Kim Kardashian and College: Why Now?

When I'm asked why I go to college my response is always something along the lines of, "to get the kind of job I want, I need a college degree". Notice I have no specific job title in mind, instead I'm after a "category" of jobs. There are a million different ways to label the category of job I want, from "high-skilled", to "white collar", and beyond. However, the most apt way to describe it in my mind is "secure". Not in the sense of the word that I'll never get fired, but secure in the sense that ensures my continued employment as I age.

I have a grandpa that illustrates this need perfectly. My mom's dad is named Jerry. Jerry is a great guy that for years worked his butt off, raising five girls.  Jerry never set foot in a school after he was old enough to drive and worked constructions jobs all his life. Jerry did fine for a while, but physically he broke down and was forced to retire at around sixty years old. At one time, this was a perfectly acceptable age to retire. However, modern medicine has blessed Jerry with the ability to live well into his eighties and hopefully beyond. This is a fantastic blessing, with one important catch: Jerry didn't earn enough before his body broke down to support him for the rest of his life. Physical labor takes its toll on the body and leads to early retirement. This is a huge problem considering life expectancy has increased by twenty-five years since 1930.

However, does this mean I should forgo physical labor entirely and jump right into college? The answer is more complex than I initially considered when I made the jump to the University of Michigan directly out of Traverse City West Senior High. To best answer that question, I should have considered "what is my best asset right now, and how does that compare to what is in demand?".  Now that may sound like an argument for trying my hand at prostitution, but I promise you it's not. Instead it's me taking an objective assessment of my skills and using that assessment to take control of the "Jack Flynn brand". The "Jack Flynn brand" is my own personal weighing of my supply of skills against the demands of the professional world. I may better at reading than I am at drilling holes in the ground, but if the world places more value on my nominal ability to drill holes, I'd be a fool not to take advantage. No one is better at this than Kim Kardashian. She clearly has very limited traditional skill, but she has parlayed what she does have in social capital into a ton of money and a fun lifestyle. This is because the Kim Kardashian brand is in incredibly high demand and low supply.

Assessing your own value is the tricky part of this calculation. As a nineteen-year-old male, my physical value is likely to never be higher than it is right now. I have about a decade of peak physical condition before my physical skill set begins to decline. Therefore, my highest value in physically intensive, blue-collar labor is right now. So why am I not in North Dakota pulling in 14k a month as a welder?

 (Right is an actual photo from the rigs repair website. They're desperate to pay people that much) I'm nearly qualified; with a high school degree all I need is a couple of months training. It clearly is more valuable to me than spending 25k a year at school. Truly, I have no better answer than I simply never considered it. It would be easy to spend 5-10 years of my life working a blue-collar job before returning to school and securing my long term future. In fact it would probably have been prudent to do that, as I could have left school debt free at age 30 with a wealth of that invaluable "real world experience". Instead, I followed the crowd and went to school right out of college.

What all this adds up to is just another decision college-bound high schoolers have to make at age 17 or 18. While it is important to secure a long term future for yourself with a goal of retiring comfortably, that doesn't mean avoiding challenging physical work all together. Assess your own personal skill set, and match that to the world's needs before mindlessly jumping into college with the rest of your friends. Control your own brand.