For more than three decades, we have grown up with the horribly misleading advice that all we have to do to get a good-paying job is to go to college. I expediently call it “the college myth”. It goes like this: if we just go to college and graduate, then *poof*, champagne will fall from the heavens and rock-solid companies all over the place will magically open the doors for you, and you’re on easy street to finding a good-paying job. Oh sure, you need a resume that will get recruiters’ and hiring managers’ attention, and you need to practice your interview skills, but aside from that, all you need is a college degree, right?
Wrong. Sure, if you major in engineering (and not something overly specialized), and have an internship or co-op under your belt, then yes, you’re in good shape towards finding a good job with a promising future right out of college.
Same can be said of finance/accounting majors, or something computer science-related. But what about other, “softer” majors, such as liberal arts? To be very frank, the outlook is bleaker…not impossible, but much smaller and more uncertain than the aforementioned hard skills majors. For example, while a starting salary for engineering majors right out of school is $55,000+, a liberal arts degree might only be worth $25,000 instead. Good luck paying your rent and bills with a job like that.
Time was, a liberal arts degree could get you a decent office job from which you could support yourself, plus grow in both skills and salary. Not anymore. Why? Also, why have we been given this bogus advice our whole lives of to just go to college with the naïve idea that if we do, everything will be fine?
It all started back during the Great Depression in the 1930s. By 1933, the national employment average reached its horrible peak of 25 percent, and even by 1940, it was still at 15 percent. With such an unbelievably tight job market, employers would not even look at you for white collar work unless you had a college degree. That stark standard left an indelible impression on those who lived through that challenging time. In fact, if you’re an ‘80s kid like me, chances are, it was your grandparents who were the most adamant in your family that you were to attend college. So that’s one reason – a psychological hangover from the Great Depression.
Another reason has to do with the postwar college boom. The Montgomery GI Bill allowed for returning veterans to attend college on the government’s dime. Plus, with the economy expanding in the 1950s, there were more opportunities for white collar work in the first place. Not only that, but most white collar jobs back then were not very specialized.
It was around that same time that employers started to notice that the highest-performers at their companies were all college grads, and they collectively drew a false conclusion from the data. Strangely, they ignored the idea that the best, the brightest, and the ambitious go-getters were going to college in the first place. No, instead they erroneously concluded that going to college is what made these employees smart and highly capable. Looking back on that, it makes a bunch of us do a collective facepalm and ask, rhetorically, “what were they thinking”?
That erroneous conclusion by employers from roughly 60+ years ago has led to the educational-industrial complex you see today. It also mostly accounts for the bogus, overly-simplistic advice of “just go to college” that has been foisted on us by our parents, our grandparents, and our teachers, too.
“But wait,” you ask, “if a liberal arts degree could get you into the business world easily enough then, why not now?”
Good question. One has to do with technology. What we routinely do on computers today, so many basic tasks in the olden days were done by hand, such as filling out forms, filing manually, etc. We needed lots of clerical worker bees to grow and maintain information now quickly accessed and processed by computer. Also, in the 1950s and 1960s, our economy was much more self-contained, meaning that lots of work done abroad today was still done here. It all added up to very multi-layered, quasi-bureaucratic organizations that allowed many workers to enjoy good livings being small cogs in very large machines.
But international competition caused companies to get much leaner and more nimble starting in the 1980s, and that in turn brought an end to “Big Unit America”. That in turn ended the promise of the good living for just being a small cog working a generic white collar job. Indeed, today, there are no more generic white collar jobs.
The white collar jobs that do remain tend to be very specialized. Most of them have something to do with the core functions of the company, such as information technology, engineering, or finance/accounting. Are there exceptions? There always are. But if you go to college just to major in, say, creative writing or political science, don’t expect companies like IBM or Texas Instruments to beat down your door offering a six-figure job, and don’t come crying to us when we told you so.
The problem is compounded by the fact that our grandparents never got the memo that there is no generic white collar job anymore like there was during their productive prime. Many of our parents assumed that since they went to college and eventually found decent jobs, they too assumed that doing the same thing on our end will eventually work out for us, too. Moreover, since all our teachers were college graduates, they could not envision any other path to success except college. None of these groups ever (collectively) broadened their minds enough to realize A) things had changed in the business world, and B), one can acquire marketable skills in other ways besides college anyhow (read: trades).
The aforementioned three groups gave us advice with the best of intentions, yes, but we all know that the road to hell is paved with them (and if you didn’t know, consider yourself now informed). That, and the erroneous conclusion drawn by employers about college equaling very bright, highly-capable employers has all added up to the mess we’re in now.
Our aim here at RGB is to start cleaning up this mess by dispelling this myth. If college is for you, by all means go, but focus on something employers actually look for, like engineering, or finance/accounting, or computer science. But there’s plenty of good vocational work out there, too – we call them trades for short – that many employers are desperate to fill, and the training does not require going to college. So let us explore all these opportunities, and find out which is the right one for you, as we all learn and grow together.