferred to
savor.
Feel free to
get your degree in a field that promises you a prosperous career if that’s your
desire. Raise a happy family and find a
pot of gold at the end of your rainbow. This
is the path chosen by those fortunate enough to appreciate its demands. I’m sorry it didn’t work for me. I’m still willing to try. Give me a ring if you know someone willing to
pay me for photographing moths in a field somewhere. I’ve also got some doodles I’d love to have
marketed as posters. I’m always game for
starting over in something new.
Love,
Dad
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