Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Anger

Every Yahoo article on higher education pisses me off!  Not that anything else on Yahoo is much better, but the higher education articles take the cake.  It isn't that they are necessarily worse than the others, it's my perspective when reading them.  Want to have a rewarding career with a good salary?  Guess what?  You're in the wrong major!  You're gonna have to get into Accounting or Nursing while there's still time.

The article I found yesterday was no different, but was slightly more thought provoking and less shallow.  Business blogger and author James Altrucher's controversial stance on the transition from high school to college was profiled.  Altrucher believes that this transition shouldn't be instantaneous, as it often is, but that people should have some time in between to develop crucial skills and figure out their place in the world.

Great, I initially though, something else I got wrong!  I'm three years and most of Grandpa's college fund deep, and now I'm realizing I really should have taken some time off to figure out what I wanted to do with my life before I took the plunge.

Granted, I was simply doing what my parents, teachers, peers, government, and society instructed me to do.  Altrucher's views are controversial because they go against everything about the role of college that has been viewed by mainstream society as just how it's done.  In fact, the general pressure we're getting from who are supposed to be our role models, especially President Obama, is that we need as many people in college as we can find.  Sorry if your message seems a little misguided when there's all these college graduates stuck in the unemployment line, Obama.

The alternatives to immediately going to college discussed by Altrucher are starting a business, doing some world travelling, creating art, trying to make it as a stand-up comedian, writing a book, working for charity, and mastering a game or sport.  I actually tried the "writing a book" route while in high school, but trying to take the summer off to do it in my house was met by considerable pressure from the parental end.  I felt like I was in the R&D division of a major corporation: "Give me some results or we're shutting this whole operation down!"  Also, I have done some travelling: not all that much, but enough to learn lessons that many of my countrymen live their entire lives without learning.  I have no qualms with what he is suggesting.  They teach people what they need to know to figure out who they are, and none of them require searching for a job in the bone-dry unskilled labor market.

Doing much of this on the scale that Altrucher suggests is risky, though.  There's still a considerable monetary investment needed for many of the alternatives, and many parents still would feel better about their kids being in college knowing that they're getting something accomplished rather than fucking around for a few years "finding themselves."

Altrucher's way may be the only way right now considering current education policies.  High schools seem to want nothing more than to have a good enough percentage of their students pass the state standards tests, and colleges seem to want nothing more than to be either free-form knowledge dispensaries or highly-specialized career generators.  The only time people have to find themselves is their own time.

Perhaps this can be changed.

The change could come from the high school end.  Why not?  The ridiculously broken compulsory education system in America needs a complete overhaul anyway.  Why not build career exploration deeper into the curriculum rather than just being a token add-on in the current system.  There's a million other problems that need fixing, we could definitely fix this one while we're at it.

Perhaps colleges could change.  It wouldn't require as much from the government, and could be implemented and tested in private colleges almost instantly.  They're halfway there as is: they just need advisors who advise rather than just sign off on classes for next quarter.  The expectation in today's culture is that college is the place to find yourself, anyway.  Why don't the colleges really aspire to help with that.

Maybe it's easier than it's made out to be, and we don't need a drastic Altrucher-level plan to gain all the life skills and self-exploration we need.  Wow, I'm already a lot less pissed about an article I was only mildly pissed off about to begin with.  Maybe the next Yahoo article will be even better.

Or not!