A College Degree Doesn’t Necessarily Unlock Every Doorby
Bill Barnwell The other day I saw one of those cable ads trying to deter current and potential customers from defecting to satellite television. The kicker line in these ads is "Satellite TV isn’t all it’s cracked up to be." I’d like to modify that line for parents who are thinking of sending their kids to expensive colleges. Let’s change it to, "College degrees aren’t all they’re cracked up to be." There is certainly nothing wrong with getting a good college education. I highly recommend just about every high school senior to get some other type of further education/training after they graduate. In fact, you must develop your skills in some fashion if you want to have any sort of meaningful employment. However, this doesn’t always have to mean taking the route of an expensive college degree that (1) may be beyond your financial means and (2) you may not eventually use anyway. Part of the problem is this continuing perception that if one just obtains that college degree, they will have jobs lining up at their feet after they graduate. I know too many people where that has hardly been the case. The reality is there are a number of other factors at play as well. You can have a lot of smarts and a degree from a good institution, but if you aren’t a likable person and have the personality of a doorknob, your prospects are going to be severely limited. At least if you want to have any sort of job that deals with interacting with others. I went to college with a guy who went into heavy debt and put in a lot of time to earn his degree. His grade point average was an impressive 3.9. Unfortunately, he was not very personable and had a difficult time getting through the interview process. It took him many more months to land a decent job after college than it took substandard students who just hobbled through their coursework. They at least had people skills. In the end, they were more marketable even though they had C or low B averages. There’s not much you can do to change your personality. You are who you are. But regardless of whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, a people person or a non-people person, you can at least work on your social interaction skills. Learn some phone manners. Begin investing in your "social capital." Learn how to talk to people in social situations. Work on your self-confidence. There are plenty of extroverted people who inside have little if any self-confidence. It eventually begins to show and their insecurity gets the best of them. They tend not to be the best workers in the final analysis. Even an introvert can master these things and still be themselves. Best yet, it doesn’t cost you $80,000 or much more in the process. Even more relevant is job experience. How many of you have been frustrated when looking through the ads posted on Monster or other classifieds when you find that most employers will only consider applicants with "experience"? You say to yourself, "I am a smart person. I can learn the ropes. I even have a college degree. All I need is for them to give me a chance!" Sometimes they will, but more often than not they won’t. They will pass over your résumé for the other guy or girl who is more qualified. If every employer wants experience, how does the prospective entry-level professional break into his or her desired career? A good option (usually) is internships. If you are looking to pad your résumé with experience, a good internship in your desired field or a related field will be infinitely more valuable than membership in this or that campus organization. Public service, organizational involvement, student government, etc, never hurt, but they don’t usually trump experience. Instead of either/or, why not do both? Set your sights on both community involvement and relevant internship experience. The problem many people have with internships, particularly college students or adults in professional transition, is that they don’t typically pay well if at all. The college student majoring in business says to himself, "Well, I guess I could spend my summer working for free for Business A and that might help me down the road, but I won’t have any money during my whole summer break! I’ll work instead for Restaurant B and make some decent tips. At least I’ll be able to have fun this summer." This is a classic example of short-term thinking. If the college student’s desire really is to be a restaurant server, then there’s nothing wrong with his thinking. But if his ultimate goal is to land a job in the business world then he ought to forgo the couple thousand dollars he could make in the short-term in exchange for receiving relevant training and work experience in a field that could pay off much better in the long term. The short-term payoff is not financial. The financial benefits will come later (assuming the individual has other qualities needed to succeed). But when making these decisions, many college students will take the short-term fix rather than think of the big picture. This happened to more than a few of my friends after college who couldn’t figure out why their college degrees weren’t providing instant employment. Perhaps working at the tanning salon or movie theater the summer after your junior year of college wasn’t the best idea after all. These economic realities work just the same in my field as well. I had planned to graduate college with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and then go off to law school. But in the middle of my junior year I felt a call I could no longer ignore to go into the ministry. So, I left the well-known state university to go off to the lesser-known denominational college. Starting over with a Christian Ministry degree would have meant 40 credits weren’t going to transfer over. That meant a lot more money and time on top of what I’d already invested. Instead I finished the degree and added a minor in Bible/Ministry. Enough to meet my denomination’s basic requirements for pastoral licensing. There remained a big problem. What church would want me as their pastor after college? I had some great previous job experience, but nothing to do with this field. On top of that, I was going to graduate with much fewer credits in the relevant subjects than my peers who were majoring in Bible and Christian Ministries. As a result I took two action steps. First, I decided to go the internship route. For the ministry majors an internship was actually required for graduation, but I wanted to make sure I got into a good one where I did more than lick stamps and get the pastor’s coffee. I did some social networking. I made contacts in the South Bend area. Eventually, several pastors who knew my story and got to know me were willing to bring me on as a summer intern. All but one of the offers were unpaid. I chose one of the unpaid ones because it was going to give me the most experience. And experience I got. As much as one can realistically get in three months. The following year, I did the same type of thing only this time near my hometown in the Metro-Detroit area. And while I was graduating with fewer credits in Bible/Theology/Ministry, I took all I could in undergrad and spent a lot of time on the side doing major self-education. By the time I graduated, I had more relevant experience than most of the Christian Ministry majors and my skills in Biblical and theological study matched if not exceeded theirs. I got offered a ministerial position a month and a half before I graduated. That first summer of working for free, and the second summer of working for very little, resulted in my getting the kind of position I wanted after graduation. Eventually I earned two master’s degrees (that were affordable after scholarships) that sharpened my skills and allow me to teach in certain institutions. I was reaching my short-term career objectives. In my field, the payoff is certainly not financial. For all the talk about money-hungry ministers, the vast, vast majority of us are not paid handsome salaries. Far from it. We don’t do it with dreams of being well-off. Many of us supplement our incomes in various ways. But for you and your desired field, if you can do something that you love AND that pays very well, then by all means go pursue it. If making a short-term sacrifice will help you in the long term, then bite the bullet now and reap the more meaningful rewards later. Short-term sacrifice is not just something for college students. Maybe you are an older adult in occupational transition and can’t find a job. Money is already tight. Perhaps you can’t afford to do some sort of unpaid internship because you do need the money right now to keep the lights on. But if you can manage to get by, if at all possible, broaden your résumé and go earn the experience you need in order to do what you’d rather be doing later. But don’t think that night classes at the local community college will solve all your problems. Many working adults make the sacrifice of paying additional money for college and then later find themselves in the same predicament as the working college student who can’t find professional work after he or she graduates. Your book smarts are fine, but the kind of person you are and your relevant experience counts just as much, if not more. College does have the benefit of helping one transition from being a kid to an adult. There’s much to be said about learning how to cook your own meals, wash your own clothes, etc., now that mommy and daddy aren’t there to do everything for you. College can help kids grow up. I especially feel this way about kids from sheltered Christian backgrounds whose parents baby them constantly. For such people getting out of the house at some point is good, whether that means going to college or saving up for a cheap apartment with some buddies. But not every teen that goes off to college grows up. Some of them graduate 22- or 23-year-old children who are more irresponsible than they were when they came in. In the end result, college can help immensely, but is not a ticket to instant success after graduation. I can’t tell you how many college graduates I know that are in massive debt and will be for years to come, but wind up taking jobs that didn’t even require them go to college to begin with. So no matter who you are and where you’re at, you need to think about what your ultimate goals are and what it’s going to take for you to get there. Me personally, I’d really like to get a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies and teach full-time in a college or university, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the cost and sacrifice involved to get there given my present circumstances. Especially when other options present themselves that would allow me to make the kind of difference I want in life and still live relatively happily.
January 25, 2007 Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. Visit his blog. Bill is also running for President of the United States. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
In
closing, here are a couple general rules: Never spend a dime more
on college education than you need to. Never spend an extra semester
you don’t need to. Remember, time is money. Don’t go and spend thousands
upon thousands of dollars if you can obtain the same goals through
different means. If you do go to college (or pay to send your children),
make sure you develop essential social skills and work experiences
in the process as well. Following that advice will make a life a
lot easier and economically manageable than it is for others who
don’t think of the big picture and just fumble their way through.