Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART I
Breaking Away
2
College Does Not Prepare You for the Real World
If you don’t know this already, you should.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re all in favor of education, but college today, for many people, is really just one last (and increasingly lingering) avoidance of the real world. High school actually does a lot more to prepare you for adulthood, particularly in terms of how you’ll be spending most of your day: at work.
In college, you can structure your schedule to fit your desires for the most part.* Want to have all of your classes over by noon? Don’t want to take a class before noon? No problem. Hey, what about scheduling all of your class times on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Then you’ve got five days a week free to work, study, and drink until your liver pleads for mercy!
We realize that this isn’t always the case. In Cam’s first semester of college, he got saddled with a journalism lab that started at 7 a.m. on a Friday morning.
High school was all about the schedule. You might have been able to pick an elective or two, but you knew where you were going to be from 7:50 a.m. until 3:35 p.m. Monday through Friday. It didn’t matter if you were not a morning person, or if you thought you’d do better academically with a four-day weekend.
Just like in high school, in the real world most people don’t get to pick their work schedule, nor do they get to change it up every four months. Even in the gig economy, your schedule is much more likely to depend on the needs of the person paying you than on your own wants and desires. You may tell potential employers that you only work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but you’re not likely to get a job that will allow you to live anywhere other than the bedroom you slept in as a kid.
In college, skipping class isn’t really a big deal. Some professors don’t take attendance, and it’s rare that your instructor (who’s more likely to be an overworked teaching assistant than a professor) is going to give you a hard time when you show up for your next class. In many classrooms, you’re expected to know the material when it comes time to take the test, but attendance isn’t mandatory.
Professor Kelli Marshall doesn’t have a mandatory attendance policy in her media and film courses at DePaul University, and she told USA Today in 2012 that while it’s not completely sure she’s doing the right thing, she “would hope it is since it suggests I’m treating them as adults.”* Actually, she’s not treating them as adults; she’s treating them like irresponsible college students.
Rachel Osman, “Should Class Attendance Be Mandatory? Students, Professors Say No,” USA Today, March 25, 2012, http://college.usatoday.com/2012/03/25/should-class-attendance-be-mandatory-students-professors-say-no/.
In high school, skipping class is a pretty big deal. Between the two authors, not a single class was skipped in our high school years (at least as long as you don’t count Senior Skip Day). The closest either of us ever got to truly skipping school was the day Cam tried to go off campus for lunch and got busted.
In the real world, skipping out on work usually doesn’t end well either. We don’t know of any job where attendance isn’t mandatory.
We’re pretty sure that even professors at DePaul have to turn up to teach their classes—one of the few ways academia resembles the real world, though we imagine it won’t be long before professors are protesting that attendance should be voluntary for faculty as well as students.
The reason so many college students party to excess is because they can—their schedules allow it, and they have few responsibilities and no parents to ground them. In high school, your social life revolves around the hours between the time school lets out on Friday afternoon and whenever your curfew is on Saturday night. Sunday is probably homework day, and then you’re back to the grind early Monday morning.
Once again, when you’re out of college your social life looks a lot more like your experience in high school. With the exception of a happy hour or two, you’re not likely to be doing much carousing when you have to get up at 6 a.m. to get ready for work.
“College was, and probably will be,” Katie Brennan wrote at the website thoughtcatalog.com, “the only time in our lives we were truly a part of something greater than ourselves; a rare and wonderful time we were a part of a true community. A community in which we did everything together at a place we all learned to love and call home.”
That actually describes high school better than college. You don’t do “everything together” on a college campus, except perhaps the mandatory sensitivity training. And more important, when it comes to being “part of something greater than ourselves … a place we all learned to love and call home,” getting married and having kids is a lot more real and profound version of that than going to Vassar or Party U.
Brennan muses that “While college didn’t prepare me for soul-crushing Excel spreadsheets … , it taught me the most important lesson: People can be crappy to one another, but when it comes right down to it, we are all basically good.”
If that’s the most important thing she learned in four or five years of college, she wasted a lot of money. Maybe she should spend more time on her Excel spreadsheets. The average college graduate of the class of 2015 owes about $35,000 in student loan debt, and with interest rates between 4 and 7 percent, that’s more than $300 a month in student loan payments.* That’s a lot of money to spend to learn that people are basically good except when they’re not. You don’t need a college classroom to teach you about human nature.
Jeffrey Sparshott, “Congratulations, Class of 2015. You’re the Most Indebted Ever (For Now),” Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/08/congratulations-class-of-2015-youre-the-most-indebted-ever-for-now/.
High school, on the other hand, imposes no student debt while teaching a lot about human nature for anyone with their eyes open. It’s true that many high school students these days can’t put the Civil War in the right century or even name the founders of our country, but they should leave high school knowing the importance of showing up, doing your work, and enjoying your free time when you can.
College isn’t always a mistake—but the dirty little secret is that for a lot of people it is; it comes down to stacking up lots of debt and putting off responsibility, while not learning much at all. There are obvious exceptions, especially if you’ve graduated with a degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. But let’s stop pretending that the “college experience” is a necessary or beneficial one for everybody. It isn’t.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
He went to college, but he did it the old-fashioned way, studying a real academic discipline (philosophy), belonging to a fraternity, and dating the woman who would soon be his wife—and then getting on with the business of being an adult.
