Well, first of all, high school me, girls are interested in you. You’re just too socially inept to see it. You’ll learn in college that if you go up to a girl and ask her out, she’ll probably say yes.
But whether or not you date in high school doesn’t really matter. In fact, there’s a lot to be said for waiting until you’re an adult to date. Once you lose your virginity and get rid of stigma associated with it, people don’t really care how experienced you are with relationships - though maybe they should. But you know who does care how experienced you are? Employers.
I don’t like the victim mentality that the current recession has cultivated in my generation. But at the same time, I have a hard time arguing with it. While unemployment has been dropping since its peak in 2009, more than half the jobs that were lost in the recession still haven’t been recovered. And there’s no question that my generation has been paying the price for it. With so many people out of work, employers have no reason to take a chance on a recent graduate when they could hire the out of work 40-year-old with the same degree and 20 years more experience who’s applying for the same entry-level position. Only 51% of people who graduated college since 2006 have a full-time job, and while unemployment is at 7.6% overall, it’s twice that for the 20-24 age bracket. Those who are working are working for less, and in jobs outside their chosen field that may not even require a degree. And all this at a time when college costs are higher than ever and steadily rising, with student loan debt climbing to meet it.
In one of the animated Peanuts specials, Lucy asks Charlie Brown: if their team loses, is it the fault of the coach, or the fault of the players? Over at Cracked, John Cheese seems to think it’s the coach’s fault, blaming his own generation for the way mine turned out. He makes a lot of good points, but I’d like to focus on #4.
If I could go back in time to high school, the first thing I’d do is ask my crush out. The second thing I’d do is get a job. I’m all about education, but grades - especially high school grades - are less important than we’re led to believe. So instead of focusing on my studies - not that I did that the first time around, either, I cruised through high school, content with the A’s and B’s I got from the modicum of effort I put in - I’d take all the free time I had and invest it in a job. And a girlfriend.
I was taught, implicitly, at least, that there was a natural order to growing up. If you did well in high school, you would get into a good college. And if you did well in college, you’d get a job in your chosen field after you graduated. So come my junior year, after much procrastination, I applied to a few colleges. It occurred to me only once that there were things to do other than go to college, but I didn’t really know what those things were. After I chose from the even smaller number of colleges that accepted me - two of the schools on my list were Yale and Harvard, because they were schools I’d heard of - my dad and stepmom sat me down and told me that college was an investment, and asked me if I was sure this was what I wanted. What the hell was I supposed to say? Going to college was what you did after high school. The fancy, posh K-12 private school my parents had paid over $10,000 a year for me to attend from the time I was six specifically advertised itself as “college prep”. My whole life had been geared towards college. So after a modicum of thought, I said that yes, this was what I wanted.
I was 17 at the time. As The Last Psychiatrist puts it, I was at an age where I could have killed someone and not been held criminally responsible. I selected my expensive private university because I had Googled “good schools for physics”, “good schools for biology”, and “good schools for computer science” and it had been on all three of the lists I got from ask.com and Yahoo! Answers. Plus, it was in Florida and they had a jungle on campus, which was cool. I eventually decided to major in biology, not because I thought a biology degree was a good investment, or even because I was particularly enthusiastic about becoming a biologist, but because AP Biology had been the class I’d enjoyed the most in high school.
What was my dad thinking, trusting a 17-year-old to decide how to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars? The only thing I knew about being a biologist was what I’d seen in movies - tromping through the wilderness, collecting samples and having adventures. Why do kids want to be firefighters and astronauts when they grow up? Because those are the jobs they see in the movies. And a lot of us never grow out of that. When I took an EMT-B certification course after deciding to switch from biology to pre-med (turns out that after you go on your wilderness expedition you have to come back and crunch the numbers on the data you gathered, then write an exhaustively detailed report on them with dozens of citations), one of the kids who was failing the class told me he was going to switch to fire school because he’d “rather just pump water”. We have no idea what any job really entails. How could we? Sure, we could have shadowed someone in the profession or gotten an internship back in high school, but no one encouraged us to do these things. Instead, it was all about sports, volunteering, and other extracurriculars - we were constantly pressured about making an effort to ensure that we got into a good college, and absolutely no one took the time to talk to us about what came after that.
And what comes after… hoo. We were told to chase our dreams, but besides being left alone for the entertainment industry to tell us what to dream about, no one dared tell us if we had no real hope of realizing those dreams. There was a kid at my high school who was in every fall play and every spring musical. He wanted to major in theater in college and become an actor. There was just one small problem: he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Did anyone ever tell him that? I doubt it. It wouldn’t have been polite. Did anyone let him know that even if he was talented, he could join a small-time improv group and take lessons on the side and, after four years, be tens of thousands of dollars richer and just as likely to get a role? Probably not; who would ever encourage a high schooler not to go to college? Getting a degree in your chosen field is what you do after high school. And did anyone ever point out to him that more people graduate with theater degrees every two years than there are jobs in the field? Almost certainly not. We told him to chase his dream, and whenever there was a chance he might realize that he was wasting tens of thousands of dollars and years of his life, we encouraged him to keep going with stories about how the Beatles were told they had no future in show business, or how Harrison Ford was so unsuccessful that he quit acting to install cabinets until he was discovered by George Lucas. (The story about Einstein from that link isn’t even true.)
But everyone (except the hundreds of thousands of people studying to be actors, apparently) knows that it’s almost impossible to get into the entertainment industry. And it should come as no surprise that anyone looking to get into the humanities is screwed too. Even scientists are having a tough time of it - all of academia is hosed, especially the psych majors, who have the only degree even more worthless than fine arts. Think you can avoid all that by deciding to become something prestigious, like a lawyer? Think again. Even people going into engineering or medicine, held up as degrees that are virtually guaranteed to get you a job, face a highly uncertain future. I could go on, or you could just look for yourself.
So am I saying that I’d tell my high school self not to go to college? Not at all, you need a bachelor’s degree to be a McDonald’s cashier these days. But the degree he’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars of his parents’ money getting is nothing more than a piece of paper proving to a potential employer that he’s (probably) not an idiot - it’s not the golden ticket to a job of his choice that we’re all taught that it is. More people have degrees now than ever, and a lot of them are looking for work. That’s why I’d tell myself to get a job - because employers don’t care about your GPA or what clubs you were in nearly as much as they care about whether you’ve shown the initiative to get a job and done that job well. Your college, on the other hand, doesn’t care if you have a job, but high GPAs and a variety of student-run clubs help them attract more students who are willing to give them money. That’s why they have programs to help bring your grades up and the University 101 class all freshmen are required to take probably requires you to join a club. But work experience is the only thing that can really set you apart from the 1.5 million people who graduate with bachelor’s degrees and start looking for work every year. (Nota bene: 1.5 million is many times greater than the corresponding number of yearly retirements.)
Further, I’d tell high school me to cough up the money for the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook report - he’s about to hand over a small fortune of his parents’ money, $50 to make sure it’s a good investment is perfectly reasonable - and to look at how many people are employed in the relevant fields, whether that number is going up or down and by how much, and how many people are graduating with the degree every year. Then look up the numbers for the specific job he wants (free here) and to think hard about whether he has any real chance of getting his dream job - see above - with this degree.
I realize that these statistics were just as available when I was 17 as they are now. Maybe someone even politely suggested I look at them. But for the love of God, why is this information not handed out to every high school student? Why was it not written in tiny letters on a sledgehammer and beaten into our skulls? Why, in the entirety of the College 101 course all juniors at my prestigious college prep school took, did they never impress on us the importance of why we were going to college instead of treating it as an end in itself? Why, when I thought I wanted to go to a hippie school that only offered degrees in Human Ecology (whatever that is) did my parents not reveal their concern until after I told them I had already changed my mind? Why is it so fucking easy for colleges to dupe students into paying for worthless degrees?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about education, about learning and striving to better yourself. But even if forking over a small fortune to a university is the best way to do that (Besides libraries, did you know that a lot of Ivy League schools offer their lectures and course materials for free online? Check out Coursera and edX.), the world doesn’t care what you know, or who you are. It only cares about what you can do for it, or rather, what you do do for it, and many degrees don’t enable you to do much that the world finds valuable. I’m a rather intelligent individual (quite modest, too), and my entire life I’ve been led to believe that because I was smart, my success was guaranteed. One individual who I had never met before sat down at a table with me and casually mentioned that I looked “really smart” and was obviously going places in life. What was I doing while he was telling me this? Taking a hit off of a bong. (Note to any potential employers that may be reading this: I no longer do drugs.) We’ve been taught for so long that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that everyone has a unique talent (not a skill acquired by training and practice, an innate talent) to contribute, that we have taken it to heart and learned to judge people by everything but their actions.
But there’s clearly some cognitive dissonance at work here, because we don’t act on these judgements. And again, actions are all that matters. People will tell you that you’re a great person - perhaps they’ll even mean it - but you don’t get invited to parties or asked on dates because people like you, you receive these invitations if and only if the qualities they like are reflected in actions that make them like being around you. And people are even more stingy with their money than with invitations. No employer is going to give me a job just for being smart, or you a job just for having a degree, just like nobody is going to pay a mechanic just for having tools - the mechanic only gets paid if he has the right tools to fix somebody’s car, and knows how to use them. I have an amazing set of tools in my head, but nobody ever taught me how to use them in a way that benefits anyone. My parents paid a private school hundreds of thousands of dollars to stuff my head full of facts. They probably saw the statistics the school advertises on their website. Right now, the stats describe the class of 2010. 100% of them got into college. 13% of them were named Illinois State Scholars. 47% were inducted into the National Honor Society, and 16% into “the prestigious Cum Laude Society”. There is nothing on there about what percentage of the class of 2008 has successfully graduated college and found a job in their chosen field.
So here I am, class of 2009, watching my friends from college discuss their job interviews with prestigious companies on Facebook. I had the arrogance to consider some of these people less intelligent than myself, but while they are preparing to graduate, I am lounging about about my mother’s house, unemployable (or so I tell myself, I haven’t applied for a job in months) and struggling to convince myself that I am accomplishing something of note and acquiring a valuable skill by reading and writing articles and books, as if the world needs another wannabe philosopher. And before you mention it, yes, I recognize the hypocrisy in criticizing the boy from my high school for chasing his dream of becoming an actor while I pretend that I have what it takes to be a writer.
I fully accept the blame for my own hubris, but I have to ask: why was it not drilled into my head from the time I stepped into preschool that there was more to becoming successful than simply being intelligent? Why do we praise kids for being smart (what they are) instead of for working hard (what they do), when studies have shown that kids who are praised for being smart are less likely to apply themselves? If anyone ever told me that I was squandering my potential by spending my high school afternoons playing Puzzle Pirates and World of Warcraft, their voice was drowned out in the sea of compliments and praise I received from my classmates, teachers, and parents. The only advice I remember getting was the occasional mention in my student evaluations that I could stand to apply myself more in class. Despite acing every test and assignment in the course and showing tremendous enthusiasm for the subject, my high school computer science teacher never told me that I clearly had potential and that I should make use of it by taking up programming as a hobby - in fact, he specifically discouraged me from taking the Computer Science AP Test, since it contained material that hadn’t been covered in the course (and, he didn’t say, it would make the school look bad if I failed it). The world told me that I already had everything I needed to get ahead. I am only now realizing that it lied.
I said at the very beginning of this article that I dislike the victim mentality that the recession has fostered in my generation. You’ve probably forgotten this, since I then spent the rest of the article painting myself as a victim. But while I can’t go back in time and set my high school self straight, I can do something about the consequences of his mistakes. I’m going back to college (again, you need a bachelor’s degree to work at McDonald’s now), but instead of forking over a small fortune to a private university, I’m going to my local community college, and I’ve actually put some effort into deciding on a major: computer science, which is what I would have done in the first place if I had had any clue what being a biologist actually entailed.
But more importantly, I’m not going to treat college like it’s the same thing as an education. Even if it were true that if I did everything they expected of me there would be a guaranteed job waiting for me at the end, I am more than my (future) job, and so are you, high school me. You pay the college money, and they give you a piece of paper certifying that you’re not too stupid or lazy to pass their courses. Unless you love the shit out of your job, what you do in the classroom or at the office doesn’t matter. It should matter, but it doesn’t. What matters is what you do because you want to become a better person, not what you do because it’s expected of you. I’m not going to stop writing, but I am going to set aside a few hours of my 24/7 free time to re-learn Python and Java, and take a CompSci 101 course on Coursera or EDX.
There’s a path laid out for us, but if you follow that path, picking fruits, flowers and vegetables as you go, at the end of the journey you’ll have nothing more to offer than everyone else who followed that path, who did what was expected of them and nothing more. The people who recognized that there were rare plants to be found just off the beaten path are the ones who will succeed. And everyone I’ve ever met has been convinced that I’m going to succeed. I’d say that it would be a shame to let them down, but that would be missing the point of everything I’ve written. Going back to college, and studying independently, isn’t about meeting the expectations of my friends and family, or even my teachers or future employers. I went to college the first time because it was what I was expected to do, and look where that got me. The changes I’m making now are about me, about becoming the sort of person that people will respect not for who I am, but for what I do. Because that’s all that matters. People will give you respect for who you are, but that’s all they’ll give you. Love, friendship, gainful employment - these things only come from giving people something they can’t get from other people.
That, high school me, is why you should get a job. I’ve been focusing a lot on the economic rewards, but it’s more than that. You want girls to be interested in you? Again, they already are, but they’ll be even more interested in you if you can ace every test without studying and hold down a job - and not just because it means you can take them out on expensive dates. You could be a very responsible person - you’re not, but you could be - but that doesn’t count for anything if you have nothing to be responsible for. Nobody talks to you because you don’t talk to them. They like you, but they don’t invite you to parties because you never do anything to make them enjoy being around you. So stop basking in the praise of having everyone around you tell you you’re smart. If you keep relying on who you are and not what you do, one day a cute girl from your organic chemistry class is going to ask you to help her study, and after half an hour of bullshitting explanations (because your ego won’t let you admit that you don’t know what you’re talking about) she’s going to say “Geez, I thought you were smart.” and leave. Stop listening to the people who praise you because you’re going places in life, and instead do everything you can to make them start praising you because you’re already there.
