by: Cameron MacKenzie
Right now I’d like to talk about your contractor. The one that won’t call you back. The one that gave you a quote about the basement remodel or the kitchen tile one minute and then just disappeared into the ether the next. The guy with the accent and the funny hair and the Big Johnson t-shirt that you joked about with your spouse. The guy with the $250 boots and the $100k pickup with $20k worth of tools in the bed.
I’ll tell you why he’s not calling you back: he doesn’t need your money. That guy’s done for the year. Closed up shop. Right now he’s down at the beach house or driving his motorcycle cross country because he’s made his quota and he’s his own boss so he decides when he’s done. And he’s done—done with your uptight, helpless, college-educated self. Your contractor’s doing just fine with his Vo-Tech degree, siphoning the money for his margaritas right out of your student-loan-burdened-wallet.
I mention this not to make you feel bad so much as to present the poster child for the “not everybody needs a college degree” argument. This is the argument that states everyone going to college is stunting growth and wages, blunting competitive edge, ruining public schools, driving up the costs of post-secondary education, exploding the levels of student debt and planting a time bomb in the perpetual story of growth and prosperity that is the American Dream. And there he goes, your contractor, true American that he is, mullet in the wind, piloting his hog on his way to Sturgis right after selfies at Mt. Rushmore.
First, it’s true. Not everybody needs to go to college. You don’t need a degree to make the absolute bank that independent contractors can make. And we need contractors, and we always will. But let’s set aside for a second the myriad difficulties involved in becoming a successful contractor, and go a little further into the college argument.
You don't need a degree to be a contractor, fine. We could also say that the key driver of the coming economy doesn’t really require a college degree either, and that’s healthcare. You don’t really need a college degree to be a tech or a nurse. You’re just running a machine or turning folks over in bed, right? But then think about a doctor. What does a doctor really need to know about sociology or geology or philosophy? Why can’t we just teach a doctor how to be a doctor—that is, how to read the machines that tell us what’s going on inside a body? Let’s keep going. What about the engineer, the coder, the HR rep? If you can concretely determine what the end job is going to be, what’s the use of extraneous learning based on an out-moded model of education? If a trade school trains a student for a job, and the student is uniquely qualified for the job, what else do we want out of a degree?
The fact of the matter is that the real aim of this attack on college isn’t the courses that are required for your utilitarian major, it’s on the requirements that you don’t need. It’s on things like literature, history, and art. It’s on religion, philosophy, and foreign languages. It’s on what we’ve been calling, for decades, “the humanities." And so “you don’t need to go to college” actually translates to, “you don’t need the humanities.” You don’t need to learn how to negotiate, critique sources, solve multidisciplinary problems, read people, analyze motives, or think for yourself.
That sort of thing is just going to get in your way out there in the world where the most important thing you have to do is sit on your stool, do your job, and not ask questions.
Because when you look at this call to avoid college, it’s a call for certain people to avoid college. Poor people, struggling people, black and brown people. And who, by the way, is calling for such a thing? Is it people who are currently sending their kids to a trade school? Of course not. But it’s not the people who are sending their kids to State Tech either. Or even State U.
The people who are calling for a reduction in education are actually sending their own kids to small, elite, private institutions that specialize in—wait for it—the humanities. In those institutions the kids learn how to code, sure, but they also learn how to ask questions. They learn how to diagnose the world around them, and they learn a few thousand years worth of thought and practice on how to deal with that world. They learn how people work, how the world works, and they learn who they are in such a way that enables them to negotiate all of it at the same time.
When you think about the problem this way, it becomes quite clear why certain parents wouldn’t want everybody to be getting the same education. If nobody’s asking questions about how the society is built and maintained, then the current state of affairs is accepted as natural and inevitable. Those in power stay in power and those on the outskirts recede further and further away, exclusively trained to fix the computers, cars, houses, and bodies of the people who have co-opted the system for their own continuing benefit. And boy that system runs silky smooth if the cogs in the machine just shut up and sit down.
So, when you think about the “investment” of college, about how it’s just a waste of money that you could use to do a thousand other things, about how what they teach up there isn’t applicable to the real world anyway, about how higher education is, in fact, all a liberal sham, think instead about what certain people are telling you about your child, about yourself, and about where they think you fit into the world. Or rather, into their world.
The contents of this article are solely the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.