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.

Learning how? Learning where?

If you are a regular reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, or even the New York Times' "Education" section, you have been bombarded with articles about MOOCs.

I actually don't think you are a regular reader of any of those things -- good for you! -- but it might be worth thinking about MOOCs. Just in case you've managed to avoid the discussion, you might want to know "MOOC" stands for massively open online courses (or sometimes massively online open courses -- we aren't entirely sure ourselves). These are courses with tens of thousands of students in them at any given time. For realz, guys. A course in finance regularly gets more than 100,000 students! Quit whining about the size of your STATS 250 lectures.

Well, maybe not.

Let's backtrack. When I was asked to be a guest blogger here, I wanted to write about education, but I didn't want to write about MOOCs. See, I'm a nerd and I am bombarded by discussions about MOOCs. "Enough effing already!" I've been saying. I'm not opposed to MOOCs or the styles of teaching involved: I've been webcasting some of my courses live since 2009, and I don't think a student's physical presence is always necessary for meaningful learning.

Students in my POLSCI 101.

And I think the idea of proving educational access to people who wouldn't otherwise have it is totally awesome. But a lot of people feel very differently about it.

A lot of my colleagues -- people who teach y'all -- are saying MOOCs are downright evil. They are, at best, cheesy attempts at pandering to get more applicants and fundraising dollars; at worst, they are a nefarious scheme to do away with existing faculty. I'm not endorsing this. I'm just reporting the view. But just for a reality check, a recent Facebook update from a colleague read "Stop this insanity!" It's not that my colleagues are lunatics: if it's true, as this widely reported controversy implies, that the administration asked a department to consider a MOOC course as satisfying a requirement, then some of the worried people are right.

OK, all of that was a long preamble to asking, whaddayouguysthink? Here's why your view matters: there are a lot of folks here at UM who think that although MOOCs are interesting and potentially very cool, residential education (what you are going through) is superior. Tons of faculty say, "That's just the way it is. Period." A significantly smaller number of us are saying, "Residential education is superior, but not automatically. We need to figure out what is the value-added our students are getting that you wouldn't get though a MOOC."

And, you know, guys, I actually don't know. We don't know. We have some ideas. But this post is really a very, very sincere plea for your views. Why does it make sense for you or your parents to pay the unimaginable bucketloads of money you pay for you to go here, as opposed to grabbing bunch of courses from Coursera or EdX (for free!) or even the University of Phoenix (for a lot less money)?

A Generational Gap Within a Generation

Disclaimer- there are two video links embedded (I hope) in this blog (ahhh, the Information Age. You can keep it).  Anyway, the second of the two may offend delicate eyes and ears, so be warned. Additionally, in order to see it, you have to sign in with You!Tube via your g-mail accounts. Yes, you've all got one- it's your student e-mail. Have a good remainder of the weekend.

Millennials.

Despite our definitions in class, I'm still not sure what to make of that term. Especially since admittance into that particular club seem based upon somewhat loose criteria. I can't help but feel that I quite clearly belong in a different generation than those with whom I currently attend university. I'm 32; most of them are between the ages of 18 and 22. In my conversations with other students, there is, to me, a pronounced gap in experience, points of reference, and general knowledge. To put in "modern" terms, I suppose you could call it the difference between two very different databases. There might be a better way to put that, but I'm unsure as to how.

Regardless of my confusion, or perhaps because of it, I wonder to myself am I a "millennial?" I... don't know.   I could make an argument for it, of course- I was born in 1981, and graduated high school in June of 1999. So, on the surface, it would seem I'm very much a millennial. On the other hand, of course, I've seen things that many others considered millennials have never seen- nor (thinking more about this, I have to say "hopefully") will they.

I watched the Challenger blow up on TV. I saw the reports on the Tiananmen Square massacre when I was eight, and how a single man held up a column of tanks. It didn't matter to the thousand or so students who were slaughtered, but it still sent a ripple into the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening salvos of Desert Storm live on CNN, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Rodney King beating, the acquittals of the LAPD officers and Los Angeles burning. I watched with rapt attention as Bill Clinton and O.J. Simpson were acquitted.

From Manuel Noriega to Slobodan Milošević; Saddam Hussein to Muamar Gaddafi to Osama bin Laden; Mobutu to Yitzhak Rabin and Yassar Arafat to Laurent Kabila; I saw them all come and go. It's unfair to put Rabin in that grouping, but his assassination heralded a fundamental shift in how the Israelis conducted themselves. I saw the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the Troubles, and an unconscionable chemical gas attack in a Tokyo subway. I lived through the Era of Domestic Terrorism- Nichols and McVeigh, Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Atlanta Games bombing and the Unabomber. I read about and saw the North Hollywood shootout, "ethnic cleansing" in Rwanda and Kosovo, and a cult of people who wore purple Nikes killed themselves because they wanted to catch a spiritual ride on a comet. I saw September 11th live on every channel, the London subway bombings, the Madrid train bombings, and the Bali bombing. I, along with everyone else in the country, watched us invade Panama, Haiti, *sort-of* Serbia, blot out one of the world's most powerful armies in less than 100 hours during Desert Storm, and finally our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (round 2). Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis- seen 'em all. To be fair, I've also seen the amazing relief efforts mounted in order to "fix" things as best as possible, yet somehow the taint of corruption, malfeasance, and strife always winds up in those relief efforts.

My point, I guess, is that few of you will understand the visceral reactions many of these quite literally world changing events evoked in me, or my generation. For those of you born in the '90s, the world has an extremely different shape for you than it does for me. Sometimes I think you're naive, sheltered, and unprotected, and then I have to wonder if I'm the naive one for thinking I see your generation any differently than my predecessors see my generation. At the end of the day, like most things, I have to call it a toss-up. I certainly know some things many of you will never know- for instance, Michael Jordan will always be the best basketball player who ever lived. Kobe, Lebron, and their ilk can't hold a candle to him, or the pedigree of superstars he played against. I know this for two reasons. First and foremost, I grew up around Chicago in the '90s, and that's just the way it is, and secondly, because I got to see him lead the Bulls to two three-peats. Despite the murder of his father.  But I digress.

The reason I'm harping on what I see as this difference between your generation and my generation stems from my reactions to some of your reactions about the "worth" of college. For me, to buy into any of this "hackademic" or "credential inflation" nonsense is just that- nonsense. Selling such a non-plan for success predicates itself on fear- your fear. Of debt, of joblessness, of failure. And, quite frankly, I despise it.

How dare anyone tell you that an education isn't worth it? How dare anyone try to prey on the fears of the young to rob them of their future? How dare anyone advocate that you handicap yourselves with artificial limitations? Because that's exactly what going through life without a degree is- a handicap, and not one you can easily overcome.

I've been denied the company of people I respect, because they have degrees and I don't. I've been looked down upon by others- even other people without degrees- because I don't have a four year degree. I'll never be able to get the job I want without a Bachelor's. No one will consider me an expert in my field without a four year degree. Most notably as I get older, I am and will continue to be considered the next best thing to a second class citizen without a Bachelor's.

Yet many of you don't know where I'm coming from, because you're simply not old enough to have experienced the things I've experienced. You haven't heard the unknowing condescension in the voices of people you've known since you were twelve. You haven't seen the change in the eyes of someone you're discussing an important topic with change from bright engagement to hooded disinterest the second they learn you don't have a degree and are therefore their inferior. You haven't seen twenty-two year-olds lead nineteen, twenty, and thirty year-olds with multiple combat tours into ridiculous situations simply because they have a degree- and you don't.

I did two tours in Iraq with the infantry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soFPZ-Wo9T4 I learned, I adapted, I adjusted. I was known in my platoon for over-thinking the crap out of things, for mentoring, for seeing "the big picture." Yet however smart I or any of my comrades were, we were always at someone else's mercy. Because we didn't have degrees. As a result, some of us died, and some of us didn't.

Is that the way things should work? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I couldn't tell you definitively. What I do know is that while you may not need a degree to be successful, odds are you'll have a better chance with one than without one. Most importantly, though, without that degree, you will always be powerless in the arenas that matter. Even if you're one of the lucky 20% that manages to start a small business and make it, you're still going to have to rely on people that have degrees to get you through. CPAs, lawyers, federal and state inspectors, policy makers, so on and so forth.

So don't, for a single second, think that your path isn't "worth it." It is. You are some of the luckiest people on earth, whether you realize it or not. You have bright, shiny futures ahead of you. Even better, most of you are young enough that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor so much sooner than people that took my route through life. I'm going to spend the rest of my days trying to make up for not going to college right out of high school, and at this point I honestly don't think I can "fix" it. But I can damn well make sure that I have the necessary tools to be heard and taken seriously. I will never again be dismissed for being an uneducated rube, and that credential can't "inflate," no matter what some kid who confuses temporary celebrity with success might tell you.

Well. That's it. Sermon over. Now start paying attention and posting on the blog.