thirtysomething on twentysomethings
Hi Emily,
Thanks for your most recent article, The Real World Threw Up All Over Us. It was a sobering and thought-provoking read about how some of my peers are handling these interesting times. Wikipedia tells me that my birth year of 1978 indeed qualifies me as part of the Gen-Y cohort, but I’m not 100% convinced. Here’s why…
The best thing I ever did in my life was having the fortune to be born to my parents. The second best thing I ever did was to ignore them when they begged me to apply to an Ivy and instead left the East coast pressure cooker and attended a large state school in the midwest (the one that just suffered a first round loss to Western Kentucky).
Here’s a secret of mine: I’ve always been horrible at math. I’ve much more innate talent for and enjoyment of the language arts. Which pretty much makes me the anti-Asian. And yet, I enrolled in the computer engineering program. Talk about being shoved into a square hole…
And that’s where I think I parted ways with my non-profit loving, Americorps-serving, volunteerism-inflicted fellow Gen Yers. Somewhere along the way, the lessons of 3-2-1 Contact and the Electric Company and Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and Reading Rainbow didn’t sink in. I didn’t chase my dreams. I didn’t think that if I put my mind to it, I could accomplish anything.
Rather, I took a survey of what I was good at, what companies paid money for, and took the average, as it were. Working in a cube farm for a giant multinational isn’t what I dreamed I’d be doing at 30 when I was 5; on the other hand, I know a lot more software engineers than I do firefighters or astronauts or employed masters of Literature graduates.
[ok, that last one was just plain mean]
[nb, I actually do have a dream job right now, getting paid to work on the open source Linux project, but that's besides the point]
I think generationally, my cohort was sold a lie. Big Bird and Snuffalupagus taught us that if we shared our toys and followed our dreams, there would be no limit to what we could accomplish. Somewhere along the way, that message got twisted, inflated, and conflated doing good with doing well. The young have always been optimistic, but I think ours was the first to be sold the idea that Peace Corp -> NGO or Americorps -> non-profit was a viable career path.
Or worse, that *not* wandering down those twisty altruistic passages, all alike, was wasting one’s chance to change the world. The pious have always induced a shameful sense of greed in the worldly, but again, I think our generation was given the hard sell on this idea.
But that was your last column, and I’d like to be relevant to your next one about graduate school. So let me try and bridge the gap, if I may.
After my own work experience for the past 7 years, straight out of undergraduate; observing lots of friends in multiple fields obtain varying degrees of education; and having given a few guest lectures to undergrads during “professional’s seminar”, I’ve developed a few rules of thumb when asked “so what about grad school?”
- The most valuable thing you own is your time and how you spend it.
- Many graduate degrees do not directly result in a bigger paycheck.
thus… grad school is a good choice if (and only if):
- it opens professional doors that are otherwise close
or
- you absolutely love the subject material and want to learn more
On that second bullet, I emphasize the fact that there is no causal link between deep knowledge about a given random subject and the size (or availability, even) of a paycheck. That is to say, grad school for the sake of learning is a worthy goal of its own right, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of society values your knowledge.
Conversely, grad school is a horrible choice if:
- you don’t know what else to do after undergrad
- you think you’ll get more money (unless you’re a public school teacher)
- you think it will be a differentiator when applying for jobs in a different field
As to the second two points, almost every company I’ve ever heard of expects a new college hire to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and kinda dumb but trainable, like a yellow lab puppy. But what you do in that first job can affect your subsequent jobs to such a great extent that I tend to consider two years of actual work experience exactly equal (and in truth, preferable) to a grad degree (of course assuming some relevancy in work experience, etc. etc.).
Grad school is a maybe-ok choice if:
- you picked the wrong undergrad degree
And that, and the first bullet under ‘horrible reasons’ are what I consider to be the real issue with higher education in America today.
Somehow along the way, we became conditioned to think that high school graduates must go immediately to college. And as a result, we’re churning out an entire populace of generally educated kids who either studied something they didn’t want to, or studied something so entirely broad as to be completely useless (undergrads in business or psychology, I’m staring at you).
If you accept the idea that time is the most valuable thing a person can own, then that amount of wasted human capital should be absolutely depressing. I can think of nothing worse than an entire generation of youthful energy, blown off during the vigorous pursuit of life (and tail), in the parochial setting of our own backyard.
If you want to preach something useful in your column, start a conversation about how our expectations of kids attending college right after high school are unreasonable. Do we really expect 17 and 18 year olds to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives? A miniscule percentage of wunderkinds, sure, but the population at large? I think not.
Even merely sending our kids to party abroad for a year or two would be better than having them party at home. At least then, they’d be exposed to the world as it really is. But if that idea is too pie-in-the-sky, then how about encouraging something like Americorps right out of high school? Don’t wait until college is over and there are no other job prospects lined up. Even if they hate it, that’s a useful piece of knowledge to have.
I don’t think that going back to grad school to fix an undergraduate mistake (begat by a high school kid’s mistake) is a good idea.
Apologies for the preachiness and length. And thanks for triggering some interesting thoughts. Maybe you’ll get something useful out of my mail. If not, oh well, I get a free blog entry out of it. :)
cheers!
- Posted by alex at 01:23 am
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Nicely said. You prompted me to meta-post
OK, I felt like I was reading my college major decision process there as you described your own. I constantly feel this guilt that I should have done something to do more for the environment or help the poor and now that you mention it, I am blaming that guilt all on Sesame Street et al. HAHA.
Great post and I hope you got a thoughtful response from “Emily”
PS. I sent your blog entry to my buddy who just started his MBA program at UofChicago GSB, LOL.
A response to A Chizang, that he asked me to share:
I really liked your blog entry…a couple of things I have had stirring in the back of my mind that came out in your article:
– Our generation has generally lost touch with the fact that you can’t just make a career out of anything you want. Understanding that my peers are generally well educated folks from above average incomes, I would agree that the reigning ideology coming out of college is “what do I want to do with my life” as opposed to our parents’ ideology coming out of college, which I believe was something like “what would I like to do, and can I make a living out of it”
–Many of us grew up in this crazy bubble where money was not a dominating issue in households. The question that comes up is – why not? In every culture around the world (with perhaps exceptions in Europe), money (or if not money, then food, shelter, basic needs) is probably the biggest thing going on – parents take crazy jobs because it means they can build up some income. And yet – Gen Y grew up where money played second fiddle to being happy and intellectual. The mentality that each child is a special flower.
–Following the point above, I actually agreed with Shannon in the article that Gen Y needs to be put in its place to some extent, whereas Emily the author disagreed with Shannon. I definitely see this economic downturn as a healthy reality check for the US, not for our parent’s generation, but for our generation. Our parent’s grew up being taught that you must do something productive and economically meaningful, and the world didn’t owe you anything, which, like it or not, is economic reality. You have to work hard in life to make a good living – Gen Y has been living off the hard work of previous generations. Think how hard our parents and grandparents worked to get what they got – and how much they saved instead of spent. At some point, it was bound to catch up with our generation..so yes, I think its healthy as Shannon opined. I think the numbers show this – the Obama administration has said that they will try to help the US out of this, but ultimately its up to us to change our ways, because you can’t have an economically sustainable society as we have been living.
– I also agree, that while a harsh reality, a masters degree in English is going to make it difficult to find a job. Especially when there are thousands of people with masters degrees in English. We can’t all be successful writers and professors – so this ties in to my first point of agreement.
–Regarding grad school – I totally agree with your points, especially after having worked for a few years. Grad school is kind of useless in the professional (i.e. – money making) world. And yet – when you leave undergrad – you have this crazy philosophy that grad school will open up lots more doors for you. Perhaps universities foster this philosophy for their own benefit? Not all grad school is bad – it just might not be worth it unless you have a vision of where you’re going (your points exactly)
–As far as life after high school – I’ve often thought the same thing you wrote – maybe kids shouldn’t go to college right after high school. And here its a balancing act I think – one on hand, college is expensive and increasingly valuable with maturity. I wish I was more mature when I was in college – I would have learned more and probably been better off in terms of my career. On the other hand, waiting to go to college might derail a young adult from the standard social train – they might be lost after high school and feel too mature while in undergrad. Maybe this isn’t true, but food for thought. Part of our social norms were formed in our young years in college.
Another thought – we all thought it was funny in college when one of your friends was majoring in philosophy. In the back of our minds we were thinking that is a completely useless degree to get…but we went along with it because we thought that friend will do just fine, despite their degree choice – because they’re intelligent and there’s all sorts of jobs floating around that might apply to a degree such as that. Also, a parallel thought in college (undergrad) is that its really just a discovery phase. Its just to let young adults be intellectual and find themselves. I think this is a pretty common theme – let young undergrads be free, so that they are ready after college to start thinking about their career. This goes to your point about time being valuable. The free undergrad philosophy has two negatives – (1) its 4 years of discovery, which is a long time, and (2) its $20,000+ per year of discovery, which is expensive. So, maybe being free (and poor) and not going right to college for a few years after high school is a good idea – it might only be 2 years instead of 4 and you would have MUCH less debt when you started to think about a career.
Snuffleupugus agrees
PS – I actually have a fried who majored in philosophy. He went on to law school and is now a successful lawyer, probably making good money.
I have varying degrees of sympathy and empathy for the people quoted in the original column. The one who strikes closest to my heart is Shala, who wonders if her parents are solvent and how they’re going to retire.
The depressing thing is that I have a pretty good idea of how our parents are going to retire. I think we’ll see the size of our social safety nets increase by an order of magnitude (at least) and we’ll be paying for the sins of our fathers. I’m not heartless enough to be totally against this idea, actually, but it does strike me as more than a little unfair. And I don’t have any good solutions.
College right after high school is great for people that know exactly what they want. It’s the unsures in the middle that our society is doing a great disservice to by encouraging them to find themselves in college. An expensive holding tank, as you point out. It’s the unsures that we should be sending abroad or pushing into the service of society. We already keep kids virtually locked up for 18 years of their lives, what’s one more?
Compulsory military service, like Israel, South Korea, etc. probably isn’t the exact answer we’re looking for, but I bet we could stand to learn a few things from that model.
Thanks.
“your mom goes to college” –kip