Do what you love, the money will follow*
August 17, 2006* Title attributed to the late, great BC sensation, Jazzberry Ram
I just finished reading (skimming, more honestly) an article about Canadian lower education employment wages growing at a faster rate than higher education employment wages. Yes, a lot of this job growth can be attributed to high growth sectors such as construction and mining, but still… it’s a little disheartening for the average recent college graduate.
Are we educating ourselves out of jobs? Or are we just pursuing educations that are not necessarily career ended?
(In good uni-educated fashion, I will define my terms: By “We” I mean many of my peers, aged 21-35ish who have spent 3+ years in a college/university bachelor-type program).
Most of the We’s I know have university degrees. A large number of these We’s are not working in their chosen field, or underemployed in their chosen field. Most of those Not-Working-In-Chosen-Fielders have some type of liberal arts degree. (Self included – Bachelor of Fine Arts, class of 2004). So why the apparent glut of fine art / philosophy / english majors?
Let’s take look at Case Study #1 as an example.
Case Study #1: Me. (I mentioned in a previous post that I was a solipsist.)
Growing up, I was encouraged to follow my dreams, do what I want with my life, never settle for some boring job when I can do whatever I want. Me Me Me!!
Whereas my mother, born 27 years before me, had 2 or 3 choices in her higher educated career path: nurse, teacher, and eventually (and/or in combination with) homemaker.
These days, with the independence-bug bred into us, family-making before 30 is strongly discouraged. So we spend the greater part of our early and mid-20s accruing degrees, life experiences, and debt.
It is not unusual for my husband (on the higher end of his mid-20s, and one of the rarities among my peers who has a degree (non-art, of course) that actually landed him his job), to interview a 30 year old who has never stepped foot inside the door of the Workforce. And it shows.
So if all this excess of book learnin’, and degree earnin’ isn’t helping prepare us for the Workforce, why are we doing it?
Yes, going to university is fun (and hard work, I assure you), but is the price too high for what we end up with? With an average of $17,600 in student loan debt, and employers shaking there heads at how Not Ready recent grads are for the Workforce, it seems like our education investment (or accrued future debt load) is not really earning it’s keep. If it were a roommate, we would have already had a House meeting to present an ultimatum—shape up, or ship out.
Should we be looking at higher education as an investment rather than a necessary life experience? Would that help dissuade the Liberal Arts Glut? (LAGs, because I like coining terms, and one day, one of them will catch on.). I’ll save a more in-depth discussion of The Usefulness of Art School for another post.
Summing up, in question form, as a nod to my first year philosophy professor, Jeffrey Reid, who taught me all about Socratic Method:
Are our (Gen XYs) degree pursuits simply a way of delaying the inevitability of real life? And are our very very expensive brains ever going to produce a satisfactory return on investment?
I was told there would be no math on this exam. -Troy Dyer, Reality Bites
(To confirm my 21-35ish age bracket, because affirmation of belongance (along with makeingupwordance) is how I roll, I googled that Reality Bites quote, and found two Myspace links – both posters in their mid-20s…)
two answers:
yes, we are putting off the inevitable “real life”. College/University has replaced highschool as those “best years of my life” time period. Why not? In a comfortable and forgiving environment where you can explore ideas and have cirtical debate without the effort of arranging it, who can focus on getting jobs that they might nor really want.
Getting out, and getting on with things for me was a great wake-up call. Taught me a lot about what I’m willing to spend my time doing if all I’ll get out of it is self-satisfaction…
yes again? I think “we” are better off having gone into and come out of a liberal arts education, because we have the mental ability to understand our own practical lackings. I guess I just figure that getting out and realizing that you have to have some “hard skills” is just a another step up some kind of cliche metaphorical life ladder.
also.
I’ve noticed that soft skills (aka brainy-ness and/or the ability to think through problems) counts more when you are not young, or going into your first job. Having just been quasi-promoted to the next level up, my experience says:
You would never have gotten this job for being a thinker, but you would never have gotten out of it if you weren’t.
Employers want to have their youth and eat them too. Young people have to be able to trouble shoot the DVD player and the laptop, have to be learning a second language, taking business classes, writing articles, practising art, and must also be able to do mindlessly boring work, like sticking hundred of stick labels onto file folders, or edit word and excel documents for formatting flaws.
If you’re good at all those things, you can be an admin assistant for the rest of your life. So much for aspirations.
If you want to move further, it seems that the strategy in business is to become good friends with your co-workers, learn how to keep your mouth shut (until the right time), know how to suck-it-up while making other people understand that you feel “lucky to be there” etc.
I could go on at length, but this is your blog…
Hey Ali,
Thanks for sharing some of your soft squishy brainy-ness with us. (I love the idea of hard and soft skills, and I’m gonna ‘do like an artist’ and exploit exploit exploit the hell out of it in the following comment).
This is killer:
–”we have the mental ability to understand our own practical lackings”–
Well said. And congrats on your move up the ladder.
When I had to decide whether or not to enroll in the MFA program I was looking at, I had to face that reality of the inevitable bill at the end of it, and my ability to pay it back. Once all the facts (tuition, room and board, etc) were drawn up in OpenOffice Calc (think Excel, but free), I realized 2 things: 1) getting an MFA may allow me “time to develop as an artist”, but the main goal of the MFA is to get the credentials to teach, and 2)I don’t really *have* a burning desire to teach.
Facing that, I started on the finance track. So far, it’s pretty dry, but I know, you have to acquire some hard (aka boring) skills to get the job that your soft squishy brain will be happy doing.
And all the time in between is for making art. My idealism (of having your art and eating it too) has been partly extinguished; I realistically know I need a Napolean D killer skill, to go along with my inner art. As long as I never call art my hobby.
p.s. please please feel free to go on at any length… blogs are for sharing the loving, not territorial peeing. You are officially made Naked Finance Board of Director #2.
[...] Interesting segment on Rob Black and Your Money today, asking the question I brought up in Do What You Love article—are university educations worth the high price tag? [...]
[...] The article Do What You Love… was highlighted, but the main point was a little misconstrued. Or maybe I just wasn’t clear. For the record: I do not think we should all stop attending university. Puh-leeze. I value my university education more than my library card. (And for those of you who know me, that makes it: priceless.) My strong stance stands at the entrance to liberal arts programs. I value the arts…but, to quote my favourite web comic, Shakespeare got to get paid, son. [...]