Higher Education Bubble: Humanities v. Community College

In the National Review, Heather Mac­Don­ald laughs at the New York Times for it’s hand-​wringing and pearl-​clutching over the idea of rural teenagers using their high school degrees to make good money with­out first going to col­lege. Teenagers are mak­ing an eco­nom­i­cally ratio­nal deci­sion to work for sev­eral years, learn a skill, and earn very good money (for an unmar­ried teen/​twenty-​something with no finan­cial oblig­a­tions). They do not see the need to head straight to col­lege as an “unde­cided” major, rack up debt, and spend four to six years out of the work­force. Good for them.

Now comes the news that grad­u­ates with occupational/​technical associate’s degrees (e.g. nurs­ing) earn more than their coun­ter­parts with bachelor’s degrees, and sig­nif­i­cantly more than their coun­ter­parts with B.A. degrees. There is the usual cau­tion that this is salary straight out of school, not life­time earn­ings, but under­scores a harsh real­ity: peo­ple are paid to do things that some­one else wants to get done, not to be their own amaz­ing phe­nom­e­nal selves, nor to develop emo­tion­ally, think deep thoughts, or engage in preen­ing. Peo­ple want and need nurses, plumbers, elec­tri­cians, and para­le­gals; they do not need some­one to regur­giatate third-​wave fem­i­nist philosophy.

More impor­tantly, the “life­time earn­ings” canard is just that. There is no law say­ing that you can­not obtain a bachelor’s dgree at night or after sev­eral years in the work­force. Those kids in Mon­tana may work in the oil fields for sev­eral years, then get a degree in petro­leum engi­neer­ing. The plumber could go to school at night. A nurse could con­tinue obtain­ing degrees if it ben­e­fits her career or stim­u­lates her intel­lec­tu­ally. This is uni­ver­sity with a pur­pose — not as the mind­less pur­suit of an aim­less teenager, aged out of state-​mandated daily school­ing and desir­ing to ape the cus­toms of the nineteenth-century’s upper class.

More­over, the value in a non-​technical col­lege degree had mostly been to show dis­ci­pline and the abil­ity to learn. Before the days of grade infla­tion, get­ting into col­lege, and stay­ing in, were no small feats. The work was harder, the courses more rigourous, and thus, the value of the degree, greater. Con­sider, how­ever, the mod­ern col­lege stu­dent, and com­pare to the young men high­lighted in the New York Times:

“I just fig­ured, the oil field is here and I’d make the money while I could,” said Tegan Sivert­son, 19, who mon­i­tors pipelines for a gas com­pany, some­times work­ing 15-​hour days. “I didn’t want to waste the money and go to school when I could make just as much.”

Less than a year after proms and home­com­ing games, teenagers like Mr. Sivert­son now wake at 4 a.m. to make the three-​hour trek to remote oil rigs. They fish busted machin­ery out of two-​mile-​deep hydraulic frac­tur­ing wells and repair safety devices that keep the wells from rup­tur­ing, often work­ing along­side men old enough to be their fathers. Some live at home; oth­ers drive back on week­ends to eat their moth­ers’ food, do loads of laun­dry and go to high school bas­ket­ball games, still strad­dling the blurred bor­der between child­hood and adulthood.

While the NYT may think that a young man is “strad­dling” the bor­der between child­hood and adult­hood while work­ing 15-​hour days lay­ing pipeline, most employ­ers will under­stand that this is an adult in every sense of the word — in a way that col­lege stu­dents, and col­lege grad­u­ates, are not.

Who would you rather hire — the young man who has got­ten up at 4 am every day for four years, or the B.A., com­mu­ni­ca­tions grad­u­ate, who hasn’t gone to bed before 4 am in four years? Let’s also not for­get: should the oil boom dry up, these kids can go to col­lege, but the col­lege grad­u­ate, B.A, gen­der stud­ies, may never get hired for one of these jobs.