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)?