Undecided: navigating life and learning after high school

What You Need to Know

You’ve taken stock of your past and thought a bit about your future, and now it’s time to start considering, in detail, some of those unknown lands we talked about earlier. But we are going to move slowly and start with something you already know a fair amount about: school. Besides all the practical arguments for going to college after you graduate, there are some that are just as important but only rarely discussed. College, or any advanced learning institution, is a relatively safe bet. A diploma or a certificate will serve you well in life, but the process of attaining it can also provide many valuable lessons (about how to navigate complicated procedures, submit important paperwork in a timely fashion, and generally just get things done). School offers a familiar environment: teachers, class schedules, a ready-made group of peers, cafeterias, homework, and regular vacations. But—and this is a big but—within that familiar framework you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to try-on a wide spectrum of future possibilities with very little risk.

If you are enrolled as a student and take the required prerequisites, a good college can become the best sampling board around, offering an amazing array of courses, from French Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century to Cellular Biology to Broadcast News 101. The facilities aren’t a bad perk either, as even schools with smaller endowments come replete with beautiful libraries, huge swimming pools, and coffee bars aplenty. And never again will you have the same opportunity to make friends with so many people your same age (who happen to be going through exactly the same experience at the exact same time). These are the kind of friendships that can last forever. Life may never be as mind-expanding or as cushy or as downright fun as the years spent as an undergraduate. However, as we discovered in the last section, those years come with a hefty price tag, which opens the discussion to an important question:

Is more school really necessary?

I know the arguments against it. They run something like this: You’re already burnt out. You’ve had enough of sitting in a classroom. You’ve already accomplished a lot in high school—enough to get the only kind of early-life jobs, at least, that the economy is offering these days. (No one needs a degree to work at Abercrombie.) You could go out and make money now. Do something real. Look at somebody like Bill Gates. He didn’t graduate from college. Neither did Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, or Ben Affleck, or Natalie Portman. They’re doing fine, right? School is ridiculously expensive. It’s hard to get in anyway. Education is moving online, so why all the pressure? Why all the grief?

YEAH, WHY ALL THE GRIEF?

It’s a common complaint—especially from the often very talented people who succeeded despite their lack of a college education. College is so pricey, and the job market so slow, that the real-world value of an undergraduate degree is being questioned by a whole mess of folks, including some very well-educated people—people like former US Secretary of Education William J. Bennett. He wrote a bestselling book, Is College Worth It?, that makes a compelling argument that too many people are going to college these days. He asks if a bachelor’s degree is worth the money if, when you graduate, you only have a fifty-fifty chance of finding a job; and many of those jobs don’t earn enough to pay down the debt incurred to go to school in the first place. (For specifics on costs, aid, and debt, go to page 82.)

Another author, Jeffrey Selingo, argues in College (Un)Bound, that the more than $1 trillion in debt owed by American students has been frittered away on campuses that focus more on gonzo student life than vigorous academics. You may think that a high-tech campus and great parties are the reasons to go to college, but once you check out the price tag, you’ll probably agree that earning your money back is at least as important as mastering beer pong.

But here’s the thing: These pundits are themselves the products of a system that is changing rapidly. Your education will look entirely different than theirs, and so will your career. Someday, in the not-to-distant future, when someone does inquire where you went to school, it’s just as likely that they’ll be curious about what your interests are and what you know rather than where you stack up on the academic totem pole. Few people are going to care if you’re a Princeton man or a Vassar woman (except other Princetonians and Vassarians).

The world is changing. Education is changing. Although the exact form that this change will take remains to be seen, you can rest assured that the path from high school to college to a job and success is nowhere near as direct as it once was. The cost of a traditional education is different, and so is the value. Unorthodox educations are treated with more respect, and prestige comes from some very different sources now.

So, don’t let the grown-up doomsayers and boomers thwart you from getting the highest level of education you can manage, in whatever form it may come—brick-and-mortar, hands-on, experiential training, online, night classes—and however you can. Education is still the most important investment you can make in yourself. How you get that education is going to be different than anything we’ve seen before. The questions you need to answer, here and now, are what do you want from your education and how will that education fit into your larger plans for life? How are you going to blaze a trail into your own best future? In many cases, despite all the expense and risk, college after high school is still a strong bet—and one you should not dismiss without serious consideration.

THE DIFFERENCE HIGHER EDUCATION CAN MAKE

Check out the 2012 table on the following page from the US Department of Labor Statistics. It shows the extent to which weekly earnings are still tied to diploma level. The data was collected from full-time salaried workers age twenty-five and older.

Level of Education	Average Weekly Earnings	Unemployment Rate
Less than high school	$471	12.4%
High school diploma	$652	8.3%
Some college, no degree	$727	7.7%
Associate’s degree	$785	6.2%
Bachelor’s degree	$1,068	4.5%
Master’s degree	$1,300	3.5%
Professional degree	$1,785	2.1%
Doctoral degree	$1,624	2.5%

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, 2012

Based on these numbers, it’s clear that even in a poor economy, an associate’s degree has better earning potential than a high school degree, and a bachelor’s degree can double your weekly earnings—and cut the possibility of unemployment in half. If you go on to graduate studies or a doctoral degree, the picture gets even better. This is, in part, why continuing your education is important and why there is and will continue to be a lot of competition to get into college for the foreseeable future. Moreover, many employers won’t even interview candidates without a BA or an associate’s degree. The government, for instance, considers higher education a prerequisite for the jobs of the future.

But, listen up! Even though getting a postsecondary degree can still make a big difference in your overall chances for a financially solid adult life, when you get the degree, how you get it, and where you get it are nowhere near as important as they once were.

A degree is the certificate that recognizes you’ve accomplished a certain amount of college coursework credit. The system is designed to help you earn those credits in one place, within an established curriculum. However, many students spend years stitching together credits from a few different institutions, take time off, or go study abroad for a year, and ultimately end up with the same degree as a student who spent four consecutive years in one school.

This is where that self-knowledge piece from the first section of this book comes in. If you are a doer with good communication skills, sitting in a library studying Chaucer or meditating on the power dynamics of medieval Europe is going to be torture. So why do it? Ultimately, you might be better off getting a trade license from a vocational school that could lead to owning your own business, or an associate’s degree that could give you a foot in the door in the field of your study. Alternatively, your parents may never have imagined you becoming an arborist, but if you love the field, are trained well by a good program, and can support yourself, why wouldn’t you? There is always time to study philosophy or work toward a master’s degree in your time off.

In some circles there is still a prejudice against two-year programs, as if the kids who go to community college or trade school are too lazy to get into “real” college, but that way of thinking is now extremely outdated. If there is one thing we’ve learned as a society it’s that we can’t all be scholars and teachers—and many of us don’t want to be, anyway. Some of us are builders. Some of us are soldiers. Some of us are artists. Some of us are farmers.

Bank on the fact that the only thing people are going to pay attention to in your adult life is whether or not you can take care of yourself and your family, while you are, hopefully, playing a positive role in the world around you. If you love your work, becoming a paid medical technician, nurse, or welding technician might be better for you in the long run than becoming an unpaid English professor waiting tables. Besides, one does not necessarily cancel the other out. Having a real world skill can support you financially while you write your novel or study to become an accountant.

Bottom line: You, not your degree, are the measure of your success.

Bill Watterson, Cartoonist, creator of Calvin and Hobbes

Bill Watterson was born in Washington, DC, in 1958 and moved to Ohio when he was eight. He did reasonably well in school and began to draw cartoons after becoming a fan of the Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Pogo comic strips. Watterson went to Kenyon College in 1976, where he spent four years drawing political cartoons for the college campus newspaper, the Kenyan Collegian. Upon graduating in 1980, he landed a job as an editorial cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post. His bosses didn’t like his work and soon fired him; and less than a year later, Watterson was back at home, living with his parents.

Discouraged, he jettisoned the idea of being a political cartoonist and went back to his first love: comics. A long, miserable season of rejection ensued. For the next five years, Watterson tried to keep his sanity by sending strips to newspapers across the nation. Rejection slips and debts piled up, and he put his dreams on hold and went to work as a layout artist for a sleazy tabloid shopper. There, in the dank and windowless basement of a convenience store, submitting to the whims of a difficult boss, Watterson developed that carefree, happy-go-lucky view of life that so permeates all his cartoons.

Looking back, Watterson admitted that this miserable period in his life was an important experience because it cemented in him the belief that the value of his creative work was in his love for it, not in what it earned financially. Meanwhile, at his drawing board, Watterson experimented with many different characters until one day he created a strip called Calvin and Hobbes, about an unusual six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Universal Press Syndicate bought the strip in 1985, and, soon enough, Watterson became a legend.